What We Learned From Hosting 35+ Webinars In One Year

January 27, 2016

Tara Robertson

Does your marketing team produce webinars? If not, you should probably consider doing so soon.

Webinars have become a vital aspect of our content marketing mix at Uberflip – so much so that in November we even hosted a webinar about how we run webinars!

Webinars have become one of our marketing team’s highest lead drivers, and we’re not alone. In 2015, we drove about 30% of our leads from webinars. And these are qualified leads – about 25% of the new opportunities our sales team added to the pipeline last year came from webinars.

Still not convinced that your marketing team should get to work planning a webinar program? Perhaps the lessons we learned last year will inspire you to make 2016 the year you dive into the wide world of webinars!

Choose your topic wisely

The right topic can make or break your webinar’s success. If it’s too high level then the content won’t be memorable, but if it’s too advanced then people may be so intimidated by the content that they won’t even sign up.

You may not have time to ask your subscribers what topics they’d be interested in, but asking your team is a great start. Try to pick a topic that your speaker(s) have deep expertise in. This will help the content flow and will ensure the audience’s questions get answered.

Pick the right partner

We hosted a couple webinars last year with partners who had large subscriber lists, but weren’t necessarily targeting the same prospects as we were. While it can be tempting to partner with a company or speaker that has a big social following to get the word out about your webinar, it’s important to take the time to think about what your goals are and how you’ll benefit from the partnership.

Maybe your goal is to heavily promote your webinar and get your registration count up to increase subscribers. Maybe lead quality is more important to you (likely the case if you’re a B2B marketer like me!). Either way, put some thought into it and write down your goals before you reach out to potential partners or begin the planning process.

Plan ahead for success

The farther in advance you plan out your webinar schedule, the more likely you are to hit your lead goal. Seems obvious, right? But when your marketing calendar is full of events, eBooks, and other campaigns, it’s not always easy to plan ahead.

We found that the earlier we could get the webinar landing page live and start promoting it, the better the webinar performed in terms of leads generated. Our team aims to have the landing page ready 2-3 weeks before the webinar is scheduled so we can start scheduling email, social, and other promotions. Of course, this doesn’t happen every time (but we’re working on it!).

Consider hosting a webinar series

Last year we hosted two different webinar series, Content Hacks and Marketing Automation Hacks. Both were successful in terms of lead gen, bringing in thousands of leads through webinars that took place over a few days. If you have a big idea for a webinar that won’t fit into one hour or less, consider hosting a series to maximize your lead gen efforts and centralize your promotions around one main theme.

Get more mileage out of your webinars

Late in the year, we started syndicating our recorded webinars on BrightTalk. In case you haven’t heard of it, BrightTalk is basically the SlideShare for webinars. You can find webinars on all kinds of topics from financial planning, sales strategy, talent management, and of course, content marketing.

We found that syndicating our webinars on third-party channels, like BrightTalk, helps us keep the leads coming in, sometimes months after the webinar was originally recorded. I’m looking forward to trying a few additional syndication channels this year.