7 Underused Tactics To Build Great Webinars That Convert

Why do you run webinars? 

Is it because everyone else is doing it? Or, did you grasp their real potential for business growth? Answering this question is crucial for understanding your approach to webinar design. 

When running webinars simply because they’re a trend, professionals may overlook opportunities for achieving strong business results. They’re mostly focused on adding a new one-way communication platform to their growth strategy and produce boring webinars few want to watch as a result.

However, when professionals recognize the real potential of webinars, these events can transform into a two-way communication environment that builds relationships with their audiences. 

They begin to craft relevant webinars that encourage real-life conversations and strong connections with leads, prospects, customers, and users. These types of webinars lead to great results, becoming a full-fledged conversion system.  

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What Does “Webinar Conversion” Mean?

Webinar conversion can take different forms depending on your goal, the organizing department, and your target group. Webinars will help you transform: 

• Attendees into (warm) leads: Your marketing webinar can be a first touchpoint, allowing you to transform your attendees into leads you can engage with in real-time communication. Also, if you offer webinars on demand, you can keep generating leads long after the session ends. 

• Leads into prospects: The more webinars people attend, the more interested they become in your brand or offer. In some cases, we’ve observed regular webinar attendance to be an indicator of increased interest.  

• Prospects into customers: Your sales webinars can help you convert free-trial or plan users into paying customers. 

• Customers into recurring customers: Onboarding and New Feature webinars are great for ensuring customer success with your product(s). Subsequently, you can upsell or cross-sell your offerings.

• Customers into brand ambassadors: Customer Success (CS) webinars can gain user loyalty and nudge them to become your brand ambassadors. 

In other words, dynamic webinars allow you to accompany people along their buying journey and convert them at any stage, ensuring your business growth. 

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Why Well-Crafted Webinars Convert 

High registration and attendance numbers don’t always equate to high growth results. Convincing people to register and attend your webinar isn’t the hard part. What’s difficult is getting people to: 

• Stay the entire session 
• Connect and engage 
• Actively participate in the conversation 
• Attend your future webinars 

These are the elements that differentiate average sessions from successful webinars that convert. Compared to your registration and attendance rates, your attendee engagement rate clearly indicates people’s interest in your brand. 

In general, people who actively engage with your content will be more open to post-webinar conversations to learn more about your products. 

A strong webinar marketing strategy based on two-way communication will result in a larger conversion rate thanks to: 

• Taking a human-to-human approach: Effective webinars can’t treat attendees as numbers to grow the marketing or sales pipeline. Instead of being product-centered, professionals who run great webinars are obsessed with their users’ needs and build the entire session around valuable knowledge that’s relevant and useful to their attendees. 

• Practicing active listening: To hold great webinars, professionals need to listen to their attendees so people feel heard. That’s essential when establishing a long-term relationship with leads, prospects, and customers. 

• Building a space for conversations: Converting webinars provide a space for genuine communication between moderators and attendees. Rather than viewing attendees as passive consumers of information, professionals treat them like active participants who have relevant insights to share.

Great webinars are based on relationship marketing and enable meaningful connections between brands and attendees. But how can you harness the true potential of webinars to construct a space for participation and two-way communication? 

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How To Produce Great Webinars That Convert

We’ve put together a list of underused tactics that’ll help you build webinars that convert. 

1) Cover the entire buying journey

To promote higher webinar conversion, accompany people throughout their buying journey by crafting webinars for each funnel stage. 

For example, you can attract high-quality leads and transform MQLs into SQLs, by running: 

• Educational webinars, covering multiple industry- and audience-relevant topics 

• Thought leadership sessions, inviting internal or external influencers and thought leaders to speak about a topic of their expertise 

• Report summaries, sharing your company’s knowledge and insights from industry-related research 

• Live workshops, asking your audience to submit real-life challenges and then demonstrating solutions during the session 

These marketing webinars speak directly to people who need to overcome a challenge but have yet to find a solution. 

You can then convert SQLs into paying customers by running:

• Demo series actively showcasing a straightforward solution to challenges people may have 

• AMAs, answering product-related questions 

• Case studies, where you  invite customers to talk about their success using your product 

These sales webinars engage those interested in finding the right solutions to achieve their desired outcome. 

Finally, you can secure recurring customers and brand ambassadors by running: 

• Onboarding sessions that provide your users practical steps on how to accomplish a specific result with your product 

• Use cases to help both beginner and advanced users make the most of your product

• ‍New features introducing and explaining new functionalities that’ll improve your users’ results

• Best practices, where you share tips and tricks that’ll help customers leverage your product and achieve great results 

Focused on ensuring users’ success, these webinars foster customer satisfaction and create space for future interaction, customer engagement, and advocacy. 

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2) Establish a webinar routine 

One conversation isn’t enough to build a long-term connection with someone and the same is true for webinars. 

As we mentioned, attending recurring webinars clearly indicates people’s interest in your brand, company, and product. So, creating multiple engagement opportunities is necessary to ensure great webinar conversion rates. Transform your events into a routine and establish a weekly or monthly number of live sessions. 

The number of webinars you can run heavily depends on your resources. However, a robust webinar platform will help you automate the planning logistics, freeing time and space to focus exclusively on improving webinar content and client engagement dynamics. 

