10 Tips for Generating Business Leads with Free Webinars

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A camera recording

A camera recording

A webinar is an effective strategy for getting qualified leads, especially for your B2B business. It is an online seminar or a meeting or a presentation that helps you to showcase your business expertise and promote yourself to a global audience. It helps you to get face to face with your audience and lets them interact with you, helping you to build business credibility.

According to the American Marketing Association, 60% of marketers use webinars in their marketing programs.

And according to this post by Neil Patel, Kissmetrics, Adobe and Buzzsumo got a whopping 22%, 20% and 19% overall conversion rate from webinars.

A webinar helps you reach out to a larger target group and build upon the thought leadership of your business. It gives you the opportunity to capture the details of your prospects and re-engage with them, with the help of customized campaigns.

Here are some useful tips for organizing a free webinar and generating quality leads.

Host Free Hangouts on Air With YouTube Live

Hangouts on Air is a free tool to host your webinar. This tool helps you to create a webinar at any time from anywhere. So, this means that you could host a session with a global audience from any remote part of the world. The tool does not show you any ads and does not ask for a premium subscription.

You can easily create your Hangouts on Air using your YouTube channel. You can visit the ‘Creator Studio’ and create a live streaming event from the sidebar and choose the ‘Quick’ option there.

Create a live streaming event

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You can add the relevant title and description to your event and make it public for the audience to see on your channel. You can promote the event’s link on other collateral and channels to get maximum participation.

The tool helps you to record your live video for those who miss the webinar and wish to view it later. While running the webinar, you can choose to share your screen with the audience or enable it to show the webcam view.

Decide on the Subject

A webinar is presented by a person to a live audience. But deciding on a subject for the webinar is similar to deciding on the topic for other content formats such as an eBook or a white-paper. You need to make sure that your presentation includes some learning for the audience.

Create a compelling headline

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The attendees are going to give their precious time to listen to you and must have the incentive to do so. Your subject and content should not be self-promotional, and it should provide a solution to some of the current challenges faced by the audience. Using a powerful headline with a quantifiable benefit to the users would certainly help you get people interested.

Plan and Test The Webinar

It is important for you to plan and test the flow of your webinar. You can provide additional time for the ‘Q&A’ session. It is important to proofread the content of your presentation beforehand. Add a brief introduction about the content and yourself or the speaker in the beginning of the presentation. You need to talk about the qualification and experience of the speaker and build confidence among the users.

Optimize the speed at which the webinar will be presented. Your audience should neither get bored, nor feel that it is going too fast. Get your team to give you feedback on the content and style of the presentation and make improvements wherever required.

Create a Landing Page

A landing page is the most important way to communicate about your webinar and promote it to your target audience. You need to add all the details of the webinar, such as the date and time, the speaker and the topic of the presentation.

Landing page speaker profiles

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Highlight the profile of the speaker and also showcase the benefits the prospects would get from participating in the webinar. Add a CTA and a simple contact form to get more users to register themselves.

Email Promotions

You need to create a compelling email campaign to get more and more participation on your webinar. Communicate the key attraction of the webinar in the messaging. It has to include the expertise of the speaker, the topic and main benefit of the webinar.

Highlighting the problem areas that are commonly faced by the target audience is helpful. It pitches the webinar as an opportunity for them to find the appropriate solution. Add bullet points of the key benefits that the webinar will provide.

The call to action must create scarcity and a sense of urgency to drive user action. Also mention any giveaways or discounts that you would provide exclusively to the webinar attendees.

Webinar call-to-action

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Including 2-3 time zones or a time zone converter in your email message will make it simpler for prospects from different parts of the world. Add headshots of each of the speakers to make your invite more appealing.

Send your campaign to that segment of your overall target audience who will be interested in the particular webinar. You need to send out automated ‘Thank you’ mailers to all those who register themselves for the event.

Email reminders are essential to get more users to actually participate. You can create automated reminders at regular intervals, say once or twice a week, and the last ones should go one day and then a few hours before the event.

Social Media

Running a campaign on social channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can help you promote your webinar effectively and reach out to a wider audience. Provide a link to your landing page or the event page in your social posts. You can add a post on a daily basis, talking about the benefits of participating in the webinar.

Add the date, time and speaker details in your post images. You can also mention and tag your key speakers to reach out to their connections. Social cover images are useful to showcase your webinar to all of your existing and new community members.

Blog

Your blog is an important channel for promoting the webinar. Talk about the subject of the webinar in the post. You can also do a series of interesting blog posts and add a registration CTA at the end of each. Add banners to the sidebar or the header section of the blog to get more participation.

Website Home Page

The home page of your website represents your business. It is an important place from which to promote your webinar effectively. It usually attracts most of the site traffic. You can dedicate a section of the home page to promote the webinar and its details. This will help you achieve your registration targets more easily.

Make Your Presentation Engaging

Once you are done with promoting the webinar and you are out there conducting it, you need to ensure that you make it a pleasant experience for the attendees. Keeping an audience engaged for 30-45 minutes is a skill that you can develop. You need to have a conversation with your viewers rather than make a formal presentation.

‘During live webinars, a shocking 82% of users participate in Q&A and 35% engage on social.’ (Source)

Make use of polls and questions to make the experience more interactive. Give complete attention to those users who are interacting with you and communicating their viewpoint. Take names of attendees while talking to them one-on-one.

Make it easier for the users to absorb what is being said and discussed by keeping everything nicely spaced out and relaxed.

Giveaways

You need to make sure that the audience is happy after the webinar. Give free content upgrades such as ebook downloads or a discount offer on your product or service. This should be given only to those who complete attending the session.

Giveaways are helpful for promoting your webinar beforehand as well. You can talk about these in your campaigns to attract more prospects and get them to register and participate. Send out a follow-up message to all attendees with a feedback form for the event. You can share the recorded video for those who wish to view it again or those who missed it completely.

Final Thoughts

If you are a B2B business owner or a marketer, you can’t miss out on organizing webinars. They are extremely helpful in building a close connection with your future clients. You get to showcase your knowledge and expertise in your niche and generate quality leads. Your objective with a webinar should be to help your target group with their current problems. With that motive and a clearly defined strategy, you will surely succeed in achieving your lead targets and generating more business.

Abhishek TalrejaAbhishek Talreja
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Abhishek Talreja is working as a Digital Marketing Manager with Enterprise Monkey. He has a keen interest in technology, and small business productivity. Enterprise Monkey helps SMEs and Not-For-Profits save time & money and increase revenue through automation, optimization & intelligence.

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