Introduction
The changing marketing landscape has companies adapting to the new digital realities. It’s no secret that webinars are ruling every marketer’s radar. They are an easy, cost-effective, and reliable way for any business to generate quality leads, convert potential customers into paying clients, and bring onboard new users. In India too, the social media and tech upgrades have opened new doors to connect online and execute virtual events worldwide while being based here.
For example, you need not be present in the US to manage and execute a webinar there. You can do it while sitting in India. But launching a high-impact webinar for an audience in a different time zone is no mean feat. Let’s say you wish to conduct regular meetups and deliver full-house webinars for US audiences while being in Asia. Easier said than done, no doubt but with the advent of new technologies, marketing automation tools that allows you to send out webinar invitations, reminders, and follow-up communications, very much possible.
So, if you’re looking for a webinar idea to target US audiences while sitting in India, you have come to the right place! Global companies are increasingly embracing India as the marketing hub. A recent survey concluded that 80% of US and European companies preferred offshoring to India.
Major players like American Express, General Electronics, Microsoft, CISCO are already choosing India for handling their businesses and services for they are assured of benefitting from superior talent, quality results, better conversion rates, effective turnaround times, and low costs. All these factors have also created the ideal ecosystem for increased SaaS adoption in India with India presently accounting for 2.6 % of the Global SaaS pie. But with India’s potential to provide cutting-edge SaaS strategies and solutions, it could garner up to 8 % of the Global SaaS market.
Know about our webinar execution strategies, processes, tactics, and results!
Experience and Expertise Scores Big
When one has successfully managed and executed global marketing campaigns for over 140 countries including the US, Canada, EMEA, Asia Pacific, planned 12 meetups (one every month) and 24 webinars (one every fortnightly) in a year with an average attendance of 100 companies, 4 large scale events in a year targeting 400 companies very recently, you have been there and seen it all to know the rules of the game and play it well! My expertise in planning helped develop the sales funnel of over 1000 companies enabling my team to consistently close 6-8 orders per month with a ticket size of USD 25k thus clocking around $200k every month. For large-scale events, we could develop the lead funnel of up to 1000 companies. Furthermore, by executing an account-based marketing strategy for all the firms associated with the events and webinar, we could generate impressively for another 500 companies and large corporates empowering them to close up to $2mil., But what was more remarkable was that we had an eager set audience, ready to listen to us, constituting a dynamic sales funnel for the subsequent year. Boy! Our webinar calendar became so exciting for that year. And it may be stating the obvious, but make the first impressions count.
- Historic analysis of previous webinars executed if any
- Analyze the type of webinars and performance
- Set the benchmarks based on our experience and industry standard
- Discuss with marketing teams and with the management team to roll out the objectives and goals of the webinar
- Based on companies current situation, suggest them the best methodology to put up the webinar calendar
- Build a webinar calendar in such a way that the company could establish themselves as thought leaders, increase their reputation, brand presence, and establish a platform for product launches, solution discussions, success stories and goes on
- Ensure personalized target audience for each of the webinars
- Unveil the real value of the webinar for the target audience
- Build every webinar as an ROI tool for the company
- Tactical executions for pre, during and post-webinar
- Define webinar index for every webinar and compare the performance
Engage your Attendees with an Irresistible Webinar Idea
Being in the webinar game for a long and executing more than 1000 webinars, I have gained a deep understanding of what sells best. The key to yield impactful webinars lies in fusing creativity with intelligence, ably supported by careful, holistic planning.
So how do you grab attention in a crowded webinar space? Because substantial webinar registration is no guarantee for a full house on the D-day. Well, the trick lies in providing your subscribers with a fresh, sustainable experience through a unique webinar idea that keeps them captivated and absorbed. Let’s dive deep and find out how you can improve the value of your webinar:
- First and foremost, identify your target audience: software engineers, marketing managers, entrepreneurs. Or think which category they fall into: consumers, businesses, individuals, or organizations. You can further subdivide into big or small companies, national or global, profit or non-profit, urban or rural. Account-based targeting has always yielded the best results for me in B2B not just for webinar registrations but also to develop the sales funnel after that.
- Then carve a niche topic focussing on a specific pain point of your target audience rather than covering a topic broadly. You can rely on Google search or scan through conference agendas for a suitable topic.
