It’s easy to see how marketing webinars might help build brand awareness, establish thought leadership and even generate leads. But connecting webinar marketing to your bottom line – that is, converting qualified attendees into happy, paying customers – that’s a different story. And when you can’t tie a campaign to your KPIs, it’s hard to make it a priority.
It was only in 2013 that Unbounce started taking webinars seriously as a revenue generation strategy. Pretty soon they became our #1 acquisition channel.
It’s time to get on the bandwagon. Smart marketers everywhere have taken to developing quality webinars: 63% of marketers will devote resources to creating webinars in 2014.
But that doesn’t mean they’re doing them successfully. That’s why our latest ebook is a step-by-step guide to creating, promoting and leveraging marketing webinars that drive customer acquisition and revenue. To celebrate, we put together this roundup of our favorite webinars of 2014… so far.
1. How to Find Where Your Website is Leaking Money (and How to Fix It)
Our friend Peep Laja of ConversionXL recently teamed up with Moz to talk about the increasingly hot topic of conversion rate optimization.
Specifically, this webinar will teach you why you should know and care about conversion research, including:
- Why you need to be analyzing conversion data per device and per browser (hint: it could increase your revenue).
- How to parse the data in your Google Analytics account: what to look for and how to know if you’re looking at a red flag or a red herring.
- How to prioritize your conversion optimization by identifying easy wins.
- Implicit and explicit ways your prospects can tell you where they’re encountering friction in your sales process.
Sold? Watch the webinar recording here.
Webinar marketing tip: If you think webinars are dry and boring, you haven’t watched one of Peep’s webinars. Peep has a unique tell-it-like-it-is style of presentation, uses lots of cheeky imagery and backs it all up with data.
2. Beyond Lead Generation: From Landing Page Forms to Email Follow-Ups
Hunter Boyle of AWeber delivered this killer webinar where he broke down email marketing strategies for acquiring satisfied, repeat customers.
His presentation covers:
- Why it’s time to rethink and optimize your linear marketing funnel.
- The four core principles you must have in place as a foundation for split testing your email funnel.
- How to provide value in every single email you send your list.
- A checklist for gut-checking whether your messaging will resonate with your audience.
This one’s packed with actionable insight, so have a pencil and paper ready. Watch the recording here.
Webinar marketing tip: Our Twitter feed blew up during this presentation. Hunter reciprocated by engaging the audience and answering participant questions long after the webinar was over using the hashtag #unwebinar:
#Unwebinar peeps – Check out: @TheGrok @tim_ash @WhichTestWon @ConversionXL @widerfunnel @alexdesigns @MktgExperiments @ContentVerve
— Hunter Boyle (@hunterboyle) May 20, 2014
3. A/B Tests for 6 Stages of Your Company’s Growth
In this webinar, Brendan O’Rourke, Solutions Engineer for Optimizely, draws on his math nerd background to help demystify statistics. His goal is to make A/B testing less intimidating for marketers who know they should be making strategic decisions based on data. He explains:
- When to choose between quantitative and qualitative research.
- Which stage of your company’s growth is most conducive to an experimental mindset when it comes to A/B testing.
- What pivotal design is and when it’s appropriate.
- Considerations that are often overlooked when segmenting audiences.
If you’re ready to get serious about A/B testing, watch the recording here.
Webinar marketing tip: KISSmetrics makes it easy for you to share their webinar. Signing up for the recording gets you an email with this friendly prompt:
4. Webinars: More Than Just Lead Generation
In our roundup of webinars (in honor of our new ebook about webinars), we just had to include a webinar about webinars.
If you’re worried that webinars can’t contribute directly to lead generation, this one’s for you. Wayne Turmel breaks down how to leverage webinars for various stages of the customer lifecycle. He provides best practices for:
- Holding top-of-the-funnel presentations to create awareness for your product and to showcase expertise.
- Creating interactive webinars for leads who are already aware of your services so they can ask very specific questions and view demos.
- And finally, presenting seminars to your existing customers: demoing new features and building the relationship by demonstrating the continued value you have to offer.
