Webinars help you understand where potential customers are in the buying process. This is one of the reasons why webinars are one of the main B2B marketing strategies nowadays. Crafting the right strategy will help you accelerate your B2B account-based marketing. In my experience, B2B marketers can get so much more out of their webinars if they have a product manager’s mindset.
Here is why…
You may have thought that your webinars would be enough to educate and generate new customers without spending too much.
And that’s true.
But what if these B2B marketing campaigns could help you get to know more about your potential customers? What if they could help you create relevant marketing personalization strategies?
The truth is that your inbound marketing webinars or even your outbound’s can become a source of direct information. They are a marketing tool that helps your sales team succeed. The key here is working as a team.
Don’t waste the opportunity.
Use these marketing campaigns to learn from the attendees‘ buying patterns. Use your findings to help your marketing team boost your future campaigns and sales success.
In the end, all these marketing efforts need to translate into a robust pipeline.
Let me share four simple steps to create more successful webinar advertising campaigns, webinar relevant content, and marketing collateral based on webinar analytics. These steps will help you target key accounts in a more relevant way.
Step One: Identify Customer Personas
Identifying customer personas is necessary for any marketing campaign. When you use buyer personas, you understand how customers’ behavior fits into the business. As you’ll learn below, you’ll also create robust marketing programs that increase conversion rates.
In this step, you’ll learn about the top questions you should ask your customers when building a customer persona. You can do this in many ways. Here are six ideas. Some of these ideas are easier to implement if you are already running webinars:
- Ask prospective webinar attendees what is what they want to learn from the webinar. Often, B2B companies are happy to share this information with you. Simply ask through a personalized email sent by the webinar host.
- Pay close attention to the questions B2B buyers ask during the webinar. Document these questions. If your organization runs the same webinar several times, you’ll see patterns in their questions.
- Follow up on the people that asked the questions. Jump on a call with them to learn more about who they are and what triggered their interest in the webinar.
- A/B tests are a powerful marketing tool. Measure the webinar invite emails. See which one brings more people in.
- Perform key problems and solutions tests with webinar reminders. Similar to the following tip, this is often easier to do in the email subject line. With this, you’ll foreshadow a climactic scene that will help your target market understand what’s in for them.
- Use marketing techniques like the Ask Method to pre-qualify webinar attendees. This technique also works like a charm to create personalized content. It will help you put them into segmented buckets to target them with the right personalized message later.
- A/B test and measure your webinar replay email subject lines to understand which one performs better. Double-check these analytics against the different buyer personas.
Use this data to know more about your leads and customers.
But don’t just stay there.
Make sure to share it with your sales and marketing teams. I often remind sales and marketing executives that marketing and sales need to work together.
Often they don’t. Avoid this mistake.
It will damage your sales cycles. You can have the best webinar platform out there but if the strategy is weak, your account-based marketing will also be weak.
Step Two: Create a Series of Webinars that Answer Key Questions
Once you’ve identified your ideal buyer persona, you can then determine what each persona is interested in. Now is time to create a target account list. From there, double-check the size of each buyer persona segment. Then, make sure Marketing and Sales Management are aligned in terms of KPIs and sales productivity goals.
This information is gold.
Based on these insights, you can create a series of webinars that answer specific buyer persona questions. This information will probably start with the definition of the webinar topic.
What I like about this approach is that you’ll create webinar topics from your ideal customer profile.
Complement or prioritize this information with insights from account reps and also from customer success teams. The reason for this is that they talk to a lot of customers and answer their questions on a daily basis.
Again, make sure to work with other customer-facing teams. Don’t just trust your gut with this. Webinars are part of your digital marketing strategy. Take into account what sales, customer support, customer experience, and even expansion teams have to say about the matter.
Do not create webinars light in content. Create intentional webinars that answer specific questions that help your target groups buy.
Step Three: Focus on Your Target Groups To Promote A Webinar
Now that you know who exactly is your target customer and you’ve created the webinar content, let’s start the webinar promotion. Even if creating webinars is cost-effective, you want to make sure you target the right audience.
So, to recap, If you want to learn how to promote a webinar, think first about the target audience. Then, answer their questions in the form of webinar content. Then, advertise your webinar to specific target groups thinking about where they are and what are their pain points.
All these will also empower your social media marketing. There is a wide range of channels. Now that you know more about your target audience and the content they find relevant, you can focus on the social media platforms that are relevant to audiences alike.
