Hello!!
I want to jump right in with talking about Demand Generation™.
What is it?
From Wikipedia (Which - may I say - is an incredible source for researching. Just look at the sources at the bottom of the pages! C’mon people!):
Demand generation is the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company's products and/or services.[1] Commonly used in business-to-business, business-to-government, or longer business-to-consumer sales cycles, demand generation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of marketing programs coupled with a structured sales process.
And here’s a good visual from Drift that puts Demand Generation (typically entirely owned by marketing) with other Sales or Sales Enablement activities:
There’s an infinite amount of demand generation strategies and tactics. They will change based on the company, industry, team size, business strategy, marketing strategy, and a lot of other variables.
And today, I want to talk about one of the most successful demand generation programs I’ve ever run. I’ve done this program easily over 40 times.
It’s fairly simple and honestly nothing new. It just works really well for startups (of all sizes)!
**Drumroll please**
Live, conversation-focused webinars
What I say? Not terribly exciting, right? But hear me out.
People need to hear from YOU - the startup team - in order to build trust. Trust is a requirement for sales.
If the goal of this program is to eventually get sales, what better way to help build that trust is to speak to them directly? Webinars - especially ones where the conversation itself is the main focus - allow you to do that.
This program is great for:
building brand awareness
establishing market credibility (especially if you have a good guest)
identifying sales-ready leads
exciting prospects
getting your audience engaged - social, CRM, wherever
These are all the things you want in a well-run marketing program.
Now, I’m going to assume you know what a webinar is. I’m also going to assume you understand the fundamental benefits of a program like this. If you have any questions - ones that may seem “basic” - please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Time to jump into this program…
Tips + tricks for the program
Strategy
We know the high-level goals here: awareness, demand, etc. I want to touch on the actual content strategy for the event.
If this is your first ever cross-channel demand gen program, your topic of conversation should be YOUR topic. If you had to boil down the topic or industry your business operates in, what is it? That is what your event is about - what it is, why it exists, your role in it and how you make it better.
If you’ve done several of these, consider a demo webinar! SHOW people what your product looks like and how it works. If you’re running a service-based business, walk through step-by-step what you would do for your client or what you already have done for a specific client.
(more on this in the Guest section below)
Logistics
schedule the live webinar and the dry run asap and include everyone who is involved in the webinar (host, guest, marketing)
do the dry run 72-24 hours before the event
Live event date: Wednesday or Thursdays between 11am and 1pm result in the best attendance in my experience
If you’re running webinars on Zoom, make sure your panelists use the link provided in their personal invitation email. Every time I do one of these, there is always at least 1 person who doesn’t know where the link is or why they can’t access the dry run/live event. I’ve made it a habit to resend the invitation emails within an hour before the dry run/live event…
The event should be 30-45 minutes and then at least 10 minutes for Q+A.
Assume you’ll have at 45-60% dropoff rate from registration to attendance.
In the dry run, you’ll review:
general flow of conversation
everyone’s audio and video quality
who owns what: managing Q&A, chat, moving slides, etc.
The host should pretty much always handle slides while marketing or whoever on the backend manages the rest.
The Host
Ideally this is the CEO or other high-level executive. It’s important to get the founder, co-founder, “public face(s)” of the company out early. This is critical for building trust and familiarity with your brand and offering.
The Guest(s)
I’ve seen this done many ways but here’s what I recommend:
Ideally, a current client that loves you. Even more ideally, the individual has a similar role as your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Another great option is an influential industry expert. This approach will help build more awareness and credibility for your brand but not as much for sales.
Just have 1 other person join you. A conversation between 2 people is easy to follow and makes the logistics of this so much easier to manage. If you have to, get a 3rd person. Ex. Your CEO, a client, and your top person closest to the event topic.
The Conversation
The way I like to run webinars is intentionally simple. Don’t spend a million hours on a deck that 10% of registrants are actually going to see. People are much more likely to go back and listen your recording, then flip through a 28 slide deck with no audio to support the visuals.
In the deck, make sure to include:
Housekeeping items
This event will be recorded and shared with everyone this week (EVERYONE asks if it’s going to be recorded. Tell them early and often.)
We'll have a 30-45 minute conversation and the remainder of the hour will be the Q&A.
If you have any questions, please use the Q&A function below. We will either respond to you right away or hold your question for the Q&A section.
Everyone is more than welcome to use the chat function below for introductions or other comments.
bio slides
agenda - this should be 4 things, tops. Set the tone for the conversation and make it clear what you are going to discuss (keeping it a little open ended is totally fine and usually results in better content)
1 or 2 important graphs or charts that help articulate your main point
Process visuals are great here. Ex. visualizing your placement in the client’s journey to solve XYZ
Charts indicating industry growth
“pitch” slide for your company/specific offering. Get inspired from your generic pitch slide but at least make the copy more tailored for that event.