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3) Conduct in-depth topic research 

Your topic can make or break your webinar’s success. Running irrelevant sessions will reduce your registration and attendance rates and hurt your brand’s trust level. A great topic is essential to produce webinars that convert, as it’ll help you: 

• Attract the right attendees 
• Build a strong webinar structure
• Hold people’s attention during the webinar 

All these elements translate into a higher engagement rate by igniting people’s curiosity and developing their interest in your brand.

To identify a valuable webinar topic, you’ll have to conduct in-depth research. This process may include: 

• Practicing social listening: Pay attention to your audience’s conversations. For example, you can follow industry leaders on social media and analyze their exchanges with their followers. This will identify industry trends and uncover what drives your audience. Subsequently, you can use this information to come up with a strong webinar topic that’ll attract a high number of attendees. 

• Engaging your community: Go straight to the source by asking your audience what they want to learn about. You can open a conversion on your community space or run a live poll asking people to vote for the webinar topics they care about most. 

• Collaborating with other departments: Talk to your sales reps about people’s uncertainties and objections regarding your product. Discuss your customers’ needs and doubts, new use cases, and interesting case studies with your CS reps. Then, distill and employ this knowledge to develop pertinent webinar topics. 

These and other topic research practices will help you identify the most relevant subjects, which will transform your webinars into authoritative sources of knowledge and valuable insights. 

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4) Provide unique engagement experiences 

Webinars stem from engagement marketing, a model focused on building relationships with leads, prospects, and customers through two-way communication channels. Providing multiple engagement opportunities makes webinars valuable and powerful for business growth. 

However, don’t expect webinars to be engaging by default. On the contrary, you must design and prepare various engagement activities and dynamics to encourage participation. For example, you can: 

• Run live polls: Reengage your attendees throughout the webinar by asking your audience questions. 

• Enable private and public chats: Foster conversation among your attendees to strengthen the connection between your community members. 

• Encourage attendees to express their emotions: Diversify people’s engagement experience through emojis. 

• Offer handouts: Feature handouts and gifts such as eBooks, research studies, presentations, or templates attendees can download during the webinar. 

• Boost Q&A participation: Ensure the active participation of your webinar attendees by encouraging them to ask questions. 

• Bring attendees on stage: Engage with your attendees in real-time conversations by bringing them to the front and center of the audience. 

To provide unique engagement experiences, choose a strong webinar platform like Demio, which is specifically designed for user engagement. Along with a robust webinar infrastructure, Demio boasts multiple attendee engagement tools accompanied by a solution dedicated to analytics that can help you evaluate your webinar ROI metrics and improve future sessions. 

Demio is the only webinar platform that offers an engagement experience unlike anything you’ve seen before. Its wide range of tools and functions helps your revenue team foster long-lasting connections with your leads, prospects, and customers.   

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5) Include a compelling Call to Action (CTA)

A strong CTA strategically placed in your webinar contributes to a high conversion rate. Depending on your goal, use the session environment to encourage attendees to: 

• Sign up for a free trial
• Subscribe to a paid plan 
• Upgrade to a different plan 
• Purchase your product 
• Access a discount 
• And more

This enables you to quantify the direct correlation between webinar participation and conversation rate. Remember, though, to build your webinar around one CTA only. If you insert multiple CTAs, you may confuse your attendees and evoke choice paralysis. 

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6) Offer multilingual webinars

Note: This tactic only applies if you want to extend your geographical outreach and attract users and customers from different regions.

Successful companies, such as Semrush and Monday.com, adopted a multilingual strategy by offering webinars in various languages. By doing so, they can better connect with people from multiple geographies. 

You can enjoy similar results by  sparking real-time conversations with a wider audience base in their native language. Doing so will increase your attendees’ engagement rate and ignite and maintain their interest in your brand. 

If you’re unsure where to start, analyze your organic traffic stats and your user or customer database. You may discover most of your organic traffic and users come from LATAM countries, for example. In this case, you’d want to add Spanish as your second webinar language.

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7) Build a post-webinar follow-up sequence

Keep in mind that webinars don’t end once the session does. To generate higher webinar conversion rates, reengage attendees with follow-up communications such as:

• Post-webinar emails: Send your attendees emails that include the webinar recording, the slide deck, a conversation summary, and any other content related to your webinar’s topic. You can also add a CTA asking people whether they have any questions about the webinar to extend your interaction. Also, encourage them to share their thoughts about the session and things they’d like to see improved. 

• Gifts: Send your attendees a thank you gift, such as a discount code, a downloadable invitation to your private community, or free access to future events. 

• Detailed answers: If someone asked a question during the webinar, you could reengage this person by following up with a detailed answer. 

• Webinar invitations: Keep the interaction going by sending your attendees an invitation to a future webinar.

Bonus: Interact with people who registered but didn’t attend your webinar as well. This will encourage them to commit to future events and give your brand a chance. For example, you can send them the webinar recording or invite them to attend your next live session.

By following up after the webinar as part of your customer engagement strategy, you’ll solidify a strong, long-lasting connection with your audience, which will subsequently translate into higher conversion rates.

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Recap 

Webinars are one of the most efficient ways to build trust, connect, and engage in ongoing conversations with your audience. When done correctly, webinars will result in conversions almost every time, transforming attendees into warm leads, prospects, and customers.

Your webinar strategy can promote overall business growth by accompanying people throughout their buying journey and maintaining their interest in your product. Compared to other marketing practices, webinars are great conversation starters that strengthen the connection between people and your brand. 

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