Have you attended a webinar in the last 3 months? What stood out about it? Was it a thinly veiled hard sell or did you get “free” value out of it? Social Media Today reports that 77% of B2B marketers use webinars in their marketing mix and 73% of B2B buyers consumed a webinar as part of their decision making process. This method of content marketing is more popular than ever, especially after the operational changes that the global pandemic brought about in 2020. On average, 56% of purchasers in B2B industries, including healthcare & life sciences, stated that webinars were the most valuable content they consumed in the past year.
Medical experts and healthcare professionals have limited time in the day (or even the week) to be “sold” to. COVID forced numerous practice changes and likely the staff is focused on immediate revenue producing activities and patient health to salvage financials. Creating and capitalizing on a window of attention and opportunity to convey your key value proposition while also delivering value to those people who will decide to buy or pass is crucial – and webinars are a great tool to do so. Here are some guidelines to get you started on creating a better webinar.
Define the Goal of Your Webinar
Webinars are a great medium to convey your value proposition while connecting with prospects in a rewarding way for them without the pressure of a sales meeting. It’s your company’s chance to address pain points, give away free advice and earn the trust of a potential client. It is one of the most engaging content marketing tools and generally has a terrific ROI when used correctly. A great webinar should be complementary to the rest of your marketing efforts. Webinars can be dynamic versions of product demonstrations, case studies, or thought leadership from key opinion leaders in the field all while helping your team gather quality leads.
Wrong Plan
“Without medical trade shows we’re struggling to generate leads, let’s run a webinar”
Good Plan
“Let’s discuss a pain point that Physical Therapists have and frame our solution to tap into their psychographics about providing more efficient care”
Speakers, Formats and Proper Planning
What type of discussion format will help you convey your key message to the audience the easiest? Do you have a number of satisfied clients who would enjoy sharing their success story with others while promoting their practice? What other Key Opinion Leaders can you leverage? If the Webinar involves a decent amount of product demonstration, who from the marketing, sales, and technical side of things should be involved for Q&A and presenting? Panels, interviews, case study reviews and product demos or training all have a different flow to the conversation. Whichever format and resources you settle on, make sure you script out the webinar and pair it with a clean deck. Trial runs are highly encouraged so you can get the timing down and ensure all the key takeaways are delivered.
Styling, Logistics, and Tech Functionality
There are a lot of webinar platforms out there. Match your needs to the platform. WordStream provides a handy review of the 20+ Webinar platforms. Many platforms let audiences comment with questions, vote in polls, or take quizzes during the webinar. For example, when you discuss pain points your prospects might have, putting out a survey question asking “On a scale of 1-5, how much of a challenge is this for your practice?” Not only does this get your audience engaged, it helps your sales reps prioritize leads after the fact.
These features take even the most bland webinars from monotonous to engaging with the smallest of efforts. Most platforms come with a form of analytics tracking, but you want to be able to review attendee information, how long people stuck around and what they may have interacted with during the presentation. If you see a large drop off before the end of the webinar, keep that in mind for your next one and try to boil down your message more concisely.
Along with interactive functionality on your platform, make sure the presentation varies up the media and content types throughout the webinar. Share social media content, play a short video, give relevant data on your product or customer successes and get your speaker’s faces up on screen from time to time. Things like Picture in Picture mode can help you deliver key messages and build rapport with potential buyers.
Good Traffic and Strong Landing Pages
Okay – you’ve built the best webinar, but will the right people come? Driving webinar registrations can be a big pain point for marketers. You’ve spent multiple weeks convincing the right people to assist with the webinar, building out a deck, doing some sort of trial run and confirming the KPIs you need to hit to make it all worth it. Don’t let bad targeting and sloppy writing drag down conversion rates.
Use Intelligent Targeting
As a reminder, quality > quantity. Your goal likely relates to increasing revenue and junk leads don’t accomplish that – in fact, they probably waste your sales reps time and cause a divide between “Marketing qualified leads” and “Sales qualified leads.” To find and attract the best attendees, leverage all of your owned, earned and paid channels.
What publications are willing to pick up your news? Does your social media presence have a good organic following or do you have team members involved in industry related forums? Engage with the right professionals about your webinar so they can share it with the right audiences.
For the paid channels, what partners operate in your industry who cater to the audience you want? They can push your message to the right audience and drive registrations. Further, you can use back end data from your website to retarget visitors on social and programmatic ads to your webinar registration page.
Lastly, leverage your CRM. Your CRM, even an out of date one, has a lot of data on what the best prospects look like. Segment out those contacts and use some killer ABM techniques in an email campaign to entice them to visit the landing page and sign up.
With all your efforts, keep in mind you want to stay as targeted as possible and push this webinar invitation towards prospects whose demographics and firmographics match ideal leads with a good likelihood of registering for the webinar.
Convert Your Traffic
A good webinar registration page has one simple goal. Convey a message about why a web visitor should enter their contact info into the form. Use a clean template that showcases the speakers, the “Why They Should Care About the Webinar” few sentence takeaway and necessary scheduling details. Identify which form fields are vital and only use those. You can A/B test which combo of form fields works too! Zoominfo has a useful best practices article exclusively for landing pages.
Pro Tip: Remember when you were shopping online and you left something in your cart without checking out? You probably then got an email or social/display ad the next day with the product.. You can do that in B2B sales for webinar registration forms if you set up backend tracking to enable retargeting.
Repackage, Retarget and Reply
The big day has come and gone. You targeted the right people, they actually showed up and the webinar went smoothly with solid engagement. Give yourself a well deserved pat on the back and then get back to work. Webinars convert between 5% and 20% of viewers into buyers, but many viewers still need a little encouragement.
Letting attendees know you’ll send out a post-webinar survey can help you gain even more insights on your audience and segment out the ones that are best positioned for conversion. Asking for their feedback on your presentation can make your next one better, you can ask for more firmographic or demographic data to attach to a prospects profile in your CRM and identify key indicators or buyer behavior that might indicate a certain lead move to the top of the Sales rep’s list for follow up.
Just because the webinar has already happened doesn’t mean it’s value is gone. In fact, it may be even more valuable now. Healthcare professional’s schedules can be all over the place and on-demand webinars afford them the opportunity to slot it in efficiently. For on-demand replays, you can add presentation notes such as timestamping and great Q&A dialogue underneath your embedded video to help future viewers digest the content more efficiently in their busy schedule. If your registration count exceeded your attendee account, you can remind the no-shows they can still enjoy your content by repackaging the webinar in an eBlast pulling out its key takeaways. Something like, “we’re sorry we missed you at the live event, but you can still see how these dentists integrated sleep medicine into their practice by by viewing our webinar whenever you have some time!”
Webinar content can also be sliced up into more digestible snippets for social sharing or advertisements. If your webinar was heavy on Q&A, perhaps an FAQ document can be spun out from it. Were users sharing examples of trying the product that can turn into a case study? Webinar engagement is usually full of opportunities to spin out additional content that you can arm your marketing and sales team with to help convert those leads and build brand awareness.