.png)
I once had a conversation with a Head of Marketing for a B2B tech company. She shared with me that it had been difficult getting Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from digital campaigns that fit their target audience.
They had recently started doing webinars due to the pandemic and needing to pivot from their typical marketing strategy of physical sponsored and networking events.
The problem was these webinars created a lot of brand awareness but little to no sales opportunities that justified the investment to leadership.
What she described is what a lot of Marketing leaders struggle with...proving marketing's value.
In this article we're going to break down our Go-to-Market Content Strategy for a company that generated 20 highly qualified leads for a new product launch, to an existing customer segment using webinars.
Hopefully, after reading this you will gain insights and ideas to help you avoid or overcome similar challenges with generating better quality leads from your webinars and other marketing campaigns.
The article is broken up into two parts:
The process used to gather insights on our target audience
How we used those insights to develop and execute our strategy
It's also important to mention that we hosted two separate webinars.
The first was used as a way to deliver value to our target audience as a 'warm up' activation play to reinforce affinity for the brand. We also used it as a way to gain early insights and positive signals that we were on the right path.
The second webinar is where we took the insights gained to develop our Go-to-Market Content Strategy and to introduce the actual product to said target audience.
Gathering Insights from Our Target Audience
1. Created Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
The first thing we did was to develop who our ideal audience and eventual customers would be for this webinar. Typically, I would advise against developing any sort of customer profile without first doing extensive research.
However, in this case it was not needed since it was an existing customer segment and we already had enough insights from previous research to develop our profile.
2. Subject Matter Expert (SME)
The next thing we did was source and sought the advice of a SME who would be the presenter for the webinar, and also give us an idea of what topics we should cover.
The reason we took this approach is because this particular SME had years of experience and expertise with this customer segment. So they would already have deep knowledge of what are the challenges of this segment, and what would be of interest to them.
Based on their guidance we decided on three potential topics for the webinar
3. Surveyed 10 Existing Customers
We surveyed 10 existing customers to decide which would be the most popular topic they would be interested in. Then we went with that topic for the webinar.
4. Webinar Assets
We then created our webinar assets such as flyers to promote the webinar, copy for the ad campaigns and a event signup landing page to collect registrants' information.
5. Targeted Ads
Finally, we ran targeted ads to our defined ICP to drive signups for the webinar.
Though our target was 50 registrants we drove over 300 signups for this webinar. We believe a part of the reason for this overwhelming response was because we took the time to really learn which content would resonate and be most relevant to this customer segment.
What it also did for us was to validate the topic we had chosen had great interest among this particular segment.
Though we were pleased with the numbers we still wanted to stick with our goal of 50 to keep it more intimate and personalized.
To solve a very good problem we prepared a survey to be used to gather deeper insights on the challenges and needs of this customer segment.
We sent an email to all registrants apologizing that we were oversubscribed, and explaining we would only be taking the first 50 to take our survey. In less than 48 hours we had our 50.
Once we gathered all the responses the next step was to sift and sort through them.
Now this can be a bit overwhelming so we used a method where we took the most common responses on the challenges they were experiencing and created similar groupings called Struggle Themes.
This allowed us to better analyze the data at a high level, and quickly identify common patterns without having to constantly be sifting through mountains of data. The video below gives a brief walk-through of what that process looks like.
Once done, now it was time for us to use the insights gathered to build and execute our Go-to-Market Content Strategy.
Building and execute our strategy to generate qualified leads
Once we executed the first webinar we gained a lot of insights both from survey responses as well as interactions and questions asked during the actual live webinar. We used these insights to develop our strategy.
In order to build a cohesive strategy we focused on four areas:
Positioning and Messaging
Content
Ad Campaigns
Go-to-Market Execution
Positioning and Messaging
This is how your target customers perceive the value you deliver, how you are different and unique from your competitors that offers the same service, and finally how you communicate that value and uniqueness.
We focused our positioning and messaging around the top three challenges mentioned in survey responses and paired them with solutions mentioned in said survey, then communicated the value in line with our offer.
Content
The content assets that needed to be created that are relevant to your target audience in order to create demand for the product, how you map that content across their buyer’s journey, and how you will deliver that content to them at the right time and place.
For us these were blog posts, email newsletters and sub-content for distribution across the main social channels (Instagram and Facebook)
Ad Campaigns
The ad creatives and copy needed to be created that resonates with your target customers that communicates what you offer and the value they will get from it, and how do those campaigns tie into your overall marketing and sales process to reach your target buyers.
These specific campaigns were less about generating leads and more about driving signups for the second webinar (which we leveraged to generate qualified leads).
Go-to-Market Execution
Your overall approach to launch and introduce this new product offering to your target customers to drive leads, signups and revenue, and finally what and who needs to be involved to execute to make it a successful.
This included running ads for webinar signups, our Subject Matter Expert who presented on the topic and our partner who added greater credibility to the offer introduced at the end of the webinar.
The video below gives a break down of what that buying process looked like for our Go-to-Market Content Strategy.
Here's the summarized version:
Ran ads to drive signups for the second webinar
Hosted the webinar and presented on topic
At the end introduced offer to gauge interest
Placed a link in webinar chat for those interested
Link lead to landing page to collect lead info
Passed info to Sales to follow up
Continued nurture emails around offer
Repurposed webinar content for continuous engagement after
At the end we were able to generate 20 qualified leads out of 100 webinar attendees, a 20% conversion rate of attendee-to-marketing qualified lead.
In Summary
The key to generating quality leads from webinars or any content execution we believe comes down to three things:
Creating a specific and detail profile on who you want to target (focused on one audience or customer segment)
Taking the time to truly know and understand your chosen segment
Delivering content that resonates and is relevant to them where you present solutions to their challenges and associate it with your offer
If you found value in this article here's how else I can be helpful
Follow me on LinkedIn - I post content Monday to Friday around how to fuel your revenue growth by building your brand authority, generating better lead quality and creating more sales opportunities from your content
Book a free consultation - I'll assess your website and social media content and provide feedback on what you can do to improve your results from your content