Compared to direct advertising of your products and services, educational content works better when generating qualified leads. And that's what you'll achieve by learning how to create an effective webinar sales funnel.
Whether this is your first time or you have experienced the effectiveness of a webinar funnel used by another business or consultant, this guide will help you get on the right track. You may already have all that is required to host a successful webinar.
Inside one of his blog posts about the value of educational content, Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, once wrote something like this:
'For years I couldn't figure out how to get attention for my business products. Since no one knew the products existed, I couldn't make sales.'
You may have been in such a position as Nathan. Even if you are getting sales already, leveraging webinars as a proven type of quality lead-generation content could help you achieve revenue growth. As a testament to this, over 54% of respondents in a study reported by VentureHabour identified live events as the best B2B lead generation content in terms of volume of leads and overall ROI.
What is a webinar funnel?
A webinar sales funnel is a structured marketing process that leverages webinars as a central tool to attract, engage, and convert potential customers into paying customers. It typically consists of several stages, including attracting leads through promotional efforts, getting them to register for a webinar, delivering valuable content and insights during the webinar, and following up with attendees to nurture their interest.
The ultimate goal is usually to guide them toward making a purchase or taking a desired action. Such action may include signing up for a service or subscribing to a product. This funnel approach allows businesses to educate their audience, build trust, and strategically move prospects through the sales journey to increase conversions and revenue.
HubSpot reported a whopping 55% conversion rate for their webinars. How did they do it? They meticulously crafted webinar funnels that not only educated but also nurtured their audience towards conversion.
Unlike other digital marketing strategies, a webinar funnel leverages the influential power of video content and interactive audience engagement with some webinar platform features.
How to create webinars sales funnel that converts
When learning how to create a webinar funnel, the steps involved are usually simple. However, your success depends on detail-oriented execution and consistency. Besides, you'll need an affordable webinar platform that suits your current budget to make it happen. Let's explore the steps involved in creating a sales funnel driven by high-value webinars.
1: Define your target audience
Getting sales from your webinar funnel requires a tight alignment between your content and your products or services. Unfortunately, a little mismatch in this regard could mean that you'll succeed at delivering value to an audience, but you won't get any sales from the entire process.
Perhaps it all starts with a clear definition of your target audience. The big question is this – who do you want to attract, and what would you sell to them?
Bearing that one size never fits all in any marketing process, it is also important to understand your target customer segments before creating sales funnels. Assuming your products and services are meant for different segments, it might be more effective to go after one segment at a time instead of creating content for anyone and everyone.
Here are a few other pointers on defining your webinar audience to make it more practical.
- Industry
- Niche
- Job title
- Business model
- Company size
- Operating location
- Identifiable pain point
2: Choose a topic and set your goals
When you clarify your target audience, choosing the topic aligned with their current interests, pain points, or business goals becomes easier. Hence, your topic's attractiveness determines your live webinars' success. For example, the chosen topic will directly impact the number of webinar registrations you'll get ahead of the event.
Instead of relying on guesswork, here are some practical steps to choose the webinar topics that will get you the best results.
Industry Trends: Look at the current trends in your industry to identify the topics that get huge audience attention. You can start by exploring research reports from leading brands and authorities in your niche. For this task, you can also use tools like Google Trends and Exploding Topics.
Existing Customer Surveys: Survey your existing customers to identify the topics that interest most of them. Dig deeper into the customer demographics and ask questions about the pain points, challenges, or business that attracted them to your company in the first place. Use webinar survey tools on platforms like CloudPresenter to identify topics for future webinars.
High Traffic Pages: Look at the topics on the specific pages that get the highest visitors on your website. With tools like Google Analytics or Search Console, you get insights that will help you choose attractive webinar topics.
Keywords Research: Detailed keyword research around your audience's niche, business model, operating processes, or desired tools could be another source of attractive topics. Based on my previous experiences, the keywords that get high search volume often prove attractive.
After choosing the topic, the next task is to set your webinar goal of growing brand awareness, lead generation, sales conversion rate, or revenue.
3: Select webinar format and create your content
Based on the fact that there are different webinar formats to use, you have to give careful thought to your choice in this regard. Hence, what is suitable for a specified audience or topic might need to be revised for another. On the other hand, your chosen format will determine the type of content you'll create for your target audience.
But in a context where getting sales is the ultimate goal of creating a perfect webinar funnel, you should endeavor to choose a topic and format that promises useful educational content. In most cases, that's the most valuable thing that often attracts an audience.
When your target audience asks what is in it for me, the answer shouldn't be completely subject-based on the chosen format or topic.
4: Sign up with the right webinar platform
Your webinar marketing strategy can only work in a vacuum with a platform. In fact, your webinar funnels are just as powerful as the platform you use. And that's the essence of choosing a webinar platform with great features to support your intended use cases and sales priorities. For example, if you want a platform that supports 2 – 5,000 attendees, multiple hosts, and unlimited webinar recording replay without costing too much money, you can sign up for CloudPresenter’s free trial. Some other features include the following –
- Number of webinar attendees
- Live session duration allowed
- Breakout rooms
- Interactive engagement tools
- Branding and customization
- Real-time live-streaming
- On-demand live chat support
- Virtual backgrounds
- Team wide accounts
- Integration with your existing tools
5: Create a webinar landing page
The next task in creating webinar sales funnels is a landing page for registering attendees and potential customers. Besides the chosen topic, the clarity and attractiveness of your webinar landing page will affect other things, like the number of qualified leads you generate from your target audience. You should consider choosing one of the best webinar platforms with features for creating custom fields and running A/B tests to improve conversion rate.
