6 Game-Changing Ways to Leverage B2B Webinars
Sep 24, 2024 Praggya Joshi
B2B webinars facilitate massive interaction with audience and promotion of brand-related valuable content. No doubt, their popularity as part of virtual events is increasing and for over half of the marketers, webinars are critical for high-quality lead generation.
From building brand awareness, credibility, lead generation to acquiring customers, there are many ways to utilize B2B webinars to their fullest. In fact, with a great virtual events platform, you can effectively use them to engage audience throughout the sales funnel. In this post, we'll explain 6 powerful ways B2Bs can leverage webinars for success.
1. Boost Lead Generation and Nurturing
B2B Webinars are the holy grail of lead capture. They are also a cost-effective approach to driving leads and acquiring customers. All you need to do is to ensure that you create content that focuses on engaging customers with themes that make them aware of your ability to solve their problems.
Nearly half of the webinar attendees turn into qualified leads. B2B marketing webinars that tap into the FOMO and offer expert advice and solutions for free, typically generate a lot of qualified prospects. A registration form does most of the job.
Besides creating a sense of urgency, such B2B webinars offer expert insights and actionable strategies to people. You can use a robust virtual events platform that supports features like Q&A sessions, polls, and chat, fostering engagement and allowing you to address questions in real time. As a result, you can directly engage with your prospects.
Let's suppose you are a SaaS company that wants to generate qualified leads. In this case, you can use educational webinars to drive engagement. During the webinar, techniques, like lead scoring and segmentation, can be used to qualify leads based on their engagement levels. In the end, you will get a list of quality prospects.
2. Enhance Thought Leadership and Industry Authority
According to the recent B2B thought leadership report by New York Times, over 56% of marketers plan to create more thought leadership content and the reasons are obvious. Showing expertise and highlighting your perspective on a specific problem related to your industry builds recognition and credibility.
By creating topic-focused B2B webinars on relevant industry topics and solutions, you position your company as an authority and thought leader in your domain.
The webinar can be one to three hours long and feature multiple industry experts delving on a particular topic. It can even be in the form of a panel discussion that explores various opinions of a few subject matter experts on a specific issue.
For example, companies like Hilton and BizBash are utilizing Eventcombo’s virtual events platform, Fireworks™, to host their own sessions. The webinar ‘Incentives Trips Unveiled’, is due this September. It further highlights the effectiveness of the strategy for sparking engagement and building authority.
3. Offer Engaging Product Demonstrations
Webinars are an excellent medium for showcasing how your product works in real time. As a result, they help people make the purchase or interact with your offering further.
Unlike traditional presentations that are often monologue, interactive product demo webinars foster interaction through questions, polls, and discussions, which happen in real-time. This rich two-way communication with a worldwide audience allows you to create memorable experiences and provide value to your prospects. You can use a demo-type B2B webinars to introduce your product or its new features and updates. These can be recorded and repurposed to be used on your website or social media, wherever you deem fit.
To make your demo even more exciting and your product convincing, ensure to feature success stories of the past clients. It will provide a real-world context and make your service more credible.
So, if you are a B2B software company and have recently launched a new solution, an interactive product demo will help your audience understand the solution better. Through a stepwise walkthrough of the product, people can explore and learn about the various features and decide whether they will help them in any way.
4. Drive Customer Retention with Training and Onboarding
The increasing complexity of software produced today demands a thorough yet stress-free onboarding process. B2B webinars perfectly supplement other types of onboarding material like articles, short how-to videos, and email tutorials.
Customer success training through webinars is becoming increasingly common to reduce churn and enhance the retention rate for their products by B2Bs. They are a great substitute for traditional forms of customer training, like providing a 300-page manual and holding a bland week-long, on-site workshop for the new users. Additionally, when such B2B webinars are recorded, they become a great resource for future use.
With B2B webinars, you can not only scale your customer onboarding process but also train existing customers. For instance, create a series of training videos and record them using a virtual events platform. The sessions can be about using your product, like a project management or sales tool which end in a certification. This will prompt more of your existing (and even new) customers to explore your product. The AWS Developers workshop showing the use of AWS Security Hub is a great example.
5. Create Networking and Collaboration Opportunities
Webinars provide a powerful platform for networking with partners and influencers by offering direct interaction and engagement in a shared virtual space. Through live Q&A sessions, discussions, and real-time chats, attendees can connect, exchange insights, and build relationships.
B2B webinars also allow influencers and potential partners to showcase expertise, collaborate on topics of mutual interest, and foster trust. Thus, they help expand professional networks in a focused environment. Power partnerships, or strategic collaborations between businesses and influencers, are gaining more traction today.
Influencers are known for being authentic and having an engaged set of audiences. When B2Bs partner with influencers, it creates many engagement opportunities. Quite similarly, collaborating with partner businesses expands your network and reach to a wider set of your target audiences.
Think of a B2B marketing firm who want to build a leadership position in the industry. If this firm partners with complementary services and co-hosts thought leadership webinars, it will lead to a shift in perception about the firm. The change in the perception, from a service provider to a go-to thought leader and innovator in the field will also aid in enhancing brand recognition.
6. Accelerate the Sales Funnel
In B2B, one of the major reasons why opportunities fail to close when predicted is the inability to know where the prospect is in their buying journey. The buying journey itself is not linear because, at any point, the ideal customer can choose to abandon the process altogether.
However, if a part of your target audience shows the indicators of choosing your solution, you can push them further down the buying journey using strategies like a live case study.
In this webinar format, you bring some notable customers to discuss their experience with your offering. The experience of the customer should touch on topics that are very close to your audience. It will cement trust in your product's capabilities in your target prospects, easing their decision-making process.
Beside targeting highly qualified prospects, B2B webinars can be tailored to other stages of the buyer's journey (TOFU & MOFU) as well. After each session, you can send personalized emails or offers and increase the chances of your potential clients progressing in their buying journeys.
Conclusion
B2B webinars serve as a powerful tool for B2B marketing that cut across several aspects, from thought leadership to customer training, retention, and high-quality lead generation. There are a variety of webinar formats to use based on your needs and goals. The key is coming up with valuable content that initiates and maintains a dialogue — a discussion related to the problems or aspirations of the audience. If you're planning a webinar soon, feel free to check out Eventcombo's virtual events platform, Fireworks™, to create immersive experiences, no matter the format of your event. Book a demo here.
