If you want to boost leads for your business, have you considered hosting a webinar for your followers?

Webinars, or online seminars, are a great way to attract attention to your brand and move visitors through the sales funnel. For small businesses especially, webinars can get the word out about their brand and provide value to new customers.

Creating a solid webinar doesn’t have to be complicated. In no time, you too can host a webinar that improves your brand’s lead generation and brings your business to new heights. Here are three tips to help you get started.

Choose a relevant topic

To start, you need to choose a topic that’s relevant and interesting to your target audience. If not, racking up attendance will prove difficult and the turnout won’t be as successful. You need to create content for users that appeals to their needs, and the best way to do this is by getting to know them better.

Research your target audience so you know who you’re presenting to. The more you get to know them, the easier it is to pick a subject that engages them the entire time. Send a customer survey, ask for their direct feedback, and reach out on social media to collect user information from various channels.

Use the information you gather to create customer personas of your audience. These are detailed profiles of your visitors that marketers use to appeal to their target market. The more you know, the easier it is to create a webinar that increases leads.

Your buyer persona might look something like this:

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Prepare well in advance

If your strategy includes creating, planning, promoting, and holding a webinar in a week, then good luck. It takes time and lots of organizing to put together a webinar that brings in enough viewers and boosts leads. Rushing the process will only result in a disorganized presentation that fails to increase sales.

At the minimum, you should start the planning process about a month in advance. This should give you enough time to plan your material and spread the word so you have a hefty audience waiting for you.

Cross-promoting your webinar across various channels, such as email and social media, will spread awareness about the webinar and increase the number of signups you receive. A whopping 96 percent of marketers use social media to drive traffic to their content. You need to create optimized social media campaigns to attract your target audience to your brand and encourage their attendance.

Creating a landing page for your webinar also improves lead generation and encourages more users to sign up. Landing pages are built specifically to guide customers through the sales funnel so they feel ready to purchase, and the same goes for webinars. Informing visitors about its benefits and details encourages them to participate.

Microsoft created an optimized landing page for their webinar to spread awareness for the event:

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Use a responsive form

When collecting user information for everyone attending the webinar, you need to optimize your online registration form to receive the best turnout. Around 67 percent of site visitors will abandon your form and won’t come back if they encounter complications, which is why it’s crucial to create an optimized form for users.

Some common issues that users come across when engaging with contact forms include:

  • Asking for too much information. People don’t want to spend a lot of time filling out a form even if it’s for an event they want to attend. Make sure you minimize your form fields to encourage more signups and a better turnout.
  • A lack of security. Too many business owners fail to secure their websites, scaring potential leads away and discouraging them from handing over their information.
  • Using the same form for every campaign. Since you’re trying to collect leads specifically for a webinar, you need to ask for information pertaining to that only.
  • Poor visibility. If your form is difficult to locate or isn’t on the right page, then it’s difficult for people to sign up. Make it easy to find so users can sign up right away.

Sometimes, it’s the little details that make the most significant difference in your campaign’s numbers. Taking the extra time to make changes that improve the UX will take your business a long way compared to those that don’t.

Over to you

You can use webinars to attract your target audience and cultivate interest around your brand. Collecting leads is an important strategy to grow your business, and webinars can bring it closer to reaching success.