Take this into account…
What’s so confusing with B2B Account-Based Marketing? Why do so many marketers confuse a lead into a buyer? One reason why it’s very challenging to make a purchase within a campaign is simply that your customer persona is not a lead — they are a buyer. And how do you market to an actual buyer?
If your webinar is part of your sales strategy, buyer personas is the only way to go when promoting your webinars.
You can do this with what you learn from step one. Remember, in step one, your goal was to identify your webinar buyer personas and the key questions they ask before, during, and after a webinar.
Sometimes the answers to all this will be quite obvious. Often, it requires some creativity in the way you look at the data and facts. With the information you’ve gathered so far, it’s time to build every single aspect of your webinar marketing campaign.
Let’s see how.
Align Your Webinar to the Customer Journey
This means that your webinars marketing should also be aligned with the customer journey. This affects the marketing channels you’ll use. Sometimes, in order for this to be effective, you’ll need to agitate a problem during a period of time.
In B2B Marketing, email marketing is probably the cheap way to do this. One of the main challenges marketers face is that decision-makers have their email inbox full of SPAM and other marketing and sales messages.
In my experience, segmented email marketing campaigns work incredibly well. They over-perform if you compare them with generic campaigns by 70 percent.
At the same time, the truth is that these email marketing campaigns are often more time-consuming. This is not a big deal if what you want is results, not just registrants.
If you target high-value accounts with highly contextualized messages, your sales process from webinar lead to new customers will be smooth.
Make sure you align each webinar to the stage of the individual accounts and their decision-makers.
Marketing managers often forget about this.
A B2B content marketing strategy is more than just educational content.
It’s about talking to your potential buyer the way each one of them needs at the right time. From a sales cycle perspective, it’s about presenting the webinar content when is the right time.
Using marketing automation will help you segment, score and tag your leads. It will make your webinar promotion easier and more scalable. It will allow you to create timely personalized email campaigns that make potential B2B customers attend, refer and buy.
Craft Webinar Invitations that Talk to the Individual Account
Turning your webinar registration into attendees and leads is not easy. In the end, we are talking about buy B2B customers. That is why crafting the perfect webinar invitation is a challenge most B2B marketers face.
We are all busy. We all have priorities. So why attending another webinar? Studies show that the average webinar conversion rate is 55% (Noisy Little Monkey).
At the same time, in recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of webinars that take place each year. Especially those for B2B customers.
In fact, according to Content Marketing Institute and GoToWebinar, 58% of B2B marketers use webinars as a promotional tool.
So, if you are creating a webinar marketing strategy, reality shows that whatever you were doing is not enough.
Sorry about that.
Webinars provide a relatively low-cost way for marketers to increase brand awareness. They help organizations foster relationships with clients and business partners.
Your webinar invitations are more important than what most think at first. Since at this point you know who are the buyer personas and what their key questions are, use this information to write email copy that converts.
Create Personalized Videos Based on B2B Customers Buyer Persona To Support Your Account-based Marketing
Once a webinar has been recorded, you can repurpose the content. If you have clear buyer personas, have identified objections, and have ways to create personalized marketing campaigns, this is for you.
92% of B2B marketers consider account-based marketing “extremely” or “very” important to overall marketing efforts (SiriusDecisions).
How about if your webinars provide useful content that your sales reps and marketers can use to engage with CRM leads that never got to register? Or those B2B customers that did?
Simply create personalized videos from the main webinar replay based on different audience segmentation criteria. For example, using data from the individual account or decision-makers in the videos.
Don’t assume your target audience will find all the answers to their questions on the webinar, or even on any type of marketing content. They often need your help to find what’s relevant to their use case, need, and budget.
Personalized videos are an amazing marketing tool that delivers relevant videos to your audience. These videos are automatically made powered by CRM data. Or even a spreadsheet like I show in the the following video:
The higher ticket the business buyer represents, the more this strategy makes sense. There is a simple reason for this. Often, you’ll have more CRM data to execute this strategy.
Then, send these videos to your marketing or sales leads as short personalized clips powered by customer data. Make sure these customized videos answer specific concerns or objections in the form of video. Also, present the videos in personalized and/or dynamic landing pages that increase your audience engagement at scale, but one at a time.
Lucky you, personalized video marketing software Pirsonal takes care of all this for you.
