Most B2B marketers consider webinars only for a specific part of the marketing funnel.
But what if I say that you can leverage webinars to engage with your prospects and customers throughout their journey? Would you like to know how?
In this article, I will show how webinars can be one of the best-performing marketing assets for your B2B businesses. So, keep reading, and I am sure you’ll get to know something you never thought of.
What is a Webinar?
A webinar is a form of content in which you hold a live or pre-recorded video session with the attendees about a specific topic related to your products and services.
Webinars can be interactive, allowing companies to take customer feedback and answer their queries in real-time. You can also offer on-demand webinars on your website, which people can access anytime by signing up a form.
A webinar is a great way to educate your prospects, leads, and customers about your products and services without even meeting them in person.
Is Webinar effective for B2B Marketing?
If you ask for my opinion, then yes, Webinars can be a very effective component of a B2B marketing strategy.
But you don’t have to believe what I say. Instead, just look at these statistics and make your own opinion about it.
- 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads (99 Firms).
- 91% of B2B Professionals say webinars are their preferred type of content(Search Engine Journal)
- Over 30% of all webinars are produced by B2B businesses like the software and technology; financial and accounting; advertising, marketing, and PR sectors. (GoToWebinar)
So, do you think webinars can be helpful for your business? If so, let me show you how you can use Webinars strategically throughout the buyers’ journey to improve the return on your marketing investments.
How to use Webinars with B2B Buyers’ Journey?
A B2B buyer journey is quite long because the decision-making isn’t a one-person thing and moreover, B2B deals involve huge capital investments and risk which must be evaluated carefully.
On average, the B2B buyers’ journey ranges from 6 to 12 months. And during this journey, a continuous flow of information is significant between you and your prospects to help them understand more about your products and services and stay on top of their mind when they make purchasing decisions.
This is where webinars can come in handy for you. But before going ahead, let’s talk about what a B2B buyer’s journey looks like.
The buyer journey is a visual representation of how an unknown person comes to know about your brand and moves forward to make the purchase decision.
The most basic form of the B2B buyers’ journey looks like this:
The same journey can be broken down into multiple stages and steps involved in the process like this –
However, for ease of understanding, we will see how B2B webinars can be mapped across these 3 buyers’ journey stages –
- Awareness Stage
- Consideration Stage
- Decision Stage
1. Awareness Stage
At this stage, your prospect is most likely aware of their problems and researching to understand the problem better and find possible solutions available in the market.
This is the stage where your prospects come to know about your brand and the services you provide. So, your goals should be to create a strong presence on the platform where your prospects are doing research and drive them to your website to provide more information.
For starters, you should focus on search engines, social media, and business listing websites to create awareness for your brand.
At this early stage, your entire focus should be on helping your target audience with their research. And this is where you can leverage webinars.
You can create webinars on topics addressing the common problems in the industry and suggest possible solutions.
For instance, if your company sells accounting software for restaurants, you can create webinars on topics like-
- Introduction to Accounting and Financial Statements
- 10 Steps To Effective Restaurant Accounting
- A Step-By-Step Guide to Accounting for Restaurants
By creating such webinars, you are becoming a trusted source of information for your audience and thus help you build credibility with them.
To get registrations for the webinars at this stage, you can use social media advertising, most preferably LinkedIn since your target audience is business professionals.
Also, you can promote webinars to your website visitors using targeted popups or in-content registration links like PushEngage.
2. Consideration Stage
By now, you should already have the contact details of the webinar registrants and prospects from different channels who are at the consideration stage of the buyers’ journey.
At this stage, your prospective buyer might have shortlisted some of the viable vendors for their requirements. So, your focus should be to help them understand more about your products and services and let them know how your products/services are better than others.
Continuing with the accounting software example, at this stage, you can create webinars on topics like-
- Use cases for account software in the restaurant
- Comparison with competing brands
- Case studies on current and previous clients
This type of webinar allows you to provide a real-time experience to the attendees and interact with them to answer their queries.
The target audiences for the webinar at this stage are the attendees from ToFu webinars and other prospects who are in the consideration phase. You can use social media remarketing and email marketing to get registrations.
3. Decision Stage
At this stage, the potential buyer likes to engage with a sales representative to learn some specific information about the product or service they want to purchase.
To provide all the information, you can create a webinar giving the product demo, highlighting the main features, pricing structure, and onboarding process with a timeline to win their trust.
This is the final stage in the buyer’s journey so what I recommend is to do live webinars with individual prospects and address their doubts personally to ensure that they know everything about what they are buying and set their expectations right.
Best B2B Webinar Software
In order to leverage the full potential of webinars in B2B marketing, you need powerful webinar software using which you can host webinars and automate the journey.
There are many webinar software available out there but not all of them provide the features essential for B2B marketing. So, here are the two best webinar software that I recommend to every B2B marketer-
1. Demio
Demio is the most modern and powerful platform that a B2B marketer can want. It provides you with all the essential tools you need to create, market, and host successful webinars. It offers a customizable landing page and form builder to put your brand aesthetic on the registration page.
Best of all, using Demio, you can create on-demand webinars allowing your prospects to attend the webinar or watch the product demo instantly without making your sales representative host a demo every time someone requests it.
Pricing and Plans: Demio’s plans start at $34/month with the starter plan and go up to $163/month if paid annually. It offers a 14-day free trial with all Growth plan features, including a 5-hour Session Limit and automated event scheduling.
2. Livestorm
Livestorm is an advanced video communication platform designed specifically for businesses. It offers two different products for hosting webinars and video meetings.
With Livestorm Webinar, you can host different types of webinars including recurring events with multiple sessions allowing users to select the date of their choice to attend the webinar. You can also add unlimited moderators to manage the attendees and avoid spam in the chatbox.
Livestorm also allows you to create a registration page with your brand identity and add a custom registration form allowing you to gather more information about the attendees.
Pricing and Plans: Livestorm offers only two plans free and premium. With the free plan, you can host unlimited webinars for up to 20 minutes per session and only 10 live attendees. The paid plan comes at $89/month, paid annually.
If you want to explore more Webinar Hosting platforms, you should check out our complete list of best webinar software for Businesses.
Conclusion
Webinars have a huge potential in B2B marketing but still, it is the most underrated and underused marketing tactic. If you want to improve lead generation and lead nurturing strategy, you must include webinars and map them throughout the funnel.
Webinars have already improved the success of many B2B marketers and now it is your turn to plan your first webinar and take your marketing strategy to the next level.