When It Comes to Webinars…Where’s the Real Value?

Most B2B marketers agree that the success of their content marketing is measured not only by the number of audience members it attracts, but also by the quality of the leads their campaigns generate. To those ends, marketers work hard to develop content that is appealing to their target audiences, and they package that content in ways that are designed to engage and excite the audience.

Marketers like webinars for several reasons. Webinars represent a kind of “live” content that is dynamic and interactive. They provide an engagement experience for the audience that is more personal than fixed, highly polished content. There is something more genuine about a live presenter answering real questions in the course of a presentation. Also, through their multimedia capabilities, webinars provide a richer, more memorable experience for the audience. And finally, webinars create opportunities for marketers to gauge audience reaction.

From the marketer’s perspective though, what is the greatest value of a webinar? Is it the opportunity to influence an audience with a truly compelling presentation? Is it a way of generating more leads? In fact, a webinar represents a unique opportunity to do several things at once. If these things are done well, the result is more than a set of qualified leads. They are leads already prepared for follow-on contact, and they are leads the marketer has learned something about during the webinar presentation that enables sales to personalize subsequent engagement.

How does a simple webinar do all these things? By combining good presentation practices with a business-grade webinar platform, a well-planned webinar presentation performs the following lead nurturing functions:

• Attract and Filter – Target an audience segment with a topic designed to interest and attract them, and use webinar platform tools to promote and register attendees.
• • Influence – Develop a compelling, engaging presentation that teaches the audience something, and use webinar platform tools to encourage audience interaction
• Analyze and Capture – monitor and measure audience activity during the presentation, capture that data at the individual attendee level, and export the data to a lead management application for further use by sales people.

Attracting the right audience and creating a compelling presentation for them sets up the conditions for analyzing their reactions and capturing information that enables personalized, post-webinar engagement. Coordinating these three activities provides highly qualified leads along with individual-level insights into each of them. Let’s see how.

Attracting and Filtering a Target Audience

Attracting and Filtering a Target Audience The first step in capturing qualified leads is attracting the right audience. The basic principles behind developing an audience for a webinar do not differ greatly from audience development for other kinds of content. However, webinars are different from static content in a several important ways:

• Because webinars are scheduled events, people need to set aside specific blocks of time to attend them. Attendees can’t skim for the highlights like they might if reading a white paper. Committing to attend a webinar is a higher threshold of commitment than deciding to view a fixed piece of content like a white paper. Therefore the value to the audience must be high, and it must be clear.
• A webinar platform has tools that help promote attendance and collect important information about the audience.

Given these differences, here are several audience development strategies:

Topic Selection – Playing to the Target Audience: Every webinar plan should include an audience objective that defines the audience and states what that audience is going to take away from the event. It’s not enough to decide what you want to tell your audience. That may be important to you, but the audience might not care about it. You need to understand what is important to the target audience—their hot buttons and the things they worry about—then present your information in that context. The more valuable a topic or presenter (or both) is to the target audience, the more target audience you will register for the event.

Attendees prefer topics with depth that teach them something useful. They are less interested in superficial treatments of large topics. Also, always remember that titles mean everything when it comes to attracting an audience.

Webinar Promotion: This is an essential part of audience development. It can include emailing to target audience lists, using social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn, paid advertising, or all of the above.

Platform Features that Support Registration and Attendance: The ultimate goal of attracting and filtering an audience is to ensure the right people register for the webinar, and then to maximize attendance of those who register.

A business-grade webinar platform provides tools that make registration easy for attendees. Registration is an important step because it is the first opportunity to capture attendee information. But don’t overdo it! Asking for too much information makes the process complicated and discourages registration. A webinar platform should automatically send email reminders as the webinar date approaches. Some webinar platforms support Outlook calendar integration, which inserts the event into the registrant’s calendar when they register.

Building an audience is an essential first step, but once you have an audience, the real challenge is keeping it.

Titles Make a Big Difference...

Presentation Best Practices

Choosing and promoting a topic that attracts the right audience is just the beginning. Gen - erating quality leads depends on an audience staying engaged during the webinar. This is im - portant not only to influence the audience, but also to measure their reaction to the presenta - tion. Retaining the audience is all about good presentation practices.

There is lots of great advice available about presentation techniques that keep audiences interested and engaged. It is not our intention to repeat all that advice here. However, here are some key points that will improve audience engagement:

• Never start a webinar with long-winded introductions and speaker credentials. Dive into the value they will be getting from it.
• Teach and inform. Do not sell.
• Make the presentation crisp. Spend no more time on a topic than is necessary to make key points.
• Audiences have shorter attention spans. It is often easier to attend one or two 30-minute webinars than one 60-minute event.
• During promotion and registration, solicit questions. During the presentation, refer to those questions, and answer them.
• Encourage attendees to use chat chat and Q&A functions to make comments and ask questions. Keep an eye on the chat box, and speak to the audience.
• Pose questions that relate to your topic, and address specific answers you receive.
• Assume your audience is multitasking and you are competing for their attention.