To increase effectiveness, these types of videos should be about 1 to 5 minutes long. Easy to consume, to the point. Here you’ll find an example that comes with a personalized landing page.
Do you have a savvy sales team?
Well, you guys can go the extra mile.
This is how…
This strategy can also be even more effective if your SDRs record short customized intros that are mixed together with the personalized videos. In the end, your sales reps will be the ones sending these personalized emails with video.
Use Clickable Replay Videos To Retarget Those That Didn’t Make it
You know very well that the fact that 500 people registered for your upcoming webinar does not guarantee that all of them will attend. For this reason, you need a marketing follow-up strategy. This is where clickable replay videos are such a great opportunity.
Let me explain why this makes a difference when you target business customers.
Remember you didn’t invest in capturing each lead just for the pleasure of spending your marketing budget.
You did it because you want to generate more business. Either building a brand, boosting upsells, or converting leads into customers. The bottom line is to make the purchase decision a no-brainer. For this, you’ve invested in intentional marketing content.
Then, your event marketing strategy doesn’t finish with the webinar itself.
If your webinar attendance rate falls below the average (55%), it doesn’t mean your webinar was a failure.
It means you still have a shut.
Many webinar registrants won’t catch the live webinar broadcast. But, guess what? They can still check out the on-demand webinar replay.
Actually, a lot of people register with this in mind. At least I do.
Generally speaking, you can expect around 25% of those who registered to miss the live show and to watch the replay instead.
This is a golden opportunity!
Now, did you know that personalized call-to-action buttons are 200% more effective than generic ones?
This means that more viewers click on the videos because the CTAs are specific to them. As a result, businesses increase engagement rates. Your webinar becomes successful, also from a user perspective.
Here is what you can do to proactively target those that didn’t make it to the webinar and still want to watch the replay video…
Instead of sending them the replay and that’s it, send them a replay with a clear in-video personalized call-to-action. This is strategy complements the one I mentioned above.
[Check this guide now to learn how to create personalized in-video calls-action that convert]
Live webinars are great to connect with the audience. Maybe you even shared a limited offer using FOMO.
If you still have a clear call to action for those that didn’t attend, then add a visual interactive call-to-action to the replay video. Personalize it! Ask for the sale in real-time!
The following video shows how a personalized interactive video player works:
This gets super easy with Pirsonal Player. Pirsonal Player is an interactive video player for marketing automation and personalization strategies at scale. It works smoothly with virtually any digital data source.
Step Four: Create Collateral Content
Now that you know who your webinar attendees are and what triggers their interest, it’s time to create marketing and sales collateral that makes them buy. So far, you’ve created a webinar sales funnel that focuses on the user experience. You answer the questions the right buyers ask. You also created email marketing strategies and video personalization workflows that make people click and buy.
From the webinar title to the webinar invitation emails, to video content, you can personalize your messaging based on what matters to your buyer persona.
This is where personalized marketing shines. One of the main goals here is to create engaging experiences that help you boost sales conversions. B2B customers are easier to target through email campaigns and ads.
The idea is that every potential customer feels that you are moving a complete army to save them from not solving their problem on time. For you, this means that you’ll make it easier for them to buy your product or service.
This approach is even more effective if you take this into consideration:
Personalized marketing and marketing automation make this possible with technology. But, from the calls to action to fully interactive experiences, your audience can’t feel that you are using an email template. They can’t feel that they are just part of another cohort.
Data, creativity, and technology make this feasible, no matter your budget. But you need to use your creativity to make it work.
An effective way to do this is if you think about it from a user experience perspective. Not just from content or email marketing point of view.
It’s not about the content itself. It’s more about the full user experience. If you take this into account from day one, you’ll see how your messages are clear, contextualized, and move people to the next step.
The Bottom Line
Create webinar marketing strategies with a user experience and product management mindset. It will boost your B2B account-based marketing.
B2B customers give you access to more CRM data. This customer information will help you solidify your webinar marketing promotion. It will also help you get educational content creation right based on direct insights. Not just your gut.
With both aspects aligned, you’ll be able to create effective B2B marketing campaigns that attract the right business customers and engage them from day one. Account-based email marketing campaigns and ads will be more relevant thanks to personalization.
No matter the marketing automation software you use. What matters here is the mindset and strategy. B2B transactions take a bit longer to consolidate. If you walk with your target audience during the journey, you close more sales faster and will increase lifetime value (LTV).