The Q+A
write at least 3 good questions ahead of the event to ask during Q&A if no one else asks a question.
For Zoom, you can answer questions privately or publicly in the Q&A function. Usually, I will publicly answer a question saying we will hold it for the Q&A at the end so the hosts can give their own answer. Or, if someone asks a logistical or otherwise basic question, answer that publicly as well so everyone can see it. The only questions I can think of where we would answer privately is customers asking questions where we could provide very specific info for them.
The Poll and/or Survey
I’ve only done polls a handful of times. They can be a great way to engage the audience and drive the conversation forward.
Word Clouds can also provide some interesting insights to your audience and move the conversation. You can create them through third party apps like Slido.
What has worked for me in the past is asking a multiple choice question. You want to see the % of your audience that answers a certain way in order to make inferences and keep the conversation going.
Yes/No questions can work but regardless of the topic, question, and audience, you’ll get 2 results:
”See? Most people are experiencing this thing.”
“Wow. Very few people are experiencing this thing that we thought they would say yes too. That’s embarrassing.”
I’ll pretty much always do a post-event survey. It will open up once the event ends or if the attendee ends it themselves.
Your survey should include at least 2 questions:
What other topics would like us to cover?
A question where if sales got a certain reply from it, they would absolute talk to this lead. This is typically an industry/persona-specific question that directly speaks to the value proposition of your company.
The Operations
Outline on setting all this up:
Email list
know your ICP or alternate audience for this event
Title and/or Job Function are likely the most critical to specify
Landing page
Branded landing pages convert a lot more
Put the form “above the fold”
Say what the event is in the header in smaller text: Live Demo, Live Webinar, etc.
include bios and speaker headshots
Include a “What You’ll Learn” section so registrants get a sense of the value
Also a good idea to say this will be recorded and shared with registrants!
Registration workflow
If your marketing tools allow, you can enroll people in the webinar once they fill out the form (instead of manually updating the registration list from a csv)
Forms
I usually like creating a custom field that gets very specific info useful for sales
Could be the 1 or 2 things they need to qualify the registrant - company size, revenue, or something very contextual to the business
Once they submit the form, redirect to a landing page or just share a thank you message.
In the thank you message, tell them they will receive a confirmation email soon and if they don’t, they should check spam. Link out to a case study as well to try to get them a bit more interested.
Thank you page
Include placeholders for the recording and button for the deck
Include a strong call to action at the bottom that goes to a demo or contact us page.
The Promotion
As with many B2B marketing promotions, cross-channel approach is best
Expect a lot from your email promotions. If your copy and lists are good, this should get you at least 50% of your registrants
Start your email campaign no more than 4 weeks before. People just don’t register for webinars that early
Most of your registrations will come in the last 4 days of your promotion period.
In your emails, try a “one click registration”. I built a little workaround for this in HubSpot years ago and it resulted in significantly more webinar conversions. You already have their email and they are part of your targeted list - why are you giving them more work by linking to another form?
Create hyperlinked text or a CTA button in your email
Link to a registration thank you page
Create an automation that enrolls the person in the webinar if they click that link
Leverage your current organic channels as much as possible
Make sure to post several times ahead of your actual promotion period. You want to increase the chances of posts showing up in your ICPs feed. Showing up on LinkedIn after not posting for 2 months is not going to help
Post-event
There’s a lot of different things here. you could say it’s kind of a “catch all” section 🤣🤭😝😹
Send a thank you email within the next 48 hours. Keep it simple! Link out to thank you page
Send it to all registrants as a “thank you for your interest” email. I used to separate the Attendees (“thank you for coming”) and the No-Shows (“Sorry we missed you”). It truly doesn’t matter - do the first one to save some time.
Create an on-demand version using the recording!
Great marketing asset to have for future campaigns
Personally, I would treat the on-demand version as a separate effort which means new assets. So create an on-demand landing page and form. Just clone everything! It takes 5 minutes. Your marketing data will be a little bit more representative of your efforts.
Create a blog with top learnings and the transcript
Create a 5-10 email nurture series for registrants that is a tiny bit more sell-y.
That’s all I have on this for now! There will always be a lot more things to cover and consider once you run this for your business.
Feel free to copy and paste this as a sort of checklist for your next event! Or should I just share my entire webinar program template? We’ll see…
See yall in a couple weeks!
-Connor