Leveraging the Platform Features for Better Audience Engagement

Audience engagement is incredibly important for two reasons. First of all, it keeps the audience attentive so they get your message. Secondly, more interactivity provides more opportunity to analyze the audience.

Platform features that support interactivity in - clude chatting (or instant messaging), annotation tools, and polling. A poll can be used to alter the rhythm of a presentation, introduce a new topic, gauge audience attentiveness, and assess the engagement of individual audience members.

So far we have discussed attracting an audience and providing a spellbinding presentation. Now we come to the heart of the matter – measuring the audience to qualify leads. Let’s see how.

Measuring the Audience/h1>

From the moment a webinar attendee registers, they are providing information that is valuable at two levels. First, as part of an audience, they are saying something about how receptive the target population is to the topic and key messages. Secondly, as individuals, they are saying something about themselves and their own interest in the topic. A good webinar platform will capture and report all this information in ways that are useful to marketing and sales.

For example, a business-grade webinar platform will be able to collect and generate reports based on information gathered before and during a webinar session, such as data points listed in the table on this page.

Strategies for Improving the Quality of Audience Analytics

We have already discussed that the best way to create an opportunity for collecting audience data is to attract the right audience and keep them engaged. Once attendees have joined the webinar, using platform interactivity features enables you to measure many aspects of audience and individual interest.

Chat: Chat is valuable because it is content that provides insight into the intent of the person who writes it, and that intent typically relates to what is happening in the presentation when the chat occurs. There are a many ways to engage with chat during a presentation. While the presenter is speaking, a colleague can post comments and questions, and attendees can do the same. Chat can be used to make an offer, such as to send links to related information, and responses can say something about group attentiveness as well as the individuals who respond.

Polling: Polling is useful because it provides real-time audience feedback while keeping the audience engaged. It also provides information about how individuals stand on a particular question. One great strategy is to poll on a question from an industry survey, and then show audience results alongside survey results.

Q&A: Questions provide information about how engaged an audience is at a particular moment. However, they also work to increase audience interest, and they provide information about what interests specific individuals. Presenters should pose questions regularly. Encourage attendees to ask questions so speakers can respond verbally in real-time. A moderator can answer housekeeping questions directly while passing on content-related questions to the speaker to address for all attendees.

Leading webinar platforms have features that give the moderator dashboard-style feedback on audi - ence attentiveness and interest. Attentiveness ratings show the percentage of attendees who are actively clicked on the webinar window, rather than on other windows open on their computers, implying that they are following the presentation rather than being diverted by web surfing or reading emails. Interest ratings measure each attendee’s behavior and level of engagement through their clicks, at - tentiveness, questions asked, questions answered, and chat messages. This feedback helps present - ers modulate their presentation, but it also provides valuable insights into how individual attendees respond to different parts of the presentation.

Leveraging Webinar Analytics in a Lead Nurturing Strategy

Analytical reporting from a webinar provides a great deal more than feedback on the effectiveness of a presentation. Webinar analytics show how the market reacts to presentation content. They also provide valuable attendee-specific information that can increase the effectiveness of any lead nurturing activity.

Consider these examples that show how individual information can personalize follow-up contacts:

• The no-show. Tom Sawyer registers but fails to show. Subsequent follow-up: “We missed you at our recent webinar. You might be interested to know that the audience found one topic particularly valuable. Did you know that……………. We recorded this presentation – would you like me to send you a link?”
• The highly engaged attendee. Jane Smith registers and stays engaged throughout, including asking a question. Subsequent follow-up: “Thank you for your participation and your great question. I have some additional information on that topic that might interest you, as it is specific to your business. Can we schedule a call to discuss this week?”

Of course, in order to take full advantage of the information that a business-grade webinar platform is able to capture, the platform must have reporting capabilities that provide data in understandable and actionable formats. This is especially true for the detailed information that is captured on every attendee. If a webinar audience numbers in the thousands, that can produce enormous amounts of attendee-level analytical information. Fortunately, some webinar platforms offer elegant analytics reports for collecting leadlevel webinar analytics.

Simplifying Audience Data Capture

The best way to capture lead-level analytics is to transfer captured information directly to individual attendee records in sales automation and lead management solutions such as Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, Pardot, and Salesforce. True business-grade webinar solutions, such as Citrix’s GoToWebinar, offer Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to simplify the transfer of attendee information and analytics from webinar reports into lead and sales management solutions. APIs are applets that any non-technical person can set up. When set up, they automatically feed information from the webinar software to the marketing automation solution. The interfaced systems create new contact records for attendees who are new prospects, and the update existing prospects’ profiles with valuable metrics like attentiveness and interest ratings. The availability of off-the-shelf APIs can be a huge time-saver in automating the capture of webinar analytics.

The Key to High Value Webinars: Capturing Actionable Webinar Analytics

A webinar is an ideal medium for attracting a targeted audience and presenting that audience with a message. However, the technical platform used to host webinars also provides a way to acquire valuable information about individuals in the audience. Selecting and promoting the right topic and delivering an engaging presentation are essential prerequisites to gathering audience information.