The importance of accurate, relevant data used correctly to maximise webinar success

Whilst content is key for any business or investment webinar, sourcing, researching and targeting relevant audience datasets alongside an effective marketing strategy is vital to driving attendance and engagement.

 This helps deliver greater relevance and education for your target audience as part of your webinar strategy which helps ensure you continue to build an active community of advocates for your online events.

Webinars are becoming an even more popular method to engage leads, with 57% of B2B marketers saying they will create more webinars in 2023, while webinars were the top content format for marketers that want to engage leads in 2021 at 48% – a 15-point increase from 2020.

With the ability to reach more relevant audiences, boost brand awareness, and, most importantly, generate and nurture new partnerships, prospects, investors and alike through greater audience education and engagement, therefore it’s not hard to see why webinars are more appealing than ever.

This doesn’t even start to highlight how webinars help position companies as thought leaders and authorities in niche or complex markets, create greater audience engagement and improve repurposed content for social media or email marketing, for instance.

However, to realise these benefits, a company must drive engaged audience attendance to webinar events that add value, whether as a consumer, customer, investor, industry partner, media who can advocate your brand or others. 

And a vital aspect of this is researching and targeting the right audience data, ensuring those who do turn up have a genuine interest in what you have to say and can impact your business.

To target the right audience, you first need to know your audience. This is critical to your webinar success, as well as you’re marketing strategy overall. Define what you want from your webinar audiences, such as investing, purchasing, promoting your brand, partnering with your company, or many of these put together.

Then, conduct market research, analyse competitors, use analytics on your platforms and create messaging personas for different segments of your audience to define who you should target.

After your target audience is defined, you now need to collate the correct data to build a collection of highly relevant webinar prospects. You can do this in multiple ways, such as sign-up forms from your website, media outreach promoting your company, appearing on industry partner webinars, and digital ads.

World Digital Foundation can also help supply you with verified, active, opt-in relevant contact data based on your target audience, which you can use to help build up your webinar audience and allow you the opportunity to extend this communication through over marketing campaigns using this contact data such as social media, email marketing and other methods.

After gathering a substantial list of interested prospects relevant to your company’s goals, you can begin warming up your audience with intriguing and relevant content and push them down the marketing funnel toward webinar engagement and attendance.

Still the best method of doing this is email marketing, as you can create a stream of content and webinar promotions that consistently feeds into their inbox, but you can also use paid and organic social media as well as other forms of digital advertising that retargets your contact data or helps you build lookalike audiences.

The webinar promotional content needs to talk about a problem that needs solving relevant to your target data, and therefore resonates with them to want to attend, engage and advocate your business now and in the future.

The lifetime value of this engagement with your contact data can deliver return on investment for many years beyond the initial outlay and research cost of building your relevant datasets.

Remember to analyse the success of your marketing efforts and see what works best. It may be that your language or content needs to change or tested in different forms to warm up your target audience better, or you need to change your webinar sign-up CTAs (Call to Actions) to increase registration and attendance.

With target audience contact data being pushed to attend your webinar with a well-prepared marketing strategy, you’re now much more likely to achieve lifetime value from your audience/community.

You can also get in touch with us here if you want to learn more about how we can help you kickstart your webinars.