15 Ways to Create Webinars that Convert and Drive Engagement

By Neeraj Shukla | Last Updated on April 23rd, 2024 10:17 am | 7-min read

Have you ever thought why an increasing number of professionals are relying on webinars as a means to get in touch with their existing and new customers? According to research from InsideSales.com, 73% of marketing and sales leaders say webinars are one of the best marketing strategies to generate high-quality leads in no time. These days webinars have become a highly effective tool for communicating with target audience. Well, online webinars offer businesses or entrepreneurs with an opportunity to communicate and convey their messages across in real time. In this technology driven era, businesses, especially SaaS companies have no other option, but to think alternative marketing strategies that make their products or services global. Here is the infographic that will help you understand the latest trends in the webinar marketing:At their core, webinars are just another type of content. Through webinars, companies can easily reach out to their existing and potential customers across any part of the globe. Webinars allow companies to build personal relationships and have real-time conversations with customers, without having to spend a fortune. The cost of hosting a webinar is much lower than organizing a physical event and hiring a venue. It even eliminates the need to travel, making it easy for your customers to know about your products or services at the comfort of their home or workplace. Webinars don’t need any kind of investments on infrastructure or on man power. For organizing a webinar, all you need is a computer and high speed internet service provider. Thus, all you have to do is to be an expert in creating an informative content that kills your customers’ problems and deliver value without teaching too much. Your webinar content must include your product or service details and how it can help users to resolve their specific problems and make their business process smoother. If you keep these points in mind, your sale will be much more organic without putting any extra efforts. If you’re determined to make your business grow, you have to include webinar in your marketing strategies. All you need to know is how to create a webinar that increases conversions and engagements? Here are a few ways to help you create webinars that drive engagement and convert leads:

1. Get the Right Technology

Smooth interaction is the only thing that can make your webinar lively and notable. While running a webinar if anything goes wrong, such as computer crashes, speaker or headphone gets disconnected, or problem in internet connection, it can ruin all of your efforts. Technical difficulties are always a possibility, however if it happens more than once, your brand image can be affected.

While your computer or laptop likely has an internal mic already built-in, however, you should consider investing in a standalone mic to get superior sound quality. Ensure you have a fast internet connection. If you have low broadband speeds, you can have frequent delays and connection issues during your live webinar.

2. Choose a Great Topic

The hardest part about planning a webinar is picking a topic and title for your webinar. It’s also the most important part to get right. So, be very careful while choosing the webinar topic. Your topic should cover problems, and desired outcomes of your target audience in relation to the product or service you’re promoting in the webinar.

You can explore topics using keyword research. The search volume of your keyword will give you a lot of idea into the most searched topics on the Google. You should also talk to your Sales representatives. Sales team is goldmine of customer insights since they talk with customers all day long. Customers always share their pain points and frustrations with your customer representatives. Therefore, they can help you in selecting topic for your next webinar.

3. Promote to the Right Audience

It’s not enough to just create webinars. The success of your webinar depends upon how many people have participated in it. And, if the goal of your webinar is to sell a product or a service, then you need to first determine your target audience.

If you don't know your target audience, you can't attract potential customers. If you’re giants like Facebook and Google, you can’t just expect people to sign up and attend your webinar. You have to make an effort to promote it. There are many ways that you can use to promote your upcoming webinar, including:

Write a blog article
Post on social media
Use an influencer
Use paid social ads
Send notifications about your webinar to your email list
Create short promotional videos
Use webinar listing sites

4. Create the Perfect Webinar Landing Page

Keeping in mind the objective of your webinar, you should create a webinar registration landing page including the content that targets your customers’ challenges, pain points, needs, and wants. Also, the content and image on the landing page should effectively convey to the visitors why they need to register for your webinar.

You should write compelling title, and put a short video explaining your webinar while generating excitement. You should also create a sense of urgency, such as a countdown timer or a note on limited spaces, to encourage visitors to take action. However, the main objective of landing page it to get potential attendees to sign up so you also need to make sure it is simple and easy to understand for your customers.

5. Involve your Sales Team

Your sales team is goldmine for customer insights. Involving sales team in a webinar is one of the keys to success of your webinar, and business as well. Since sales reps talk to the customers all day long, they know how to answer attendees’ questions. Marketing leaders always encourage participation of sales people in a webinar. In addition to this, by taking part in the webinar, your sales team will get familiar with the topics that ultimately help them to serve customers more effectively.

6. Send Multiple Reminders

You’ve created an event and people have registered to attend it. You think that all registrants are going to attend your event, but it is not like that. You still need to make sure that registrants will come up at your event. People may simply forget about your occasion or lose interest therefore you need to send them reminders.

People often fail to join webinars because they forget about it. So, send reminders at regular intervals, but not too often. Even expert webinar presenter promotes the webinar to their list.

