Webinar Marketing in 2024:

A B2B Marketer's Guide to Success

📅 9 February 2024 | ⏱️ 6 minute read

Are you staying up to date with the rapid developments taking place in the world of digital marketing? If so, you’ll be aware that webinar marketing, as a cost-effective digital marketing tool, is growing in importance. Webinars allow businesses to share insightful content, increase engagement among a relevant audience, and establish themselves as thought leaders in an industry. They also help boost brand awareness, generate new leads, and achieve product promotion.

Mastering webinars as a marketing tool in 2024 is an important skill to have. The benefits are numerous. In their B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2023 research report, Content Marketing Institute revealed that 62% of B2B marketers created and used webinars in the past 12 months. When asked which content asset produced the best results, 47% of marketers voted for webinars (second only to in-person events).

Moreover, webinars help attract high-quality leads, resulting in a positive return on your investment. In their 2021 Benchmarks Report, BrightTALK revealed that 69% of survey respondents from buying groups spent 20 mins or more reviewing webinars when researching an upcoming purchase. And according to statistics on Demand Sage, as of 2023, the global webinar market has exceeded $1 billion, with experts projecting it to reach $5 billion by 2035. This shows that webinars are not just a marketing tool, but they also play a crucial part in the sales process.

Now, ensuring the success of a webinar marketing campaign requires proper planning of your customer journey, involving every stage from awareness and consideration to conversion and retention. This blog post will help you optimise your webinar marketing process, enabling you to utilise the full potential of webinars as a digital marketing tool to drive business growth and success.

Fundamentals of Webinar Marketing: The Success Formula

When it comes to effective webinar marketing, there is a simple yet effective formula for success. This formula contains three main variables, and if you get this right, you have a high chance for a successful marketing campaign. These are:

Right content
Right people
Right time

So, developing the right content to target the right audience and timing this right is crucial to the success of your campaign.

Fundamentals of Webinar Marketing: Best Practices

It's essential to identify your target audience and segment your data based on demographics and behaviour. A well-planned campaign typically lasts between two to three weeks and can generate significant registrations. Email marketing campaigns, digital paid campaigns, and social media are all effective channels for promoting your webinar.

However, the effectiveness of your webinar marketing strategy doesn't stop at promotion. It's crucial to personalise your content for each segment of your audience and optimise the timing of your emails. Rapid experimentation and A/B testing can help you understand what works best for your audience. Creating a sense of urgency, offering free content, and ensuring your webinar is available on-demand can significantly increase engagement and registrations.

Finally, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential to measure the success of your webinar marketing campaign. These KPIs include the number of registrations and attendees, conversion rate, engagement score, registration page conversion, and channel performance. By monitoring these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your audience's behavior and optimise your strategy for better results next time.

Fundamentals of Webinar Marketing: Complete Customer Journey

When it comes to an effective webinar marketing campaign, customers go through a complete journey comprising four phases. During this journey, they research and evaluate their options before arriving at a decision. Below, we describe the complete customer journey and how everything comes together:

Awareness and Consideration phase: The awareness and consideration phase include a marketing campaign which usually lasts around three weeks. This involves multiple marketing strategies, such as email campaigns, social media posts, and paid campaigns, all aimed at driving traffic to the landing page where the registration form is placed and promoted.
Conversion phase: Once a contact completes the registration, they enter the conversion phase. This phase involves sending a series of thank you and reminder emails, along with calendar invites to ensure the registered audience saves the date and attends the webinar.
Retention phase: Lastly, we have the retention phase. This is the most important phase, where you ensure the leads generated are converted into actual business for your brand. And this starts on the day of the webinar, where you keep engaged with this audience through various touchpoints, such as live Q&A sessions, polls, surveys, and content downloads. After the webinar, make sure you send an email to the ones who missed the live session, providing a link to watch the on-demand video. This phase also includes a nurturing campaign to analyse the behaviour of the leads and convert them into long-lasting business for your brand.

Navigating Potential Challenges

Despite the potential benefits, some businesses may face challenges in implementing a successful webinar marketing strategy. These challenges could range from targeting the right audience, insufficient time and resources to organise a webinar internally from start to finish, to a lack of access to the right technology, or uncertainty about the results. To overcome these challenges, businesses can consider sponsoring editorial webinars. By choosing a specific topic, businesses can ensure they are reaching the right audience for their product or service.

If you’re a supplier of food, beverage or nutraceutical ingredients, Smartcore can assist you in reaching your targeted buyers online through smarter digital marketing campaigns that deliver greater returns on your investment and time. One such solution is webinar marketing. Webinars serve as an indispensable marketing tool for brands looking to nurture trust among their audience in a more personal way and transform their prospects into loyal customers. Take a look at this success story to see how Gencor, the renowned nutraceutical ingredients specialist, executed a strategic webinar marketing campaign to establish thought leadership and amplify their brand visibility in the industry.

Sponsoring editorial webinars offers several benefits. It allows businesses to reach an international audience, collect high-quality leads cost-effectively, associate their brand and products with a specific market-relevant topic, and achieve sustainability goals by sponsoring sustainability and supply chain-related topics. Moreover, businesses can also achieve their brand awareness, lead generation, and thought leadership objectives through these webinars.

Webinars aren’t going away; they’re here to stay. Watch our on-demand webinar titled Webinar marketing in 2024: Engage, Convert, Succeed. This free webinar will provide you with key insights into webinars as a transformative digital marketing tool for your business. Gain an in-depth understanding of your customer journey, learn best practices for data segmentation, and discover how to optimise your use of digital channels for maximum effect. Hear from industry experts on utilising webinars to generate high-quality GDPR-compliant leads, maximise brand visibility, and showcase thought leadership.

Partner with us

Webinars have been an important marketing tool for businesses in 2023 and will continue to be valuable in 2024 and beyond. They present an engaging platform to interact with a target audience, generate excellent-quality leads, and drive business growth. Well-crafted content, an accurately targeted audience, and perfect timing are the keys to maximising the efficiency of your webinar marketing campaign. Moreover, by closely monitoring KPIs, you can measure the impact and success of your initiatives. This strategy, when coupled with sponsored editorial webinars, empowers businesses to connect with their desired audience, leading to the accomplishment of many marketing goals.

Partner with us to engage, convert, and succeed in your webinar marketing journey this 2024. We can handle the entire process for you. Be seen as a true leader in the market by presenting your products and brand in an editorial webinar of your choice and reach an engaged live and on-demand audience. Gain maximum brand visibility, generate excellent-quality GDPR-compliant leads, and establish thought leadership in your industry. Alternatively, if you wish to share research results and studies or promote your expertise on a topic while generating a high volume of highly qualified leads, our custom webinars are the way to go.

Our record of accomplishment speaks for itself, with many renowned ingredients suppliers successfully reaching their target audiences through our webinar marketing services.

Contact us today to learn more about the products we offer and what challenges we can solve for your brand. Get in touch here.

Author

Serena Warren