Before creating landing pages, here are some of the core variables you use to run an A/B test and capture email leads.
- Landing page headline or event topic
- Content description of what you'll get from attending
- Presenters profile photos and job titles
- Date, time, and time zone information
- Registration form fields for generating leads
- Clear call to action
6: Promote your webinar
To empower your sales team to convert more leads into customers, you must invest in a proactive and effective webinar promotion strategy. With a proven and consistent promotion strategy, your sales funnels will perform to their fullest potential.
Remember, the most important thing that should be clear is why your target audience needs to attend the event. In other words, more than merely putting the registration page links in front of the potential buyers or attendees is required. Consider why the webinar will benefit your audience and make them the central focus of your promotion copies and landing page.
Some of the most effective webinar promotion strategies include Facebook Ads and Google paid Ads, search engine optimization, email marketing, content marketing, web traffic generating guest blog posts, organic posting platforms, and audience retargeting Ads.
7: Create and send email reminders
Ahead of the fixed event date, you must send reminder emails to registered people. That's why it is important to set a future date that will give you enough time to implement your promotion strategies.
But that's not all. Automated email reminders will help make your webinar sales funnel more effective. Besides, nothing stops you from adding pointers to your products and services ahead of the future live webinars. As part of the overall webinar planning process, you should have the emails ready to help you increase your webinar attendance rate.
8: Host the webinar
The level of your pre-webinar preparation will determine the value your target market or audience will get out of it. Before your webinar starts, set out time to organize your outline, slides, and the flow of the presentation. Most importantly, commit some time to test the webinar platform to avoid any surprising technical issues that may arise during the presentation.
Use polls, Q&A, and live chat on the chosen platform to keep the target audience engaged. For online learning-related businesses or coaches hosting 2 – 5,000 attendees, you can leverage Cloudpresenter's breakout rooms feature to increase engagement levels during your live webinar presentation.
If you are hosting an automated webinar, keeping an eye on the engagement activities in your webinar funnel is important.
9: Create and display call to action
The call to action is about what you want your webinar attendees to do during or after the event. As I have noted earlier, it is enough to deliver great value and expect your participants to take the next step independently. Leaving that gap is as good as leaving money on the table.
Depending on the chosen platform and sales conversion tracking, the call to action is one proven way to measure your webinar success. Below are some examples of webinar CTAs you can use.
- Book product demo
- Sign up for a free trial
- Request for an audit
- Purchase a product
- Opt-In for a discount
- Join a newsletter
10: Segment your audience and send follow-up emails
Even when the prospects coming into your webinar funnels belong to the same customer demographic, it is still possible to find some interesting differences among them. Besides, everyone who attended your webinar can hardly make a purchase or act on your CTA during the live webinar. That's the essence of segmenting your audience and sending emails to nurture leads after the event.
However, you must always do the two most important things in this context. The first is to create your emails ready to nurture new leads through the webinar. Secondly, using a webinar survey to segment your audience will enable you to send more effective emails.
11: Analyze results for improvement
When your ultimate goal of hosting a great webinar is to gain leads and make more sales, how you measure success in this regard becomes very important. Regardless of the platform you choose, your webinar analytics dashboard should give you access to metrics like registration, attendance, engagement, and conversion rates. And that will provide you with the basis for analyzing results.
Besides the ones mentioned above, registrant source tracking and webinar-generated sales are other interesting metrics to measure your webinar success.
If your chosen webinar software doesn't provide such, you may need custom integration through an API or webhooks to get better insights. Fortunately, the insights you get in this context could help you improve the effectiveness of your webinar sales funnel and profitability.
Conclusion
Before you leave this page, one interesting thing worth reiterating is that hosting live and automated webinars holds great potential for your type of business. As I noted in the earlier section of this webinar funnel guide, you already have everything required to get started.
What is required is for you to put that growth potential to work. And now you have a guide.
Remember, you and your team are just as powerful as the tools you use. So, endeavor to choose the best webinar software that suits your current business and marketing goals without requiring a big financial commitment.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to create an automated webinar funnel?
Utilize webinar software with automation features, set up registration pages, and integrate email sequences for pre and post-webinar communication. Incorporate landing pages, automated reminders, and follow-up sequences to streamline the attendee journey and maximize engagement.
What is the webinar funnel process?
The webinar funnel involves creating awareness through promotion, driving interest and registrations, hosting the live event, and finally nurturing post-webinar engagement through follow-up emails, surveys, and additional content. The goal is to guide participants seamlessly from awareness to post-event engagement.
What's the difference between a webinar funnel and a landing page?
The webinar funnel involves creating awareness through promotion, driving interest and registrations, hosting the live event, and finally nurturing post-webinar engagement through follow-up emails, surveys, and additional content. The goal is to guide participants seamlessly from awareness to post-event engagement.
How to attract leads for the webinar funnel?
Implement strategic content marketing, utilize social media campaigns, and leverage targeted advertising to drive traffic to your webinar registration page. Offer valuable insights in promotional materials to attract and convert potential leads into attendees.
How to measure the success of the webinar funnel?
Track key metrics such as registration rates, attendance rates, engagement during the live event, and post-webinar conversion rates. Utilize analytics tools to assess the effectiveness of each stage in the funnel, enabling continuous improvement for future webinars.
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