- Develop your webinar idea around the challenges of your target audience and then provide them with meaningful, actionable solutions/useful hacks. Pre campaign surveys will help us to arrive at the right webinar topic
- Identify what may motivate someone to attend a webinar. My experience has taught me the driving motivating factors are learning about new ideas, knowledge, or skills to try or keeping abreast with market trends.
- Consider curating the webinar idea using the mind mapping technique which entails developing ideas by graphically representing them to create new ideas.
Know Your Audience ( KYC)
So, you have a stellar webinar idea and an attractive webinar invite. Is that enough to create a buzz? I would say, not really. After belting considerable global marketing experience in content, automation, SEO, social media, UX design, website, and landing page development, I have found that it’s absolutely vital to identify and understand your audience and let them know what they will derive out of it.
After getting behind the scenes and working with a leading SaaS company, I gained valuable insights that can help you build coordinated, unified, comprehensive strategies to plan, promote, present, and follow up a webinar that can shatter attendance records and generate leads. Let’s have a closer look at some of the crucial aspects:
- When planning a webinar globally, it’s imperative to be mindful of the time zones. Accordingly, pick a time slot that works best for the majority of your followers.
- Ensure that your webinar content is available later on to those who couldn’t be there for the live presentation.
- Alternatively, you can also consider scheduling multiple networking sessions for varying time zones. Simulative webinars have given us multiple ways of targeting the same webinar across geographies.
Get Creative with Webinar Invitation across all channels
Entice people to attend by designing a compelling webinar invitation, one that intrigues and appeals to your prospects and makes them reach RSVP pronto. Let’s break down the vital components of an impressive webinar invitation:
- Keep the subject line short, clear, and crisp.
- Consider phrasing your subject line as a question rather than a statement. Also, try imparting a sense of urgency. For example: How can you fast-track your number of quality leads in 24 hours? Also, put the real facts or value that customers can get up front. Being honest in communication will build trust with customers and build the healthy relationship from day1
- Get them excited about attending the webinar by highlighting the prospect’s pain point and then conveying the advantage of joining it. Simply communicating details isn’t enough.
- Adding pictures of the host/guests is always a good idea. No graphics and only a bunch of text can be dull.
- You will like to send a series of emails in the run-up to your webinar to build the required anticipation for it. But don’t overplay it. You certainly don’t want to spam the inbox of your client which can be a turn-off. It’s best to automate the webinar invitations over a period of time. Getting to know the execution of sequence and drip email campaigns is an art
- Every reminder email can add something new/some value to the invite.
- In the end, you may like to add a Call to Action (CTA) button, linked to the webinar landing page. Again, Call to Actions phrased in first-person pronouns are more likely to hook people than those framed in second-person pronouns. Save my spot may work better than Save your spot.
- To put it simply, place yourself in your customer’s shoes and think will this invite thrill me to attend the webinar? I hope I don’t get left out. The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a real and powerful thing and can propel your subscribers to act!
- Lastly, promotion is crucial for the success of any webinar. Exploit social media tools like set up a LinkedIn, Facebook event or organize an event countdown on Instagram. You can also list your webinar on popular sites like Eventbrite. Consider creating an event hashtag and share it with people to realize greater audience reach.
I have tried to explain in simple terms of executing the results !!!
Frequently Asked Questions
Anyone running webinars will tell you that their biggest challenge is to boost webinar attendance. There are several things that you can do:
- Have a topic that resonates with your subscriber’s interests.
- Offer effective reminders via text messages, emails.
- Take advantage of online platforms and create polls and quizzes to encourage participation.
- Involve people by taking their suggestions, requests and feedback.
- Increasingly promote live-tweeting of your webinar.
- Extend incentives, freebies to draw your audience to show up.
- Ask attendees to submit their questions via a chat tool. People are more likely to stick around until the end to know the answers.
Selecting the right day and time for your event is vital. Thus, before putting forth “save the date” to your subscribers, it may prove worthwhile to do some research. Ensure there are no holidays or contending events that may interfere with the attendance. Additionally, find out when your target audience is typically online. You can also post a poll or use social media tools like Instagram story stickers for your preferred dates to arrive at a firmer consensus.
Some of the best webinar platforms are:
- Zoom
- Demio
- JetWebinar
- WebinarNinja
- GoToWebinar
- WebEx
Everyone from the B2B companies, to large scale businesses, have jumped on to the webinar bandwagon. They are not only getting results but optimizing the benefits. Let me know how this blog helped you enhance your experience. Do share your thoughts for I would love to hear from you.
