In many cases, we’ve seen how a well-produced and delivered webinar can move prospects off the fence to become new customers as well as help measure their intent to purchase as a result of attending the webinar. To attract an audience, it is your challenge to: Identify their challenges and pain points. People won’t register if it’s not specific or if it doesn’t provide content that will help them overcome a vexing challenge. An example of some other must-have topics that have proven to be very successful in attracting an audience are described below. Use Industry Disruption to Your Advantage Industries in turmoil, or ones dealing with confusion and change, are ripe for attending a webinar to learn how to overcome these challenges. By refining the demographics, we not only identified 10 top industries, but we were also able to determine the job titles most ripe to learn about why LCMs provide advantages over traditional methods. A thought leader or third party expert is critical in attracting an audience. Key email and webinar performance metrics can tell you if you’re on track to meet your goals. More importantly, you can share this information with your speakers to make sure they align their presentation with the interests of the audience. There are many other metrics that are used during and after the webinar that I plan to cover in my next post.)
Webinars continue to be an invaluable content marketing tool for companies to attract and engage with prospects as well as retain existing customers to become your advocates. They are theatrical, like a radio show with pictures, that allows you tell a story beyond sound bites with real business outcomes.
Over the last eight years, my team and I have produced, delivered, and moderated hundreds of webinars across a wide canvas of B2B industries. In many cases, we’ve seen how a well-produced and delivered webinar can move prospects off the fence to become new customers as well as help measure their intent to purchase as a result of attending the webinar. (highlight to tweet)
In this post series, I’m going to share my most important lessons learned for attracting, engaging, and converting your audiences into customers.
Before You Begin
First, in order to effectively attract your webinar audience, you must understand that most registrants and attendees are not “sales ready” at this point. Instead, they are on a journey to become better informed and better educated. They don’t want to feel like they are attending a sales pitch, or that you are asking them to attend one. They want to know how you can solve their problems.
To attract an audience, it is your challenge to:
- Identify their challenges and pain points.
- Determine how you can help them solve their challenge.
- Effectively communicate this before and during the webinar—in your email invitations, on your registration landing page, and through your speakers and PowerPoint slides.
In this way, attendees can eventually become your customers and future advocates. Now let’s get into more specifics on how you can plan and ensure you attract your desired audience
1. Choose a Relevant Topic
Is your topic a “must have” that will educate the audience on how to overcome a pain point or demonstrate how they will achieve better outcomes? People won’t register if it’s not specific or if it doesn’t provide content that will help them overcome a vexing challenge. Remember, people buy when they are in pain and have money to solve it.
A great example of a relevant topic comes from a recent case study webinar covering a large automobile dealership. The dealership, using an innovative software solution, increased new vehicle gross profits and sales by discussing their challenges, options to solving these challenges, methodology used, business outcomes, lessons learned, and how to get started.
The webinar, titled Conquest Case Study: How Performance Toyota Increased new Vehicle Gross Profits and Sales, addressed a real pain point for automobile dealers; it attracted about 600 influencers and decision makers! This resulted in over 180 leads, of which 30 were closed, resulting in over $400,000 in annual incremental revenue.
An example of some other must-have topics that have proven to be very successful in attracting an audience are described below. (By the way, two of these led to a million dollar sale—can you guess which ones they are?)
- “Case Study: How Merck is Using Virtual Team Building to Increase Performance”
- “How Active Rehab Protocols Reduce Post-Operative Recovery Time”
- “Smarter Streets: Case Studies for Cities and Utilities – Learn How the City of Baltimore and Washington Gas Reduced Costs”
- “Separating the Contenders from the Pretenders in the World of Oil Water Separation”
- “Culture Shock: Shake-Up Your Company, Your Store, Your People and Sales Increases Will Follow”
2. Use Industry Disruption to Your Advantage
Industries in turmoil, or ones dealing with confusion and change, are ripe for attending a webinar to learn how to overcome these challenges. Webinars that address these issues do very well in attracting their audiences. All of the examples above, in one way or another, were dealing with disruption from industry changes of markets, standards, or legal compliance shifts.
For example, we continue to see a very strong audience acquisition outcome in…
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