Webinars are one of the greatest tools in a lead generation system because they allow companies to personally engage with prospective customers, regardless of their physical location, and gain valuable feedback that can enhance further promotional materials.
Take it from us, virtual events are the gifts that keep on giving. If you’re not immediately convinced, let’s examine the many ways you can incorporate them into your lead generation system.
What does lead generation mean in the context of digital marketing?
A lead generation system is the machine that helps drive your company’s sales by creating useful online content that draws people in, gets their contact information, and continuously engages with them until they become a customer.
Unsure about webinars as a component of lead generation? Let us tell you why virtual event and webinar marketing is the one tactic demand generation marketers can’t afford to ignore in 2021.
How To Build a Lead Generation System
A Lead Generation System Begins With a Website and Other Digital Channels You Can Own and Optimize
Your company’s website is the hub for your lead generation system. All marketing content ultimately comes from and leads back to your website, where visitors can continue interacting with your brand’s messaging and become future customers
Remember, people are going to interact with your content multiple times and on multiple channels before they make a purchase or sign-up. This is why you need to build a digital infrastructure, or ecosystem, that keeps your leads circulating within your spaces. It’s important to have online channels to create registration forms, collect data, and distribute engaging content that’s web-optimized.
For example, turn an old webinar into multiple pieces of content to feed into your content marketing system. Repurpose webinars into blog posts to boost your website’s SEO, or create landing pages with gated content, where visitors have to enter their details to download your webinar.
Having a website isn’t enough — you’ll need social media accounts, a YouTube page, and maybe even a custom mobile app that you can use to distribute webinar related content, such as useful quotes, important segments, shareable infographics, and blogs that incorporate webinar footage and transcripts.
If You’re Just Getting Started, Your Lead Generation System Needs To Give Something of Value Away For Free
Your brand might not be the most popular on the market, but producing high-quality webinar content can change that.
Producing amazing, free content and asking for nothing in return can be your ticket to building an unstoppable strategy and lead generation system.
Other Common Free Lead Generating Content
- eBooks
- Cheatsheets
- Ultimate Guides
- SlideShare Presentations
- Infographics
- Exclusive videos
A Successful Lead Generation System Is Scalable – You’re Going to Need to Automate the Load
Nurturing generated leads from your webinar will take time and energy. But if you’re fortunate enough to start generating leads at an unmanageable pace, you’re going to need the help of some tools to automate certain processes.
Consider using some of these automations for your lead generation system to reduce the workload for yourself and your team.
Calendar Invitations
One great tip for reminding registrants to attend your webinar is to ask them to put the event in their email calendar. This is easily achievable by creating a Google calendar event and adding a link into their onboarding email that says, “Add to my calendar.”
This can also be useful if leads request an appointment with you, as the request can go straight to your calendar.
Email Automations
Use an email marketing automation platform to automatically send emails once certain actions have been triggered.
For example, it’s common to send a welcome email to a registrant immediately after they submit their contact info. This email can ask them to check boxes on what kinds of updates they’d like to receive, further automating your email processes and giving you insights on what content your audience wants.
Other email automations include re-engagement emails or gentle reminders sent to leads who haven’t engaged with your emails, survey/feedback emails, and event update/reminder emails.
CRM Tools
CRM tools are the Rolodex of the 21st century and often a key component to lead generation systems. Almost all CRMs integrate with lead generation forms to automatically create new customer profiles. Once these customer profiles have been created, they can be sorted, analyzed, and referenced to assist your whole team with the sales process.
Lead Scoring Tools
Lead scoring is a methodology used by companies to determine what leads are the most valuable. This is another step that can be automated to help your sales team be more efficient.
Numerous lead scoring applications integrate with CRMs to help you create segmented lists based on your preferred customer traits.
Optimize Your Lead Generation System Based on Data and Set Everything Up Like An Experiment
At this point, you’ve got social channels, paid ads, a website, and your virtual events/webinars all in motion. Your lead generation system has tons of people in various stages of the sales process.
Great! Now let’s start analyzing the data to see what tactics are actually working, and which ones aren’t so you can repeat your success, and avoid wasting time on the things that didn’t achieve your goals.
Common Ways to Test Your Lead Generation System
A/B Testing Buttons, Titles, and Other Landing Page Features
The smallest changes to your registration landing page can have the biggest impact on your lead generation system. To test this, create a landing page, and then duplicate it, changing only minor details to see if one performs better than the other.
It can be as simple as changing the color of the “submit” button from blue to green or changing the wording of the call-to-action from “Sign Up Today!” to “I’m Ready for Improvement!”
Continue A/B testing your landing pages to constantly improve conversion rates.
Filter Your Email Audience To See Which Leads Respond to Different Rhetoric, Sales, and Content Types
Search your CRM or email marketing platform to see which emails have the highest open rates, and which emails go unopened. Use this data to plan new content that will achieve higher open rates and conversions in your lead generation system.
Use any data you’ve gathered on your leads to try segmenting your email list. From here, test different language and strategies on your various segments to see what resonates and what does not.
Use Google Analytics To See How Long People Spend On Your Content to Help Build More Content
Look to your website’s Google Analytics reporting dashboard to help you determine what your most popular content is, and then produce more of that type of content.
You’d often be surprised what content performs best on your website, so refer back to your analytics page to make sure you’re not wasting time creating content that’s going unseen.
Create Interaction Goals to See Which Webinar Formats Work Best for Generating Conversions
If your webinar is only focused on selling your company’s products and services and ignores your audience, it’s going to fail. Webinars need to be interactive to hold your audience’s attention and convert them into being customers.
Your goal is to create the most engaging, interactive webinar possible, which means that every webinar you host should outperform the previous, in terms of conversion and interaction.
Luckily, many webinar platforms easily allow you to see how many interactions each webinar received, more on that in the next step.
Check out your Marketing Team’s Guide To Generating Leads With Online Events in 2021 to take virtual lead generation to the next level.
Use a Webinar Software Platform That Measures Engagement Rates
Webinars are built to be interactive, otherwise, they might as well just be infomercials.
Most webinar platforms allow participants to engage with the presentation. Common features allow for chat messaging, hand raising, thumbs up/emoji buttons, and answering polls.
The more engagement your webinar receives, the greater its success will be.
Unlike traditional presentations, webinars allow you to record all interaction data between you and your audience, which is useful for determining what content was popular. It can even be sorted to tell you what audience members were more active, which is a clear indicator to help you rank leads by their interest.
Check out the 15 Best Webinar Platforms For Your Business in 2021 to determine which one is right for you.
How SpotMe Can Turn Your Webinars Into a Lead Generation System
SpotMe provides marketers with all the tools they’ll need to host webinars and integrate with their current CRMs to give their lead generation system a boost.
With SpotMe, you can create fully-branded registration pages to drive up attendance, and use many interactive features to keep your audience engaged. Our platform integrates with thousands of applications, such as CRMs and email marketing platforms to create a scalable, efficient webinar lead generation system for your company.
Take SpotMe Express on a test drive today and get a free demo.
Looking for more webinar resources? Check out our guides 27 Creative Event Promotion Ideas for Your Next Online Event and 18 Tips for Marketing Your Next Webinar Event.
