5 Quick Wins to Get the Most Lead Engagement Out of Your Webinars
Recently, webinars have become one of the most effective ways to generate engagement with prospects and customers. You can make the most out of your webinars by integrating your webinar platform like GoToWebinar, with your marketing automation (MA) tool, like Marketo, and your sales CRM, like Salesforce.com (SFDC).
But what are the key aspects in which we have to focus on, in order to achieve success, and synchronize the work between marketing and sales? We have identified five key points that will help you to get to most of these programs.
1. Your Webinar Title and Topic
It’s better if you define a narrow topic like “How to Migrate to a New Marketing Automation System” instead of a generic topic like “Marketing Automation.” In our experience, people who use generic themes end up trying to fit in everything they know in a short time and that could be annoying for the audience and hard for the presenter. Additionally it is helpful to think about the best format for the topic: you can use slides, interviews, a Q&A format or a combination of those elements. Finally don’t forget to define the structure of your webinar with a defined introduction, main points, and finishing with relevant calls to action.
2. Landing Page, Emails and Other Promotion
There are some key elements that you will need to have, to invite and track the status of your leads. First of all, you need a cool banner that differentiates you from the competitors and then you can think about the email invite. Here at Harnon, we normally use a marketing automation platform like Marketo to send emails, track the member status, and to track ads on your social media channels, with Facebook and LinkedIn being the two of the most important. These can be synced with your marketing automation tool to track conversions. It could improve your conversion rate to send reminders to the leads that visited the register page but didn't fill out the registration form.
3. Last Preparations and Execution
We normally use a third-party webinar platform like GoToWebinar to host and send the confirmation email with the URL to join the webinar, once the lead is registered. There’s a cool integration between Marketo and GoToWebinar that allows you to update someone’s registration status automatically in both systems. It is good practice to send email reminders to registrants about the date and the topic as this could help to improve the attendance rate. Finally, it is very important to make sure that your panelists have been invited to the webinar!
4. Follow up strategy
If everything went to plan, you have now executed a great webinar, it is time to follow up. To use webinars as a lead generator and drive sales, it is critical to notify and work really closely with your sales team. One of the best ways to automate this process is using Marketo and SFDC integration. This way you can share real-time data with the sales team, showing the leads that responded to the campaign, with the most relevant information about them. This means your sales team can be prepared to call the attendees just after the event has been completed. Additionally, for our most successful webinars, we set up a process so leads can attend, on-demand tracking the status and notifying sales so the sales team can follow up with the leads.
5. Measuring your success
Using Marketo you can track the form submissions, clicks, and attendance rate and using the CRM you can calculate your return on investment (ROI), of your webinar. The sales team can then check back in with the marketing team to show how many sales resulted from those leads.
Finally, creating a good audience that responds to our campaigns can be a hard task but don’t forget that “success is not always what you see” as webinars will help to nurture prospects and clients over time, so hang in there!
By focusing on content, planning and execution, all hand-in-hand with your sales team, webinars can become another solid method for lead engagement and drive those ever-important sales.