Are you looking for new innovative ways to tap into a new audience? One of the most underutilized tactics in demand generation is webinars.
Webinars are effective because they capture user data, help brands connect with users personally, and provide lots of value and insights for that user.
Webinars also help the brand understand your customer’s pain points. These insights allow the brand to make product changes or change the way it markets.
Overall, webinars are a win-win for both sides of the equation.
In this blog, we will define webinars and why they are so effective for demand generation. In the end, we will teach you how you can hold a webinar for virtually no cost.
What Are Webinars?
Webinars are generally used by companies to educate potential customers about a topic or product.
A clear distinction about webinars is that they happen over the internet, hence “web” in “webinar”. They are exclusively held through video conferencing.
Webinars can last between 30 minutes to an hour. They might feature a panel of speakers or subject matter experts.
There might even be an interactive component at the end of the webinar that allows you to ask questions to the panel of experts.
What is demand generation?
Demand generation is how your brand or company goes about finding new customers or existing customers who are interested in your product or service.
Demand generation goes a bit further than just audience acquisition.
Even the customers that you have already acquired and converted are eligible to be remarketed to and upsold to.
You might have acquired your converting audience through social media but you most likely need to use email marketing to drum up more interest in either a new product line or upsell them to a new product tier.
Why webinars are a demand generation best practice?
Webinars allow brands to connect with their audience on a personal level.
If you ask any marketer how to acquire new customers they will give some of the tactics listed below:
- Paid media campaigns to email signup with downloadable content. Begin a user journey.
- Brand awareness campaigns on social media.
- Content marketing campaigns tailored to keywords potential audience members might use in looking for solutions to their problems.
- Cold calling or cold emailing
- Word-of-mouth referrals or partnerships.
These are all very capable methods to drive in new a new audience but they do share a common characteristic.
These methods are not personal.
There is a lot of work on the user’s end to get themselves to learn and understand how your product and service solve their problem.
The user needs to click, signup, read, read some more, understand, compare and then take action.
There is a major step that is missing step in this flow.
Ask questions. See the product in action.
A common trait about people is that they always need to fill in knowledge blanks. Think about the last time, you heard something that you didn’t know. You probably looked it up on Google or Wikipedia.
Sometimes, the content we use as lead magnets for email signups or on our product pages does not answer all the questions that the consumer may have.
It could be unclear. It may be too much information.
This fact alone is one of the reasons why Webinars are an effective tool for demand generation.
Webinars fit just about everywhere on the user journey. You can hold a webinar to introduce new people to your product and teach existing customers how to use your product or service better.
But the differentiating characteristic is that they allow people to ask personal questions.
This is another tool you can use to gather feedback and useful intel on your ideal customer base to further improve your product.
The Competition is probably not running webinars
Another benefit of webinars is that most marketers simply are not willing to do them.
Planning and running a webinar is a lot of work that marketers and companies are not willing to spend time on. You have to coordinate schedules, set up technology, and find subject matter experts.
You also have to market the webinar. For some, that can be dollars and time spent marketing your product or service instead of the webinar.
If you can run a stellar webinar, you put your company at a competitive advantage especially if your competition is relying on less personal methods for demand acquisition.
How you can start using webinars for demand generation or audience acquisition
Contrary to what was stated earlier in this article about marketers not being willing to do webinars because of the number of associated tasks, webinars can be run fairly easily and inexpensively.
Step One – Technology
The first thing you will need to start your webinar is a landing page to capture data from interested users.
You can accomplish this fairly easily with any CMS like WordPress or Webflow and using a native form builder or a plugin.
If you want to splurge on a dedicated landing page tool, my recommendation would be Instapage or Unbounce. They let you have lots of design flexibility and allow you to test multiple landing page variations at once.
Next, to run your webinar you’ll need an email deployment tool.
Most email tools do offer free trials to a certain sending monthly send limit. The best ones to probably consider would be Mailchimp or SendGrid.
You need an email tool to send people who’ve shown interest in joining the webinar, the actual webinar link, time, and date.
For the webinar itself, you can use Zoom. Just be certain that the free version of zoom is capped at 100 attendees and the sessions last for 40 minutes. You generally won’t get to 100 attendees unless you’re a massive company or conference.
As for the time duration, as long as you follow a strict discussion schedule, you should have no problem finishing up in 30 minutes. You have to be mindful of people’s time, you can’t expect people to stick around if you decide to run a two-hour webinar.
Step Two – People and Topics
It is not necessary to find a high-profile guest speaker for every webinar. You just need 1 or 2 subject experts and a host.
Luckily, in most cases, you can find a subject expert on your product or service in-house. As for a host, it can be anyone. The host’s job is to welcome the webinar viewers and keep the webinar on track in terms of the topic schedule.
As for the topics, it depends on what stage the audience is at. Are you introducing your audience to a new product or service? Is this an existing audience wanting to learn how to utilize their product better?
See below for some topic ideas based on whether the audience member is on the customer journey.
Introductory:
- Tutorial on how to use a product or service
- High-level features of product or service
- Why your product or service is better than the competition?
- X hidden tricks about using product or service
Existing Customers
- How to better leverage products or services?
- How to integrate products or services with XYZ technology?
- New features of product or service coming in the next year.
Bonus Tip
An overlooked aspect of using a webinar is the outreach afterward and the addressing of the people that signed up but did not attend.
You need to make sure your brand remains at the top of the webinar attendees’ minds right after the webinar.
Make sure that you send them a follow-up email within a few days thanking them for attending the webinar, provide them with a recording of the webinar, and a method for them to reach out about specific questions that they might have not had the chance to ask during the webinar.
Case Study of a webinar used for demand generation
B2B Demand Generation Agency, Digital Litmus published a case study on helping a company attract a new audience using webinars.
Digital Litmus worked with Spektrix which is a technology company in the venue space.
They identified the opportunity webinars can bring to the company citing the number of in-house experts on their team as a tremendous benefit.
In execution, Digital Litmus used several paid social media channels like Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads, to drive traffic to the Spektrix webinar landing page. Webinar sign-ups were then entered into an email drip campaign until the lead-up to the webinar. Finally, the webinar audience was further segmented into webinar attendees and non-attendees.
The webinar was a huge success for Spektrix. They obtained a 51% webinar attendee rate and engaged with 53% of target B2B accounts.
Click here to read the case study for yourself.
Conclusion
If your brand has tried all the more common demand generation tactics, webinars might be a good place to start when thinking outside the box.
They provide great value for the user and the company as webinars allow you to engage on a more personal level. Attendees can ask questions and learn about the product or service. Brands can hear customer pain points.
Webinars are very cheap to run and set up. All you need is software video conferencing software, a little promotion, a subject matter expert and host, and some email marketing.
You will be tapping into your newly found audience in no time.
