Distinct types of marketing webinars can be used to match the broad objectives of the company while capturing prospects at different stages of the product or service buying cycle and moving them along on the path to purchase.
1. Positioning or Awareness Webinars
These webinars are often used by new companies to announce their intial offering or by existing companies looking to launch a new technology or enter a new market. This type of marketing webinar can generate new leads or help qualify current leads by identifying a level of interest. They set the stage for later marketing to move their audience into the ‘serious evaluation’ stage.
2. Educational Webinars
This type of marketing webinar provides prospects with new information or helps them better understand a specific set of problems and/or solutions. For example, many firms educate purchase influencers about a problem or issue accompanied by a short introduction to their technology as a way of starting the sales conversation with target organizations.
3. Demonstration or Solution Webinars
These marketing webinars are designed to get the host company into serious consideration for more complex or higher cost sales. In addition, they can drive prospects to decisions to simplify the sales process. In a technology sale, this often means demonstrating a web interface or a software application or showing screenshots of the product.
4. Webinars Designed To Convert To Sales
These marketing events are characterized by a call to action at the end of the webinar. They can ask for the order, for example, or move the prospect to engage in a 30-day trial.
Converting Leads To Opportunities And Sales Through Marketing Webinars
Early in the buying process, webinars may require multiple marketing steps (including subsequent webinars or seminars) in order to reach your objective. That’s why it is important to define and prepare for the next step in your marketing process before the webinar.
If you have taken action during the webinar to prioritize your leads or segment your attendee list, you may have multiple follow-up programs. This includes your immediate webinar follow-up actions from a ‘thank you for attending’ email, a link to a trial of the software, a follow-up phone call, or a face-to-face visit.
Almost all marketing webinars are intended to move the prospective buyer or influencer through the buying process towards the sale – whether the sale is an actual purchase, a conversion to a supportive point of view, or some other positive action defined as a marketing objective.
Marketing webinars offer marketers professionals the opportunity to cost-effectively create and nurture leads towards a sale.
Depending on your marketing objectives for your webinar program, the benefits can go beyond marketing cost savings and shorter sales cycles to include better market positioning and improved perceptions of your company.
From Bob Hanson