Webinars: Can they help your business grow?

Several companies have started effectively using webinars to generate quality leads for their products and services. Designing and executing an effective webinar, however, remains a challenge. Provided below are some pointers to designing an effective webinar.

Be clear about the purpose

Unless you are clear about the purpose the webinar is expected to serve, there will be mismatch between your expectations and the reality. Depending on which phase of your sales cycle you plan to serve through a webinar, the event can be designed to support lead generation, lead incubation, branding, thought leadership, etc.

Get your topic right

Once you have decided the purpose the webinar should serve, focus on identifying a topic which will interest the target audience. It is important to define the target audience properly and apply considerable thought to what they would be interested in knowing, which ALSO serves your purpose to tell them. Far too often, we get so caught up in what we want to say that we forget to think about what our target audience wants to know. The result: wasted marketing dollars!

Scores of documents address the technical aspects of execution of webinars and the best practices of execution, but rarely do they address the issues critical to making a webinar a successful marketing tool. How to articulate a topic? Who should the speaker(s) be? To know more about how to effectively use webinars for branding, lead generation and lead incubation, click here.

So how are these 2 factors, namely clarity of purpose the webinar has to serve and the choice of webinar topic, related? Let us illustrate:

• Branding & Thought Leadership: If the webinar is to help position your brand, the topic must be futuristic, bold, perhaps even controversial, to grab the target audience’s attention and position your brand as a thought leader in the market segment you operate in. Positioning your company as an industry leader that sets industry standards and pioneers industry trends becomes simpler through the medium of webinars. If this is your goal, then your webinar should cover topics that detail industry trends in your target market while outlining how your company recommends coping with changing or emerging trends. Your webinar should focus on innovations in your market segment that you want your company to be recognised for. The key to conducting a successful 'branding' webinar is to have a industry-recognised speaker, while it is imperative that a senior management member conducts a 'thought leadership' webinar. A large database is required for both. In this scenario, a sharply-focused database is not required since immediate business is not expected.

• Lead generation: If conducting a webinar for a heterogeneous audience, it is important to keep in mind that most of your respondents may not convert into leads. You will come across several tire-kickers at this stage. To identify potential leads from amongst your respondents, you must conduct a pre-webinar interactive session. Keep your webinar topic informative, with just subtle reference to your company's services, to minimize the impression that the webinar is only a sales pitch. 

• Lead incubation: Webinars are highly effective when used to convince indecisive prospects. With a focused topic and a database comprising only those people who are interested in what you have to say but are yet to write the cheque for your product or service, messages delivered through webinars have a significant impact in leading them towards conversion. Ideally, companies should apply the DAB (Desire, Ability and Budget) method to conduct webinars only for invitees rather than for a registered audience.

 
After choosing the right topic it is also important that you choose a good speaker.  How important a role does the speaker play in a webinar?

 
It’s fairly evident that the speaker must be engaging, eloquent and someone who understands the topic. But it is also very important for the speaker to be aligned with the overall goal of the webinar.
 

• For lead generation: If the webinar is for lead generation and you have conducted an interactive pre-webinar session to identify prospects from the tire-kickers, then this information should be shared with the speaker. This allows the speaker to address those issues in his presentation that will successfully engage prospective customers without spending too much time on the indecisive respondents.

• For innovation: If the webinar is about an innovative process, product or service that has been adopted by your company, then the ideal way to go about the webinar is to have a subject matter expert talk about the innovation along with a client who endorses the innovation and explains the impact of the implementation on your company’s performance.

• For Thought leadership: If the webinar is about your company’s ‘thought leadership’, then the speaker should be a senior management member of your company who is well known in the industry. 

• For lead incubation: If the webinar is being conducted for prospects who still haven’t made any decision about your product or service for varying reasons, then the speaker should work along with your sales force to try and identify two or three issues, common to all the prospects attending your webinar that are preventing them from making a deal with you. This helps you address some of the reservations your prospects may have regarding the value of your services.

• For Branding: The speaker should be a well known person who isn’t a part of your organization who agrees to associate with your company and wants to speak on the topic you have chosen. Your topic should reflect one aspect of the market that you want your company to be associated with. Eg: If you want your company to be associated with the best ‘third party testing services’ then the speaker could be a testing guru who talks about the ‘benefits of third party testing’. The webinar should also have a member from the senior management member of your organization to open and conclude it.  

A lot of companies have burnt their fingers, having conducted unsuccessful webinars due to an incomplete understanding of the tool. Unfortunately, they abandon the idea of conducting another webinar after being unsuccessful the first time, instead of analysing where they went wrong, rectifying their mistakes and implementing a programme that works for their company and target audience. On the other hand, it is also true that a webinar need not add value to everyone’s marketing strategy. So companies who just jump on to the bandwagon thinking they should do it because it’s the next big thing, should also be careful.

 
How do you determine whether your company could benefit from a webinar? Write to us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we will help you determine if it’s the right marketing tool for you.

 
This article addresses some of the generic factors that must be considered before conducting a webinar. In our next article, we will focus on specific issues a products company or a services company should consider before conducting a webinar. If you would like to leave your comments or if you have any questions, please write to us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .