During one of my recent webinars where I discussed the actions B2B organizations need to take, before, during and after the webinar, I performed  a quick poll and and asked the audience what is their biggest challenge when it comes to producing and delivering a webinar:

a) Attracting the right audience and more of them
b)Engaging them during the webinar
c) Converting them from prospects into customers

40% of the votes said… Attracting the Right Audience, was hands down their #1 challenge.

This was not at all surprising, as today, it’s far more difficult that even 6 months to a year ago, to get the right eyeballs to register for your webinar.  Let’s face it, with all of the email noise from webinar invitations and social media updates, the novelty of attending a webinar no longer exists.

There are many reasons why businesses fail to attract the right audience and but…

Here Are the Three Biggest Reasons Why Many B2B Organizations Hosting Webinars Fail to Reach or Exceed Their Registration Goals

Reason #1: B2B Organizations are failing to target and refine their audience demographics to invite only those whose interests match the value proposition of their message.

For example, we recently completed a webinar for a technology company that’s listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. I never had such a difficult time attracting people to a webinar – and I’ve hosted, produced and moderated hundreds of webinars.

The company’s marketing team had us focusing on e-commerce professionals.  After the webinar, I had a feeling that we had to adjust the focus of our targeted audience and zero in on who exactly will resonate with the message of the webinar.

Before, we started planning for the second webinar in the series, I spoke to the head sales manager (so we can get the right direction this time.) He confirmed my belief by specifically requesting that we don’t invite anyone with ecommerce in their name or any technology people.

The sales manager is interested in high-tech hardware and software companies that he calls “born in the cloud” like Google or DropBox or companies that consider themselves cloud companies already with revenues between $50 million and $2 billion. And, he wants sales and marketing managers and directors who are pressure by their CEO to create a channel to go after the SMB market.

Now, we have a demographic who will resonate with our client’s value proposition. And, we’ll be able to market the webinars more effectively through a targeted email lead generation and a targeted LinkedIn lead generation campaign.

Reason #2 – They’re not making their webinar information a “must have”.

As I belong to or associate myself with a number of organizations like the Content Marketing Institute – my email inbox gets full with webinar invitations. I spend my days managing and marketing my clients’ demand generation webinars, talking to potential clients and creating strategic partnerships to provide my clients with even more value.

So I do NOT pay attention to the webinars that have information that is either “nice to have” or is a “nice reminder about the information I already know.” Most companies do not  spend time up front strategically selecting a topic that their audience is hungry to learn about. They keep trying to provide the same old, tired topics.

Reason #3: Most B2B webinars are not case study driven – and neither are their invitations.

By changing the invitation’s headline and email copy for another technology client to become case study driven – we were able to get more people signing up for the free webinar than the 3 previous invitations combined.

In the invitation headline, we mentioned “Case Study” and included the result our client’s customer achieved. In the email body we described the challenge the customer was experiencing (and what it was costing the customer so potential webinar attendees will see the pain and want to join.)  And, we described in more detail the results the customer achieved. We then added the call-to-action to register for the webinar to see the step-by-step process that will solve the attendees problems.

Your Next Steps…
There are other tips and positive outcomes that I’m excited and plan to share on a webinar series I’m doing with the Content Marketing Institute and Citrix GoToWebinar. I’ll be using real world examples and case studies. For example, I’ll show you how…

  • The Friedman Group targeted and attracted an audience of decision makers including a Big Box store that became a $1M deal.
  • How a major brand introduced a new category to educate the market of C and executive level prospects of which 15%-20% immediately engaged with sales and the balance were put into a longer term nurturing campaign.
  • How Knovel, a provider of web based analytics firm attracted the right audience before the webinar and after the webinar with 80% of the audience becoming fresh, hot new sales leads.

Register for my webinar now and to obtain a free copy of my award winning eBook “WebinarReady – A Step-by-Step Guide to Hosting Successful Webinars”.

To register go to: http://tinyurl.com/webattractwebinar