If webinars aren’t integrated into your overall marketing strategy…
You’re missing a huge opportunity to engage your audience!
That’s because you can use webinars at any point in your customer’s journey to learn more about your audience’s interests, their challenges, and their role within a company.
In this clip from Fresh Take: Webinars As A Pipeline Accelerator, presenters Laura Ramos, Erik Newton, and Kathleen Timbol-Abdeen shed light on how you can use webinars for attribution, data gathering, and extremely high ROI.
Watch the clip or read the transcript below from this mind-expanding presentation from B2B Forum 2023.
Kathleen Timbol-Abdeen: So Laura, just for a quick moment, let’s think outside of webinars. I think when we think, “webinars,” we get kind of pigeonholed into this one concept. But if we looked at webinars as any other tool in our MarTech stack, what are some other examples of engagement using other platforms you’ve seen that were very attributable?
Laura Ramos: If you think about webinars as webinars, you’re going to pigeonhole it, like you’ve said. But really what it is, is it’s a platform for engaging with your audience.
And that audience can be prospects, early stage, mid stage—as Eric was talking about—or it can be with your existing customers. And this is an area of my current research. I’m looking at the post sale.
And I think this is an untapped opportunity probably for most people.
Because you can use this technology to create engagement in a way that is more purposeful and direct than just, say, having a community.
Now with a community, you’ve got to have a community manager who’s in there and doing things and… asking the community to participate and getting them to create connections with each other.
All of that is great. But in some respects, you’ve got a community that is attending your webinars and events. They’re there because they have a common purpose, a common set of problems.
So you can use it in the same sort of thing to help educate with webinars that are focused more on a how-to.
One of my favorites is the office hours webinar, which is [when] you bring somebody in [who] maybe talks about a specific type of problem, demonstrates how to fix it, and then answers questions from people online or participating in that way.
So focusing on your existing customers can really be another way of driving a lot of benefit from this particular type of technology.
Kathleen Timbol-Abdeen: Yeah, one of the challenges I see marketers having with webinars is making it attributable. Like, the success of it. So I’m curious from you, Laura, looking at other platforms… Most of us use other platforms and always look at it from a critical standpoint and really criticize how much ROI am I getting from [those other platforms].
But with webinars, I don’t think we really do that today. So I guess how would you compare webinars with those other platforms?
Laura Ramos: Oh, I think that it’s very possible to get a lot of deep information about your customers and what they’re interested in.
I don’t remember who told me this, but it was like: make the comparison to your website.
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars instrumenting our website for the 30 seconds that some visitors are there just to figure out what they’re doing.
But we don’t spend the money on the two to three days when they’re with us at an event or the hour or so that they’re with us on a webinar!
And the ability to collect data from that interaction and use it towards understanding where that customer is in their journey, what they’re interested in, what they’re not interested in, what their role is, is unbelievably different.
And when you use all of that, that’s what can help you to attribute the value that you’re getting from those events.
Kathleen Timbol-Abdeen: And the budgets are so tight too, and resources are tight, right?
So I think it’s really important for marketers to remember to dissect how much ROI or how much value they’re actually getting out of their webinars.
Laura Ramos: How much pipeline, how much opportunity, all of that.
Kathleen Timbol-Abdeen: Yes!
Eric, one of the ways we want to reframe looking at webinars is, making sure that it’s part of the marketing strategy and not a one-and-done.
How do you integrate webinars into the entire integrated marketing strategy?
Erik Newton: Yeah, think about your webinar as the main course in a 10 course meal.
So typically if we’re going to go to market, we’re going to pencil in some content or some execution or budget into 10 different places.
But because the webinar happens at a specific point in time, it often has a guest speaker. It often involves your executive, or your product leaders, who are going to be launching a product.
It’s the main course!
So in an integrated campaign, it’s probably not sourcing that many new people to the event, but it’s influencing people that are already in touch with you. So I would think about it that way, that it’s the main course.
Published 10/24/23
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