In digital business, lead generation and lead nurturing are two of the main keys to success. After all, if you can’t generate leads and nurture them effectively, you won’t have anyone to sell your products to.
But have you ever wondered what these two terms, lead generation and lead nurturing, really mean? If not, don’t worry! That’s exactly why we created our Webinar Glossary.
It’s the second time we zoom in and take a detailed look at one or two phrases in the Glossary. This month, we focus on lead generation and lead nurturing. In this article, we’ll explain the difference between the two terms and show you how to use webinars to facilitate each one of them better.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
The Difference Between Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
To make sure we’re on the same page, we’ll begin by defining both terms.
Lead generation is an online process of identifying and collecting contacts that have the potential to become future clients and/or customers. It’s a crucial part of any business strategy. If a company doesn’t have any leads, it won’t have anyone to sell goods and services to.
Lead nurturing, on the other hand, is a long-term, patient, and precise process of building business relationships with a list of leads in order to turn them into clients and/or customers. Lead nurturing is also an incredibly important business concept.
In a nutshell, lead generation is the act of introducing potential customers to your company’s world. Lead nurturing is the process of building trust between your company and its potential customers so that they feel comfortable purchasing your product or service.
Both lead generation and lead nurturing play a vital role in the success of your company. And each relies on the other to achieve business goals.
Using Webinars to Generate Leads
One of the best ways to generate leads for your organization is to host webinars — at least that’s what 73% of marketing and sales leaderssay. That’s because, when done right, webinars are very engaging and tend to produce lists of high-quality prospects.
But hosting a business-building webinar that brings in an avalanche of red-hot leads isn’t as simple as switching on your camera and hitting the Start button. There are certain things you must do to ensure your webinars are successful. That’s what we’ll cover now.
Know Your Audience
This is the first rule of marketing. If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, how can you possibly expect to get their attention? The answer is – unless you get very, very lucky – you won’t. So, start your webinar lead generation efforts by understanding your audience. That way, you can cater your content to their interests and needs.
Are you aiming at the folks who have never heard of your brand before or are you retargeting people who have visited your company’s site in the past? Knowing demographic details such as the age, gender, income, and occupation of your audience is also important. Psychographic information such as the hopes, fears, and goals of your audience is crucial as well.
Once you have all this information, assemble it into distinct buyer personas. If you’re not familiar with this term, a buyer persona is simply a fictional character that represents a subset of your target audience. Once created, you can use personas to implementyour marketing and sales strategies, including the kind of webinars you should host for lead generation purposes.
Brainstorm Content Ideas
Now that you know who you’re hoping to reach with your webinars, you can begin to brainstorm potential content ideas. What topics will your webinar focus on?
One of the tips we have for you in this regard is to consult the rest of your sales team. These are the people who work with leads every day. As such, they should know what content subjects will be best received.
It goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway), your webinar content needs to be extremely valuable. There are plenty of companies producing subpar content these days. To truly succeed with webinars for lead generation purposes, your content needs to stay one step ahead the competition.
Promote Your Event
Once your audience and content topic has been chosen, it’s time to start promoting your webinar to the masses. The research tells us that anywhere from 20% to 40% of webinar attendees become qualified leads. If you market your event properly, you’ll have a full pipeline! Here are a few of our favorite promotion channels:
Social Media
Social media is a fantastic way to get the word out about your webinar. Log into your company’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles (or any other social platform it happens to be on) and let your fans and followers know about your special event.
Just remember that to succeed on social media, you need to be social! Interact with your company’s followers. Don’t use these powerful platforms as a one-way sounding board. If you do, you’ll have a much more difficult time securing registrations!
Click’s Tip:
Speaking of social media, ClickMeeting integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube and allows you to easily promote your webinars and expand your reach via our platform. It’s easy and effective. Check it out for yourself today!
Email Marketing
Email marketing is another amazing way to promote your webinar. Perhaps there are people on your company’s email list that haven’t purchased your product yet. These folks are prime targets for your webinars. So, send them an email inviting them to watch your event.
Email is also the perfect “reminder” strategy as messages can easily be automated. Be sure to create an automated email sequence that reminds registrants of your upcoming live webinar and why they actually should attend.
Paid Advertising
To really reach the masses and let them know about your webinar, consider investing in paid advertising. Platforms such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads offer incredible targeting possibilities. Meaning you can get ads for your webinars in front of your exact audience type and no one else.
You’ll definitely want to track your paid advertising efforts. Are your ads working? If you’re using both, Facebook and Google, which is more effective? Don’t just throw money at your ads. Be strategic, adjust when needed, and you’ll be successfully generating leads with your webinars.
Partnerships
Finally, we have partnerships. If you cooperate with other companies or influencers in your field, consider contacting them and asking if they could promote your lead generation webinar to their followers. This can be a very effective way to expand your reach as your partner’s audience already trusts them.
If it works with your strategy, you may even consider running a joint webinar with another company. This will allow you to split the workload while also gaining their trusts and more leads.
