Webinars have become an important way for marketing and sales teams to generate more brand interest and drive leads. Webinars allow marketers and salespeople to reach out to a larger audience more effectively while also allowing them to educate potential customers about new products or services and other useful industry tips.
With the right webinar strategy in place, businesses can drive more sales and shorten their sales cycle. Besides helping to build brand value in the market, webinars can help establish a strong market presence that can be beneficial in the long-term.
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Webinars have mostly been a tactic used by marketing teams to boost online brand value and build a lead pipeline. So how can sales teams get in on the webinar game to drive sales revenue?
Here are a few steps that can help.
Plan a webinar for your ‘’cold’’ prospects
Every sales person will have a list of prospects who have stopped responding at some stage of the sales cycle or those that have gone cold over time. Sales teams can identify a list of accounts and contacts that are cold and establish a webinar strategy that covers topics and themes that can attract these cold prospects and re-initiate brand interest. Deploying creative email prospecting nurtures to then nudge these prospects to register, watch or download the session and then evaluating how this audience reacted to the webinar campaign can help salespeople understand whether there is any scope to keep diving into this subset with the aim of trying to move them closer to a purchase.
Offer something of value
What’s in it for your audience? Before building a content strategy or webinar plan, every marketing and sales team has to have the answer to this crucial question: what’s in it for the customer?
Salespeople can choose to use webinars to offer free trials or free giveaways (for instance, ‘’watch this session to unlock a 06-month product trial or discount code’’). While on the one hand it is crucial to identify topics of interest based on who your audience is, the other important aspect lies in defining what else you can do during your webinar to pull prospects closer towards a purchase or product discovery call.
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Bring on guests your prospects would want to hear from
Your webinar host should ideally be a senior leader from your own marketing/sales or other customer facing team. But when it comes to identifying both the topic and the guest(s) for your session, shortlisting people that your prospects would want to hear from can make all the difference and create a deeper impact.
In the recent years, content marketers have capitalized on their online conferences and events by having established thought leaders like tennis stars or even actors and actresses keynote their sessions. The key takeaway from this trend: bring on guests and keynote speakers who have a strong identity in the marketplace to attract your audience and drive registrants.
Keep it interactive
Sophisticated webinar tools like Go-To-Webinar or Zoom’s Webinar package allow brands to host live sessions as well as interactive Q&A’s during the session. Sales leaders who opt to use webinars to drive sales cycles can use this gimmick to interact with prospects, to encourage a dialogue and then follow through with an appropriate lead nurturing campaign once the session is over.
Webinars can be a useful way for both marketing and sales teams to nurture leads, tap into a larger market and even build long-term brand value.
For brands who have a strong webinar infrastructure in place, marketing teams can run their own webinar campaigns with sales teams running a different webinar strategy just with the aim of driving sales. The themes and webinar flow as well as topics can be determined based on the health of current prospects and their real-time interests.
With the right webinar tools, sales and marketing teams can easily track the performance of their webinars to keep optimizing their future topics and workflows.
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