How Pardot Drives Customer Engagement with Webinars

Finding new leads, and ultimately converting them to customers, is one of the biggest concerns for any growing business. That’s why webinars are so great — they are an extremely effective way to engage and reach your target audience. Best of all, they don’t break the bank!

Keep reading to learn Salesforce’s best practices for running a successful and meaningful webinar.

PROMOTING YOUR WEBINAR

What’s the point in hosting a live webinar if you can’t get people to show up? There are a few things to consider when trying to drive webinar registration::

Title and Abstract

The first step in promoting your webinar is creating a catchy title and a abstract that helps readers understand what they’ll learn if they attend. Think of this step as the front door to your webinar. This is where people decide whether or not they want to ring the doorbell — or in this case, register. First impressions are everything.

Targeting the Desired Audience

You probably already have a customer base or a subscriber list of some sort — make sure to segment your audience based on relevant criteria, such as: job title, location, industry, product, etc. Targeting the right people based on the content of your webinar is going to help increase your registration, and ultimately boost attendee engagement.

Sales Activation

As a marketer, you don’t have to bear the sole responsibility for webinar registration. Leverage your sales team to invite their customers and prospects by providing them details about the webinar, along with a marketing-approved email template. This gives your sales representatives a reason to reach out, and can result in higher registration and attendance – it’s a win-win.

CREATING RELEVANT AND ENGAGING CONTENT

Before you even begin your webinar planning, you need to think about your audience and what information is most relevant to them.

For me, a small business marketer at Salesforce, I know that my audience responds well to tactical information (think: tips and tricks). I typically start my webinar topic brainstorm by looking at content that our team has already created and what has been performing the best.

It might be an ebook, a research report, or a whitepaper. This helps me understand what’s top of mind for my small business audience.

Next, I read the piece of content and think about the key takeaways and how I can best synthesize the information. Time is of the essence for small business owners (and anyone, really) so my focus is to help the audience get the most out of my 30-minute webinar.

For our most recent webinar,  I took an ebook on the 7 Inspiring Email Templates and turned it into 3 Ways to Kickstart Email Marketing for Your Small Business in 2019. By changing the format of an existing piece of content, you can help your audience learn something new, while also saving yourself time.

Quick Tip: Structuring your content around 3 ways to ‘____’ or 5 tips to ‘_____’ enables your audience to focus on the key messages and walk away with tactical information.

FOLLOWING-UP WITH ATTENDEES

Yay! Your webinar is over and it was a huge success. You had a record number of attendees and audience engagement was through the roof. Now comes the most important part, following-up with all of the leads that attended your webinar. The first action you should take is to automate an email to send a recording of the webinar to all those who registered but were unable to attend.

This is where your relationship with sales becomes very important — they are the catalyst to driving revenue from your webinar. 

Make following-up easy by providing a list of those that attended as well as those that registered but were unable to attend. This will help sales reps understand which of their specific accounts they need to target.

You should also provide your reps email templates and talk tracks so they have the information they need to have constructive conversations with their customers.

As I mentioned before, a webinar is a great reason for a sales rep to reach out and open or reopen a conversation.

Webinars are a proven way to increase brand awareness and if done well, can help you provide value to existing customers while also reaching potential prospects. 

With the right promotion strategy, an awesome webinar topic, and a solid follow up plan, you might just bring in more leads than you or your sales team will know what to do with!

To learn more about everything Salesforce and Pardot are doing to help small businesses, visit salesforce.com/smb.