secrets of b2b marketing webinars

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This document will give you the key concepts and guidelines presented by Ken Molay in his web seminar on how to create more effective Business-to-Business marketing webinars.

June 2016

Ken Molay, Webinar Success

Secrets of B2B Marketing Webinars

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When presenting online, I like to start by asking attendees to type their first name into the web conferencing console. It gets people used to participating and lets me refer to some individuals by name, which creates a sense of closeness and trust.

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I picked three key “secrets” to highlight. We will see how to apply these concepts to many different areas of web seminar preparation, presentation, and follow-up.

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I love alliteration! It’s a quick and easy trick to capture people’s attention when looking at a series of items. We’ll cover five different areas where you have the opportunity to improve the effectiveness of your lead generation web seminars.

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The first problem we face in putting on lead generation webinars is getting people to pay attention to you and the existence of your topic session. I highlighted the old quote about beauty in the eye of the beholder because it emphasizes the importance of my first secret: Think Like Your Audience. Beauty in this case is the attractiveness of your message. You have to make it appealing to your prospective audience, not to your own employees or marketing staff.

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Facts are not enough to hold an audience’s attention. You need to give them a reason to care. The biggest selling Lego products these days are not the random collections of blocks we grew up with as kids. Now they offer a kit that builds a complete recognizable object. It results in more interest from their audience, even though the components are the same as they ever were.In a lead generation webinar, your primary goal is usually to find and gather new prospective customers and start them thinking about the desirability of your product or service. Unfortunately, that is not the goal or interest of your audience. Very few people attend a web seminar with the goal of being turned into a sales prospect. So you need to “trick” them into attending by offering them something they want, need, and value. Identify your target audience and "step into their shoes." What are their interests and goals? The interplay between what you want to accomplish and what your audience wants to get out of the event determine your content. Write down your goals and the audience interests, along with a brief description of what you will offer. Keep this handy for reference during production of marketing materials and presentation content.

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From your earliest planning, throw away titles and phrasing that talk about your information content, and replace it with the appeal points for your target audience. The fact that your product has new features isn’t appealing to your audience. It’s how those features help them that counts.

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You may need to change your message for different targets. In our software example, developers want to know how the new release makes their development process faster and easier. But executives want to know why using the new release is beneficial for company profitability. Find these value points for your various targets.

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Once you have a clear idea of the value proposition for your audience (or different audience segments), it is time to get the word out through your chosen promotional channels.

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Many advertising venues give you extremely limited space to get your message across. Boil down your value proposition to its single best appeal to your audience’s self-interest and state it clearly and succinctly. Your landing page does the rest of the work.

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A well-known marketing trick is to emphasize exclusivity in your promotional materials. Let your audience know that they are part of a select group to receive the invitation. Or that space at the event is limited. Or that there is a limited time to register. Or that the content is exclusive. This web seminar uses exclusivity in the title, letting you know that by attending, you will have access to secrets that non-attendees don’t know about.

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Once you have captured your targets’ attention, you need to get them to make the commitment to attend your session.

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Be careful not to make registrants jump through too many hoops to register. Each additional field acts as another barrier to entry. Consider carefully each and every input field you ask for. This information will be used for initial contact after the webinar. Will you be calling them, or simply sending out emails? Are you going to separate responses by territory at this point?

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If you simply load up a bunch of detailed registration fields and dump them on your sales force, the sales people will get angry at you for wasting their time.This stage of lead generation is still part of getting people to pay attention to you, not trying to advance the sales process.

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If you ask a lot of sales qualification questions on your registration form, you turn off people who see your event as simply a way to target them for annoying sales calls. People don’t think of themselves as leads, so you don’t want to engage with them that way either. “So, are ya ready to buy yet?” is not the way to introduce yourself.

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Marketers often try to rush things and put all their lead generation steps in the registration form. Stop trying to seal the deal before you’ve said hello! Why not get to know your prospects, give them a little information, establish some trust? Then you can work on developing the relationship. I would not have had much luck back in my dating days if I had used the typical webinar registration approach:“Hello, ladies. You have the opportunity to receive a free drink. No obligations. But only if you first provide me with your full contact information, your requirements, plans, and timeframe for making a decision. By the way, after the drink, one of my colleagues will be calling you to see if you would like to move forward with a date.”

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Don’t forget to give your registrants a confirmation message after they sign up. This starts your “responsive dialog” with them and acts as the first outbound response to their actions. Let them know that you’ll be sending them a reminder message later. This sets the stage for permission-based communications going forward.

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Registration is only a part of the battle. On typical lead generation webinars offered for free to the general public, you will get about 1/3 of the registrants to show up for the event.You need to work on tactics to get registrants to honor their commitment and actually attend the webinar.

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You will improve attendance if your event confirmation and login instructions include a calendar appointment. This gets it on the registrants’ schedules and ensures that the local time conversion is correct on their calendars. When people sign up well in advance of a webinar, they forget about it unless it gets added to the calendar.

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A great way to boost attendance is to appeal to self-interest once again. Ask your registrants to tell you what content they want to see. They will show up to see if you answer their question. Now they have a personal stake in the material. This is part of our third secret, encouraging action.Although you can put this question gathering on your registration form, a separate email message again establishes the idea that you will be engaging with them in a relevant manner through emails going forward. You want them to see your communications as valuable, rather than annoyances.

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I like sending a reminder 24 hours before the event and from 1-3 hours before show time. Try to reinforce the key value proposition for your audience in a single sentence. Keep hitting the reason they should attend… From their viewpoint, not yours. Many registrants will have forgotten the persuasive arguments that made them sign up in the first place. It is your job to remind them of why the session is valuable for them.

