Are Webinars Dead? How to Make a Webinar that Works in 2018

As an acquisition marketer, I hear questions like this all the time: "Is the PDF dead? Is the webinar dead now too? How should we continue generating leads for our sales team while continuing to innovate on the content formats we produce and gate behind a form?"

It’s 2018, and the way our prospects and customers find and consume content has certainly changed. While I would love to say that there’s one new, highly optimal content format that all marketers should use for lead generation instead of older formats, I can’t -- it's a little more complicated than that. Instead, I’ll make a bold claim: webinars aren’t dead, and neither is the PDF ebook.

What has changed, however, is a saturation of mediocre PDF ebooks, webinars, and other forms of gated content available online. So while webinars aren’t dead, that doesn’t mean marketers should continue running the same, tired playbook.

Luckily, HubSpot and GoToWebinar teamed up to bring you the ultimate guide, “How to Produce Webinars Your Sales Reps and Prospects Will Love.”

Make sure you’re following these steps to create an effective webinar that works in 2018.

Webinars Drive Sales

According to InsideSales.com, 73% of marketing and sales leaders say webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality leads. Why?

• They are highly engaging. According to GoToWebinar, the average webinar attendee viewing time is 61 minutes.
• They work across the entire customer journey. From thought-leadership panel discussions to weekly live demos, webinars are a dynamic and effective way to move prospects down the funnel from awareness to closed deal and beyond.
• They generate high-quality leads for Sales. Webinars come with a ton of information about your prospects you can use to identify high-quality, sales-ready leads. With each webinar registrant, you can collect lead and engagement data your sales team can use to initiate personalized outreach.

How to Make a Webinar in 2018

Convinced that webinars are still a relevant acquisition strategy in 2018? Follow these steps to create an effective webinar.

1. Leverage Your Sales Team for Content Topic Ideas

When it comes to building a successful webinar strategy, it comes down to sales and marketing alignment. If the marketing team is creating content that isn’t helping their sales conversations, it won’t be a successful effort for driving high-quality leads to sales.

Luckily, you have experts at your disposal for coming up with content ideas that will actually compliment and aid the sales conversation: the reps themselves.

Instead of guessing what your sales team might want a webinar to be focused on, ask them. Get reps' buy-in for a webinar before you plan it. Set up a meeting to discover new content ideas and to find out what pain points they need to help solve. This will go a long way for ensuring sales' follow up with registrants is seamless once the webinar is over.

2. Nail Your Promotion Strategy

Once you’ve come up with relevant content topics for your webinar, its your job as marketers to get that webinar in front of as many eyes as possible. With webinars, it’s not just about generating initial excitement; you have to build excitement and encourage engagement once the webinar goes live. Here are a few tips for doing both:

• Try your hand at Co-marketing. One of the best ways to get new expertise, generate interest for a piece of content, and expand the reach of a campaign is to run a co-marketing webinar. Instead of running a webinar with speakers internally, try working with another company that’s going after a similar buyer persona and bring their expertise into the conversation. Doing so creates more interesting content and gives you the opportunity to get your webinar in front of another company’s established audience.
• Create automated email reminders under each sales rep’s name that will be sent to prospects who have been invited but not yet registered.
• Create manual email templates reps can send in their one-on-one communication with prospects.
• Set up an automated email to notify reps when one of their prospects has registered for your webinar. This will help them engage and close those prospects done the road.
• Once you’ve gotten registrants, that doesn’t mean they’ll show up. After all, if you promote a webinar 1-2 weeks in advance, a portion of your registrants are likely to forget when the live date comes around. Remember to send out reminder emails the day before and day-of the live event so ensure a high live attendance rate.

3. Don’t Just Stick to a PowerPoint and Talking Head

The format of slides with a person speaking on screen has been done time after time. Don’t feel the need to stick to the script -- literally. Instead, think about ways to mix up how the information in your webinar is presented:

• At HubSpot, we’ve found unscripted, discussion-style webinars to be quite effective at engaging our audience. In many of our live events, we’ve foregone the slides completely and instead brought two speakers together and had a host ask live questions on air. It’s effective for both encouraging Twitter participation via a hashtag and keeping the content conversational, but informative.
• Try building a webinar around your prospects' questions. Send a call for questions to be answered live on-air. This will help build engagement and excitement for what’s to come. Hopefully, the people asking questions will be more likely to show up day-of too.
• You can also use a landing page, like this, that includes a voting feature for people to upvote they’re top questions. This will also help your prioritize the material your audience is most interested in.

4. Deliver Necessary Information to Sales

A huge part of the pre and post-webinar process is making sure the right information gets delivered to sales. That’s why GoToWebinar and HubSpot recommend creating one webinar hub that’s easily accessible by sales with the following information:

• On-demand recordings of all webinars.
• A calendar with past and future webinars.
• Documentation that details the webinars goals, title, target persona, funnel stage, key points, speakers and logistics.
• Promotional and follow-up emails.
• Collection of graphic and text CTAs sales reps can drop into their communications.
• Mechanism to collect suggestions from sales reps for new topic suggestions and general feedback.

Once the webinar is done, however, it’s time to make sure the sales reps are ready to close those leads. Send a follow up email to your reps and include the following information:

• Leads who registered
• Leads who attended
• Leads who registered but didn’t attend
• Leads who never registered
• New SQL leads from post-webinar lead scores
• Any other relevant webinar data
• Send email templates sales can use to send to leads based on their webinar behavior. Include other relevant content they can use to continue to nurture leads in the coming weeks.

Putting the extra effort in will go a long way toward making sure the webinar is a success from both a sales and marketing standpoint.

It's All About Alignment

Webinars as a marketing tool aren't dead. But they're also not just an effective marketing tool; they’re also effective sales tools – but only if your sales team has the information, content, and tools to use them to move prospects down the funnel and close deals.

However, creating the kind of alignment you need to make this all a success isn’t easy. That’s why HubSpot and GotoWebinar created this ultimate guide for creating a successful webinar in 2018 and included a checklist to guide you through pre, ongoing, and post webinar communications.