7. Leverage your Current Audience

In the most basic sense, businesses exist because they provide a solution or value to their existing customers. Sharing an informative webinar that explains the usage of your product (especially if it’s SaaS) with your existing followers is one of the most critical factors to make it a huge success. Not only does it educate them, but it also reduces the Time to Value ratio, thereby ensuring your business connects with the customers at a deeper level.

They already know about you, so they can easily register for your event. This will also give you an opportunity to strengthen relationships with them and build the trust you need for conversion.

8. Make your Webinar Interactive

The success of any webinar or online event depends on the attitude of the audience. Therefore, getting the audience attention is vital. To ensure you capture your audience’s attention, you must make your webinar interactive, like a radio or TV show.

Vibrant visuals are very important for maintaining engagement and attention. To make your visual content more effective, you can use them on slides. There are simply too many tools that can be used to create stunning and powerful slide decks that can capture your customers attention. Another way to create a lively webinar is considering a panel discussion. A panel of experts discussing a subject and providing their own opinions will attract a lot of visitors looking for variety and rich content. Therefore, it’s important to have a group of people who are experienced enough to keep the conversation moving and on-topic.

9. Choose the Best Webinar Software

A successful webinar can provide many benefits to your company. And the success of any webinar or online event highly depends upon the technology or software you use to host it. Therefore, choosing the best webinar service is the first step to follow, which will ensure your interactive webinar ideas work.

Not all webinar tools/services will give you the desired results. There are some webinar tools that only have basics while others have advanced and multiple interactive tools to help you engage the audience all the time. Consequently, you should choose a webinar software that meet your promotional requirements while giving your clear customer insights.

10. Incentivize the Webinar with Bonuses and Offers

Giveaways are the best way to attract audience attention to your webinar. They help to build a community surrounding your webinar and, if done correctly, can increase your webinar registrations. In fact, everybody likes freebies. This technique has been used by leading marketers to promote their products or services.

It could be anything from iPad to software upgrade, a whitepaper, or anything as per your budget. If your giveaway gets a lot of response you might end up with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of entries.

11. Identify your Audience

Targeting the right audience for your webinars is key to getting marketing qualified leads. So, while creating the registration landing page or writing your webinar invitation, you should segment your demographic by industry, level, department, age, etc.

This will help you find the right audience for your webinar and also help create a great webinar sales funnel.

12. Pick the Right Day and Time

Hosting a webinar requires a lot of planning and hard work. From finding topic to marketing, it takes a lot of legwork. Even the most planned webinar can fall apart if it gets low level of participants. It is not always topic or lack of audience interest, but it could be a day or time. If you host a webinar on weekend, it can fall victim to low levels of viewership. Therefore, when hosting a webinar, it can be beneficial to consider utilizing the most successful days and times. A study by ON24 shows that Wednesdays and Thursdays attracts the huge number of attendees. So, you should host your webinar on these days to likely get the highest number of participants.

The study also shows that 11 am PST (2 pm EST) is the best time to host a webinar.

Also, you can use Google Analytics to analyze your traffic. Based on our Google Analytics data you can find the right time and day to schedule your webinar.

13. Include Question and Answer Session

The one and only motto of any webinar is to connect with potential customers. For it to be effective, your communication has to be two-way around. If you only explain features and benefits of your products or services and don’t take care of your customers’ responses, they might not attend your webinar next time.

According to a range of surveys, majority of webinar attendees want a live question and answer session at the end of a webinar. Therefore, you should include Q&A sessions in your webinar.

14. Re-target your Webinar Leads

Webinar marketing has become crucial inbound marketing tactic for many businesses. The amount of time, resources, and money you spend in creating a webinar can have a big impact on its success. However, post-webinar follow-up email campaigns is also one of the most critical tactics to improve your sales.

Creating re-targeting email-campaigns for your webinar leads will surely help you to improve your bottom line. You need to segment these leads based on their responses, interest and engagement. Keep in mind, your re-targeting campaigns or ads include a range of marketing tactics too.

15. Run a Test Webinar

Even if you’ve done webinars a thousand times before, it always pays to practice as much as you can. You should run test webinar at least a few hours or days before the webinar airs. According to some of the leading webinar presenters, most successful webinars are usually the result of hours of practice and research.

Therefore, practicing your presentation greatly increases the quality of your webinar . You can record yourself or rehearse before a colleague and ask them for improvement. This will help you to identify the issues within the presentation.Check Out Appy Pie’s WebinarsAppy Pie runs weekly webinars, on topics ranging from basic no-code app building to its submission to Google Play and App Store, helping small businesses get new customers and increase their ROI. Appy Pie has an amazing set of guest panels who have helped thousands of small business owners to improve their sales through mobile app.

Neeraj Shukla

Content Manager at Appy Pie