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You have overcome steep odds by getting your prospects to register and then to show up. Now is your chance to prove to them that they made the right choice and that your company, product, or service is worth pursuing.

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The webinar coordinator/marketers and the webinar speakers need to be very clear on what has been promised to the audience during the promotion of the event. The people developing the content should have the advertising copy in front of them for reference. When a first draft of the slides is finished, the coordinator needs to check it to see if it fulfills the promises made in the promotional copy. If it doesn’t, your audience will be dissatisfied, no matter how good the information is. They made a decision to attend based on the promotional promises. If they get something else, they feel cheated.

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Do you know the cliché that says “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”? You want to establish yourself as a trusted provider that gives value. And you need to do that within the first minute. Get into your subject as quickly as possible. Your audience knows why they are there. Give them something of value up front to grab them and make them pay attention. Think like a Bond movie... You get an action scene BEFORE the opening credits, not after.

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Remember… Relevance is key. Be ruthless about removing filler materials that are not relevant from your audience’s perspective. Maybe they are interested in the fact that you have a lot of sales offices, but probably only as a checklist item after they are satisfied with everything else at the end of their qualification and review process. Don’t lead off with basic company history and facts in a marketing or sales presentation… Get to the audience’s perceived value points as fast as you can.

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In the online session, I constantly speak to the audience on an individual basis. Instead of saying “Can anybody tell me what will come next?” I ask “Can you tell me what comes next?” The use of “you” translates to a personal engagement. It doesn’t matter if I know there are 1000 people in the audience. Each person relates to me as if I am talking directly to them. It puts the responsibility on them as individuals to take action and respond.

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Video is definitely a double-edged sword.

When the average person thinks of presenter video s/he thinks of a presenter on TV… perhaps a late night talk show host or a TV news anchor. Those people are the best of the best, trained and experienced over many years. They have professional studios, lighting, audio engineers and hardware, camera operators, hair and makeup professionals, and directors changing angles, cameras, and insert graphics every few seconds to keep viewers engaged. You can't possibly compete with those subconscious expectations. And it turns out that a fixed-position "talking head" rapidly gets boring and loses additional value for viewers. Being on video adds more stress and things to think about for a presenter. You can't swivel in your chair, grimace at a difficult question, or scratch an itch on your nose. You are distracted by the way you look in your preview window.

I recommend using live video sparsely… perhaps at the beginning and/or end of your formal presentation… Maybe just during Q&A. This keeps the exposure short and the perceived engagement factor higher.

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Video clips place the audience in "TV" mode. They lean back and instantly become more passive. The two-way nature of your web collaboration is lost.

To fight this problem, you need to set up your clip's relevance and tell the audience what they should be looking for and paying attention to. Let them know that there is a reason for showing the video and you will be engaging them when it ends with some kind of interaction.

The second rule of thumb is to keep video clips short. I prefer a maximum of 2 minutes if possible. If your audience feels that the majority of your content could have been received at their own convenience later, they can feel resentful of having made a special effort to come to what was advertised as a live interactive session. If you are forced to show a longer clip, try to incorporate typed chat that everyone can participate in while watching. It keeps them active during an otherwise passive experience.

When your clip ends, circle back to what you promised in the setup… Engage the audience and try to involve them in some active participation.

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Back in 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the new iPhone 4 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Obviously they had checked the demo a hundred times and run through every consideration. And when he did it in front of the room, it completely failed. They hadn’t counted on all the techies in the audience overloading the number of Wi-Fi access points.

Adding a live demonstration to your marketing webinar requires additional backups and failsafes. Have a second computer keyed up and ready to run the demo if necessary. Have slides with screen shots ready to use as a backup if the live demo fails. And add serious, dedicated practice time until you know every mouse-click and keyboard stroke you will use in your demo. A marketing webinar is not the time to go "off book" and show off things on the fly.

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Your final engagement point is getting the audience to take the action that you want. This is the key that satisfies your own selfish goals for holding the event. Action may be nothing more than accepting a follow-up sales communication. It may be getting them to visit your website or download a white paper. Or it could be anything up to placing an order.

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Beware of leaving your audience with too many options for the next step after leaving the web session. Offering too many choices results in “option paralysis.” They can’t decide which action is the most important, so they give up and do none of them!



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You have a very short window of opportunity after your webcast to engage your audience. If people get something of value from you, they briefly lower their defenses and are willing to talk to you or follow up in some other way. But that feeling goes away quickly, and within a week or two, they mostly forget about your event entirely.

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Don't wait till after the event to create handouts or extra materials. Have them ready for distribution or download immediately after the event.

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Tell your sales team about your lead generation webinar before it happens. Give them a reminder the morning of the event. Let them know you will be farming out hot leads immediately afterwards for quick follow up (these are people who specifically ask for a contact or want an answer to a question they asked during the webinar). Ask your salespeople to block out an hour on their calendar following the event to be used for immediate response to these individuals. The power of a rapid response while they remember asking for it is immense.

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As you have seen, a lead generation webinar involves many different activities and phases, each of which requires proper strategies and tactics to be effective. From initial awareness of your event and registration, through the active presentation, to post-event follow up, your actions determine how your audience views you and your material.

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The three simple-sounding secrets should stimulate thought at each phase of your webinar production and delivery. If you let them influence everything you do, your lead generation activities will result in more receptive prospects with a better perception of your company.

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Please feel free to email me with your questions or comments. You may also enjoy looking through my blog for additional tips and tricks, along with news and information about webinar products and applications.

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secrets of b2b marketing webinars

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