The webinar is the new secret weapon of the modern marketer. It is the current trend to generate high quality leads.
One of the most successful companies in this respect is the American startup Drift.
They have managed to generate 2-3 times more highly qualified contacts through webinars compared to their other acquisition channels.
In business, a big part of the job is to learn from other companies’ best practices. We have therefore found an interesting source of information on this subject for you.
The company Demio, which offers a webinar platform dedicated to marketers, wrote a very interesting blog post on this subject.
The following article is largely inspired by it and will help you understand what made Drift’s webinars so successful.
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Webinars: the value of a high-performance tool
Generate highly qualified leads
When Drift started out, they had a very large conversion funnel of leads, but they didn’t have a system in place to identify them quickly and efficiently.
So they set up the webinars with the aim of qualifying prospects more accurately.
Thus, webinars are very useful when it comes to generating highly qualified leads. But what other benefits could there be?
New business opportunities and an effective way to present your service
Drift webinars can take two forms, each with a different focus:
Partner webinars
These are webinars presented in partnership with another similar company in the same sector of activity, if possible complementary. This method has several advantages:
- Promote complementary services and generate more business
- Developing and improving relationships with a partner
- Exchange and learn from the partner’s best practices
- Increase the quality of the webinar content by offering more expertise
Customer training” webinars
They are used to present how the tool works:
- For prospects to show them the value of the service
- For customers to increase their skills in using the service.
Valuable feedback from prospects in real time
Webinars also provide a deeper understanding of the expectations of potential customers, which is essential for effective marketing.
Nowadays, knowing and understanding consumers is the big trend in modern marketing. Being “user centric” has been the success factor for many high growth startups. This is why the webinar has a significant advantage: it allows marketing teams to better understand the expectations of their customers to better adapt their marketing.
Drift presents its company to a small group of 10 to 15 participants per webinar who can interact with the presenter in real time. This allows Drift to go deeper into the questions of the prospects, to reassure them about the product, but also to better understand their expectations in order to better target its marketing pitch.
This feedback allows Drift to clearly identify content that is relevant to users rather than trying to guess at it. To encourage the sharing of this valuable feedback, the Drift team makes sure that discussions are animated so that the audience does not remain too passive.
“Best practice: Drift, a model of performance
Promotion: make people want to!
In the first instance, Drift promotes its webinar. In addition to the usual methods of generating traffic, Drift uses its chatbot to encourage visitors to sign up for a webinar in the hope of converting them into paying customers.
You will understand the usefulness of integrating a chatbot into your website in the following article.
When you arrive at Drift’s webinar page, you will see the information for the next webinar.
“How to book more qualified sales demos”: the title is catchy. Who doesn’t want to get more qualified leads?
The description that follows is also neat and presents the benefits that the webinar will bring in a few bullet points. The goal: to make visitors want to register.
Once you have registered, the Driftbot appears and guides you through the registration process. You give it your email address, and it sends you all the information you need for the webinar. Very user friendly, the aim is to make it easy for you to register.
The presentation: honing your presentation
While the process Drift uses to get a highly qualified lead is interesting, the content of the webinar is not to be outdone either. The demonstration is very well polished, and uses foolproof sales techniques.
Let’s take a look at some of the slides from the presentation, and understand what makes the presentation so effective.
The introduction: make sure everything is operational
The webinar starts a few minutes before the start time. The speaker, Dan, stands up to say hello to everyone, then chats a bit with the participants before starting his presentation.
He introduces himself and then asks everyone to send him a quick message in the chat room to make sure everyone can hear him.
He says that it is advisable to stay at the end for the Q&A and that an exclusive offer will be given to participants at the end of the webinar. This is a great way to keep the audience’s attention and make sure they don’t leave during the presentation.
Content: observation, solution, demonstration
Dan starts by showing that the current way of operating to generate sales is not effective.
Dan starts by asking simple questions to get his listeners interested:
– “How many of you respond to sales emails?”
– “How many of you like to receive cold calls?”
Almost all viewers obviously say that they do not appreciate this type of solicitation.
The point is simple: the old marketing techniques no longer work. The methods currently used by marketers are outdated.
Dan, the presenter, explains that many companies waste a lot of time getting a visitor to fill in a form and then be contacted by a real person. So why not interact directly with the visitor to our site?
He demonstrates the interest of his service: an efficient chatbot that allows to engage the conversation with the website visitor in the first 5 minutes, where the person needs to be accompanied a maximum to understand the interest of the solution.
Then, he explains that his chatbot is easy to use: as easy to configure as a Google form or Typeform! He then gives a demonstration to prove this claim and shows how Drift uses this functionality on their own behalf.
At the end of the webinar: encourage the participant to register!
Dan concludes his presentation with a tempting offer to the audience: they get 7 days free access to their chatbot. The aim is to allow prospects to try the service for free in the hope of converting them.
At the end of the webinar, Drift sends the recording of the session to its participants.
This is a good excuse to ask for the person’s e-mail address and to start a tailor-made conversation with the person to better target his or her needs and respond to them. A good way to illustrate the phrase “strike while the iron is hot”.
In the future, Drift would like to automate the content of its follow-up emails with the help of an AI that would continuously improve itself. Further proof that the possibilities of marketing automation and conversation are limitless.
What should we remember?
- Webinars are a very effective way to generate highly qualified leads
- They can be a real opportunity to create strong links with partners
- Can be an effective way of training users to use a tool
- You need to have content to present that offers real added value to participants
- The webinar should be promoted carefully and visitors to the site should be encouraged to attend
- It is necessary to develop a good sales pitch to make it effective, taking inspiration from the Drift webinar
- To offer participants the opportunity to test the service presented free of charge
- Use the pretext of sending the webinar recording to obtain a valid email address
- Contact the person by email to start a discussion and to focus on the participant’s request
All you have to do is convert the prospect into a customer and maintain the business relationship.