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Remember, if you’re planning to host a live webinar rather than an On-Demand one, you’ll need to market your event continuously until the event starts. Just because a prospect registers, doesn’t mean they’ll actually show up. You’ll need to remind them that your webinar is around the corner and get them excited about attending.
Collect the Right Information
The whole purpose of running lead generation webinars is to collect important information about your potential customers. So first, make sure you ask for the right details during the registration process to increase sales. Then, when the information has been collected, present it to the rest of your sales team.
The kind of details we recommend collecting include:
- Registrant contact info;
- Attendee contact info;
- Statistics with time spent watching an event;
- SQL leads based on post-webinar surveys.
Research also shows that for live webinars, 92% of attendees take part in a Q&A session at the end of the event. This is another way you can collect valuable information about your prospects.
Repurpose Your Content
Once your live webinar is over and you’ve generated new leads, what’s next? Sure, you’ll want to follow up with your new contacts and begin nurturing them, we’ll talk about that in the next section, but wise marketers also repurpose the content they’ve just created.
That’s right, we’re talking about taking the webinar you’ve just recorded, turning it into an On-Demand webinar, and using it as a new lead generation tool. This new piece of content can be sent to registrants who didn’t end up attending. It can also be used as gated content material — new prospects can get access to the webinar in exchange for their email addresses.
We make it really simple to take a live webinar you just hosted and turn it into an on-demand lead generating machine! For those intrigued by the On-Demand Webinar opportunity, we also offer an Automated Webinar feature which will save you loads of time.
Using Webinars to Nurture Leads
Once you’ve built up a list of leads, you can begin to nurture them — a process that 74% of companies say is their top priority, according to HubSpot. Again, webinars are the perfect strategy. But the way you nurture your leads will determine whether you succeed in this endeavor or fail. Here are a few tips to make sure you get it right.
Segment Your Leads
Segmentation is an important concept when using webinars to nurture leads. Not every lead on your list will be in the same frame of mind. You need to determine at what stage of the buyer journey each lead is and separate them accordingly. Each stage — awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty — deserves its own webinar with unique content. Let’s take a look at each of these stages more closely:
Awareness – at this stage, the prospects realize they have a problem and begin the research to collect information regarding it.
Consideration – now, the prospects have clearly defined what they’re struggling with and begin to look at every possible solution.
Conversion – in the conversion stage, the prospects have determined how they will solve their problem and are simply evaluating different vendors. In the end, they’ll choose one.
Loyalty – lastly, we have loyalty. At this point, the prospects have made their buying decision. Now it’s the company’s job to help them get the most value and keep them happy.
You can discover at what stage each of your leads is by analyzing the kind of content they already interacted with.
For example, a prospect that recently attended one of your company’s lead generation webinars, regarding increasing web traffic, has likely just emerged from the awareness stage and entered the consideration stage. A lead nurturing webinar on specific SEO tactics might be right up the prospect’s alley.
Choose the Right Topics
Once again, the content of your webinar plays a crucial role. But the topics you choose for your lead nurturing webinars will differ than those you selected for lead generation. You need to take the buyer journey into consideration and where your attendees are within it.
For example, a lead in the awareness stage is still figuring out what their problem is and how to solve it. Trying to sell them your product at this point may backfire. This person is still learning and evaluating their options. Instead, they’ll want webinar content that identifies the different solutions available for them.
But a person in the conversion stage is ready to buy and simply needs a final push to purchase your product or service. Webinar content about how your product works and its benefits would fit perfectly in this situation.
Propel Your Leads Forward
Finally, each lead nurturing webinar your company produces needs to propel your audience forward. That means your webinar should either move your prospects closer to the sale (from the consideration stage to the conversion stage, for example) or help them realize that your company’s solution is the right fit.
Remember, you aren’t hosting webinars “just because.” You’re doing it to grow your customer base and to make your company more successful. So, make sure you’re constantly taking your prospects on a journey that leads towards a purchase.
Wrapping Up: Key Takeaways for Your Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing Webinars
Lead generation and lead nurturing are vital to your business. Fortunately, webinars are one of the best strategies your company can use to both secure more leads and effectively move them through the buyer journey. Here are a few key takeaways from this post:
Lead generation and lead nurturing are really two sides of the same coin. To ensure your sales pipeline stays full, you need to consistently generate new leads and effectively nurture them through each stage of the buyer journey.
Webinars are excellent lead generation tools. Just remember to know your audience before hosting one. Then choose the right content topic, promote your event, and collect the right information from each attendee.
Webinars are also effective for lead nurturing. First, segment your leads by the buyer journey stage they’re currently in. Then choose appropriate content topics for each segment and always propel your leads forward.
Brand new to webinars? Then you may want to look at a webinar technology solution to assist you as you create both lead generation and lead nurturing content. ClickMeeting is your best option. Our platform is intuitive, feature-rich, and trustworthy. Try it free for 30 days and see for yourself!
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