Sound relevant to you? Watch the recording here. Oh, and if you haven’t had enough of the webinar theme, Unbounce also recently held a webinar about webinars.
Webinar marketing tip: Wayne fields over 20 minutes of attendee questions in this webinar. This shows his expertise and his willingness to deliver as much value as possible to the audience.
5. Building a Better Social Business Series
Amy Ullman, former inbound marketing consultant for Hubspot, presents this webinar series all about building a better social business. In three acts, she breaks down how to build and execute a social media plan and how to optimize the heck out of it. In the process, she shares how to:
- Identify smart goals for your social media efforts.
- Optimize your time on social media by creating an efficient sharing calendar.
- Analyze social platform data to report on your social media ROI.
- Develop an improvement plan based on collected data.
If you’re in need of a structured social media strategy, or if you think your current plan has room for improvement, check out the recording here.
Webinar marketing tip: For each of the webinars in the series, Hubspot provides a list of “next steps” and resources so attendees can make changes to their social media plans while the presentation is still fresh in their mind. Super actionable!
6. Leveraging Marketing Psychology to Boost Revenue Per Session
Presenters Ryan Urban and Sean Shahparast are in the business of CRO at Bounce Exchange, a company that makes automated marketing software to capture abandoning visitors.
Accordingly, this webinar has one goal: to help ecommerce companies improve their conversion rates. Throughout the webinar, Ryan and Sean:
- Play a “Pick the Winners” game, where audience members must guess the winner of real-life A/B test examples.
- Share the psychology behind the winning variation.
- Share many actionable tactics about landing page, product page and checkout page optimization.
This is a fun, fast-paced presentation. Check it out here.
Webinar marketing tip: This is a great example of a webinar that engages the audience by making the presentation about participation.
7. Agile Content Marketing for Increased Conversions
Heidi Bullock of Marketo starts off this webinar with an encouraging statistic: 68% of consumers spend time reading content from a brand they are interested in. If you have a blog, that’s good news, but how do you turn those readers into customers? Heidi breaks down how to:
- Measure the ROI of your content marketing in relation to goals you have set.
- Determine which content is appropriate for which stage in the buying process.
- Know which content should be gated and on which social channel.
- Leverage your content at various stages of the customer lifecycle by repurposing it (with tons of suggestions on how to do this).
If you’re a content marketer, this one is a must-see.
Webinar marketing tip: At the end of the presentation, Heidi pauses on a slide of “Tweetable Takeaways.” This encourages people to spread the word and also serves to summarize all of her key points in a digestible format.
8. The 3 Landing Page Mistakes That 98% of Marketers are Making
This cheeky webinar breaks down three all-too-common landing page mistakes that Oli has observed time and time again. And while you could belong to the 2% of the marketing population who is doing it right, you may also unknowingly be killing your conversions. Don’t be a statistic. Find out:
- What attention ratio is and why many people are killing their conversions by neglecting it.
- What messages match is and why there are so many terrible examples of it in the real world (on Google).
- How to use the elements of conversion centered design to make sure that all of the design elements on your landing page are aligned to a single, conversion-centered goal.
- What conversion coupling is, why it’s such a rare spotting in the wild, and what it has to do with Topher Grace…
No doubt you’re a smart marketer. But you want to be sure you’re not making the embarrassing mistakes that 98% of marketers out there are making, right? Just in case, watch the presentation here.
Webinar marketing tip: If you sign up to watch the recording, pay attention to the landing pages you see and the emails you receive. Each one plays a specific role in our webinar marketing strategy, which you can read about in our new ebook below…
You can do it even better
And there you have it: a roundup of eight amazing webinars from companies who are doing webinar marketing well. Our hope is that they will inspire you to kickstart (or revisit) your webinar marketing campaigns and turn them into the revenue-generating beasts that they can be.
If you’re in need of a tried-and-true webinar marketing campaign blueprint, check out our latest ebook, the Smart Marketer’s Guide to Webinar Marketing – just click the CTA below. Coupled with your expertise, it’s all you need to start generating revenue from your webinars this year.
