Marketers have made great use of webinars and digital experiences over the past two years. As a result, we’ve learned many lessons about how to improve webinar marketing strategies and how to drive better engagement with audiences.
To be successful, we need to learn from the past and make changes for the future. Let’s take a quick look at the webinar marketing lessons learned in 2021 and understand how we can apply those lessons in 2022.
Audiences expect more
Audiences are no longer satisfied with talking heads and slide deck webinars that are passive and lack interaction. If they’re going to spend valuable time on your event, they expect it to be an enjoyable experience.
Audiences want to be entertained and engaged. They want to be transported away from their desk and out of their office and into your immersive experience.
As webinar marketers, we need to provide these types of experiences if we want audiences to attend. Instead of thinking “how am I going to plan this event,” shift your perspective and ask yourself “what does my audience want from this event.” And then do that. Give your audience what they want, and they will attend.
Time and experience have shown us they want more. More of everything: more engagement, more interaction, more entertainment, and more content to click on.
Marketers Need To Do More
The standard “one size fits all” plan from a few years ago is no longer sufficient. We cannot continue to rely on the same old program and methods to reach audiences and connect with new prospects. Audiences have different needs and are at different phases of the buying journey, so a single webinar or event isn’t going to work for all of them.
To be successful, marketers need to build all sorts of webinars and events with different styles and objectives to reach their different audiences. Each audience is unique, and your events need to be unique to fit them.
Sales teams need more from marketers
Sales teams need more than a list of names from a recent webinar. In fact, marketers must provide more information to help the sales organization craft better relationships with prospects.
Webinar marketing programs can produce thousands of data points that show an attendee’s level of interest and engagement. Use that to your advantage and enhance your sales team’s virtual selling efforts and help them target the right prospects.
Instead of cold calling, provide an SDR with data about the attendee can continue the conversation by following up with questions that didn’t get answered on-air. The best part? You can automate handoff to your sales team through powerful webinar integrations. It gives them a legitimate reason for reaching out and allows them to continue the conversation instead of leading in with a hard pitch.
Want to do even better than that? Include sales teams in the event!
The event host is busy giving their presentation, pushing out polls and connecting with your attendees. They can’t answer every question that comes in during the event, so have SDRs available in the background to answer questions, set up meetings or pop into a breakout room to have a direct conversation with a prospect or attendee.
Use These Trends In 2022
All of these actions equate to more engagement and a better audience experience which will drive more pipeline. To learn more about how you can drive engagement, check out our on-demand webinar here.
