4 Undeniable Benefits of Webinars for Lead Generation

Businesses are always looking for ways to generate new leads for the sales team. There are a lot of different methods to bring fresh leads. Buying lists will get you a bunch of new emails, but they are often cold and unqualified. Blog marketing is a great long-term strategy, but it takes time. And hosting events is great for building rapport with potential clients but it can be expensive and time-consuming.

Webinars offer many of the positives of other lead generation techniques while forgoing some of the setbacks. If you are looking to get start generating leads today, here are 4 undeniable benefits of webinars for businesses:

1. Build Trust and Rapport with Your Potential Customers

By creating helpful, relevant webinar topics that resonate with the pain points, stumbling blocks, and common mistakes of your potential customers, you start to build rapport. Offering this advice in a free, easy-to-access format builds trust in your industry and helps people see that you care about more than just finding the next sale.

Not every person that signs up for your webinar is going to be a qualified, sales-ready lead and that's okay. Work hard to make shareable, memorable content that people take with them, forward to their co-workers, and post to their social networks.

2. Short Lead Time

Unlike other forms of content marketing, webinars have a relatively short lead time. All you need is a webinar platform (we'll talk more about those in a minute), a description of your event, a presenter, and a landing page. You can work on the full-length presentation during the 4-6 weeks of promotion of your event. That means that you can start promoting the event (and driving new leads) right away.

Send out an email, put it on your events page, write a blog, publish a press release, try a little targeted PPC spend. Every company will have different results with number of registrants, but if you are creating great content, you should start seeing results right away.

3. Low-Cost, High Return

There is very little cost involved with putting on a webinar. There are really two factors that contribute to the cost of your webinar. The first is time and no matter what marketing initiatives you are working on, it's going to take time. The second is the cost of your webinar platform. There are several options available, most under $100/month. Here are a few of the most popular:

• Google Hangouts on Air: Free, unlimited viewers, automatic recording to YouTube
• Join.Me: $25/month for 250 Viewers
• GoToWebinar: Starts at $79/month for 100 viewers
• WebEx: Starts at $79/month for 100 viewers
• Adobe Connect: Starts at $45/month for 25 viewers
• Ready Talk: Starts at $49/month for 25 viewers

So, if you plan to spend about $50 a month on a webinar platform, you'll see some solid ROI. A HubSpot survey says the average cost per lead for most B2B companies is $43, so that means you only have to convert ONE NEW LEAD to hit that average cost per lead. If you can get 10 new leads, that cost goes down to just $5 per lead.

4. Qualify Your Leads

Webinars provide several great opportunities to qualify your leads. Making use of these opportunities can help provide valuable insight to your sales team.

• Registration Landing Page: You need to collect name, email, company, etc. for the webinar registration, but what other relevant information can you collect that might help in the future? What is their annual budget? What are their biggest challenges? What questions do they have? These are all potential fields that you can use to gather data that will help both the presenter and your sales team.
• In-Webinar Polls and Questions: Use your webinar as a chance to engage with your audience, ask for audience participation, questions, etc. If you use one of the higher end platforms, like GoToWebinar, you will be able to see which user asked which questions. Tying this information back to the CRM is a great way to provide insight to the sales process.
• Follow-Up Survey: Use a post-webinar survey as a way to continue to engage with your audience. Ask them what topics they want to see in the future, what key takeaways they had, and how they will use the information moving forward.

These are just a few of the great benefits of webinars to drive new leads for your business. They can be a great way to drive leads for business in both the short term and as part of a larger long-term strategy. If you need some inspiration, make sure to check our resources for several on-demand webinars.