Driving Webinar Registration Remains A Challenge For Marketers

Webinars remain one of the most valuable content formats for engaging with leads throughout the buying cycle. However, maximizing registration and attendance are among the biggest challenges for B2B marketers when it comes to webinar success. The content can spark interest, but you have to get them to tune in.

“Webinars are being used now as a top-tier tool across the entire buying cycle,” said Mark Bornstein, Senior Director of Content Marketing for ON24, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “Webinars used to be just for lead generation, but now marketing organizations are using them in every aspect of the pipeline. It’s important you are talking to the right audience at the right part of the buying cycle.”

Once you have determined the target audience, it’s time to begin promoting. Whether through email campaigns, social media messaging, or various other methods of reaching your audience, observers stress that you must build in ample time to promote your webinar.

According to a March 2013 ReadyTalk/Demand Gen Report Survey, email is still the go-to for webinar event promotion, with readers ranking it 4.5 on a scale of 1 to 5. Social media came in a close second, scoring a 2.8 on the scale. However, an email campaign can be very time consuming especially since best practices suggest three weeks of promotion maximizes attendance prior to the webinar. Today, many webinar platforms have integrated marketing automation tools to ease the burden of tracking registrants.

“You must get the topic and speaker information out via the usual social channels, obviously promote the event on your web site, and possibly through some third-party channels as well depending on budgets,” said Erika Goldwater, Director of Marketing at ANNUITAS. “Don’t overlook your partner network, customer network and advocates to help spread the word about your webinar. People like to share good content so this objective should be part of your overall event promotion metrics.”

Content Shapes Webinar Promotion Strategy

You would not be planning a webinar event if you didn’t have something worth presenting. According to Goldwater, no matter how well you plan the promotional aspect before the live event, the content has to be relevant to your target audience to drive attendance.

“If someone really wants to hear your message, if they need your advice/solution to help them solve their business challenge, they will register for your event,” Goldwater said. “Good content gets heard and shared.”

On average, 40% to 50% of registrants actually attend the live webinar event. So don’t be discouraged when the registrant-to-attendee ratio doesn’t add up. In addition, a complicated registration page tends to scare away potential attendees. Keeping the landing page as simple as possible will maximize the overall results in registrants.

Goldwater explained: “Twenty attendees that are interested in your topic and fit your buyer profile are better results than 100 attendees that are not your target audience.”

After The Show

While you want to drive attendance to the live event, don’t overlook post-event promotion. At Brainshark, a provider of a cloud-based platform that helps companies improve sales productivity, the goal is to make sure that the webinar is available on-demand as soon as possible after the event so that the content continues to drive leads.

“Everyone consumes information in their own way,” said Andy Zimmerman, CMO of Brainshark, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “There’s going to be a lot of people that you invite that will not attend for whatever reason, but you can send them replays of the webinar for viewing at their convenience. You want to maximize the reach of your content.”

According to a white paper published by Brainshark, Re-examining Your Webinar Strategy, 49% of attendees review content that they have seen after a live webinar. Also, 34% of those attendees end up forwarding any available on-demand content from the webinar to their colleagues. The usage of webinar content after the initial live webinar can help generate a greater ROI by extending the reach and lifecycle of the content, getting it in front of attendees and non-attendees alike.

“All the people who signed up for the event but didn’t attend,” continued Zimmerman, “or those who didn’t bother to sign up at all, have the ability to obtain an edited down version of the webinar when they want it.”

Brainshark launched a new on-demand feature last August, named VideoSync, which incorporates video into standard slide presentations. The ability to insert video clips into a regular slide show is just one of the many ways on-demand content can be more attracting towards the target audience than the live event.

Tools Of The Trade

There are a number of interactive tools, such as polls, surveys, Q&A sessions and live white boarding, designed to maintain the attention of the audience and minimize attendee drop-off.

ON24 has helped many of its partners learn different techniques in order to get the most out of a live event. The company’s technology behind a recent Marketo online event that helped explain how improved analytic tools are helping B2B marketers get a better handle on how buyers are engaging with their content.

There are tools like the Webinar Benchmark Index, a catalog offered by ON24 that allows customers to compare their webcasts to a collection of peer webcasts and to use that data to improve the performance of their own webcast programs, which help webinar users understand their strengths and weaknesses while also finding solutions to their problems.

“I think it’s just a maturity of some of the markets here,” said Mark Szelenyi, VP of Webcasting Product Management at ON24. “If you go back a few years, marketing automation was just email marketing, those tools have matured into lead nurturing platforms and places where all of the intelligence about your leads and campaigns are being aggregated. More customers are putting in platforms like that, so other marketing tools have to fit together with them.”

Szelenyi noted that tools to allow interaction with the audience throughout the webcast will give the audience a feeling of control, which in turn leads to more useful data for the hosts. With such programs such as ON24’s Enterprise Mobile Webcasting Initiative, a program designed to support the enhanced, real-time delivery of mobile-ready content for its customers, buyers can engage and interact whenever and wherever they prefer.

“The interaction between the attendees and presenter are typically around Q&As and polls, which allow us to store individual response data,” added Szelenyi. “The ability to include a follow-up tool that allows attendees to request a follow up meeting with the host gives a better conversion when the perception of booking time with the webhosts to answer their specific questions is in use. The attendees are more responsive, and user controlled experience makes the information well received.”

When it comes to driving registrants and attendance for your webinars, you need have everything you control in sync — strong content, the right promotion messages and platforms to reach your target audience, and the tools to keep prospects engaged.

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