Congratulations, your webinar was a huge success! A big number of prospects registered to watch it and now you have a good list of new leads to contact. If that wasn’t the case, don’t worry. We’ve put together a series of posts designed to help you create great webinars of your own.
But recording your webinar is just the start. Because even though the actual date of a webinar might have passed, you can use it to keep generating leads over the long term.
In this post, we’ll tell you how to turn a webinar replay into a real lead generating machine. How can you make sure that prospects keep wanting to access your webinar content at a future date? Read our guide below.
1. How to get the most out of your webinar replay
If you use one of the larger online webinar platforms to produce your webinar, these always give you the ability to download the webinar video. It might be tempting to just put the original webinar straight up on your website. But with just a few tweaks, your webinar video can be a great piece of content to offer prospects at a later date.
1.1 Create your webinar replay video
Once you’ve downloaded the video after the webinar, you can make it more enjoyable to watch as a replay later with just a few minor changes:
- Edit the beginning and the end of the video to cut out any blank screen time or initial on-screen preparations that took place before the webinar. You don’t need to be a professional video editor to do this. It’s easy to do using iMovie (for Mac) or another free video editing tool.
- Add an introduction to give your webinars a consistent look and feel and reinforce your brand image. This isn’t essential, but it is a nice addition. At Plezi, we only started doing this after we’d been producing webinars for a year. There’s no need to be elaborate here. Ours is very simple and we use the same video for both the introduction and the outro of our webinar videos.
- If the webinar is long, or has a lot of different sections, adding a clickable contents screen will be of great benefit to prospects. This will let them watch what they want and replay specific sections of the webinar. Again, this is easy to do using the right tools.
Once you’ve made these changes, your webinar replay is ready to be shared and viewed as a piece of content in its own right.
1.2 How to showcase your webinar replay video
In just a couple of easy steps, you make use of the work you put into preparing for the original webinar to showcase this new piece of online content.
Create a new landing page for the webinar replay.
This is easy to do using marketing automation software like Plezi. You simply need to make a copy of the landing page you created to sign up prospects for the original webinar and make a few small changes to it.
This new page can then be indexed in Google to improve your website SEO and visibility online, both of which will help you to generate more leads.
Create a dedicated web page for the webinar replay
We use WordPress to create web pages for our videos. The idea is obviously to host the video on this page, but you can also include other elements.
Below our videos, we list the questions that were asked during the webinar and answer these. This provides more value for prospects and also lets us provide links to additional content for those who want to learn more about a topic.
It’s also a good idea to add a call to action after the video to a downloadable resource that provides more information on the webinar topic, and which lets prospects continue their buyer’s journey.
Then, in Plezi, just drag the link for the replay page into the email to be sent when prospects complete the online form on your new landing page. This lets prospects access the webinar replay directly from their inbox.
(Plezi’s workflow email with a link to the webinar)
2. How to generate leads with a webinar replay
Once the webinar replay video is online and people can access it, how can you use it to generate leads? How can you use it to help prospects and move them closer to purchase?
2.1 Lead scoring
Lead scoring is a technique that uses marketing automation software to assign each piece of content a specific value or score.
Each time a prospect downloads or views a piece of content, its value is added to the prospect’s overall score, letting you track their buyer’s journey. This makes it easier to determine when this contact should be passed to the sales team.
To assign a webinar the correct score, you need to look at both its content and how close the prospects who register for it are to purchase.
For example, you could decide on the following scoring:
- Awareness stage webinar: 2 points
- Evaluation stage webinar: 5 points
- Purchase stage webinar: 10 points
2.2 Integrate Plezi with a webinar platform to leverage automation
It’s easy to integrate a webinar platform with marketing automation software like Plezi. This simplifies lead management and marketing actions that happen after prospects have viewed the webinar.
This can save you significant amounts of time and let you better manage leads generated by your webinars.
You can configure a Zapier connection to perform the desired actions in just a few minutes:
- Note when a prospect has viewed the webinar
- Increase the prospect’s overall score once they have viewed the webinar
Automating these steps saves a lot of time and means you won’t lose track of a single lead.
Once you’ve adjusted the required settings, you need to put in place marketing actions to continue generating leads after the webinar has taken place.
3. How to leverage webinar content after it has taken place
If a webinar addresses an ongoing challenge or problem that prospects face, this makes it an ideal content format to generate leads over the long term. For example, our webinar on the “3 Key steps to get started in Inbound Marketing“, was created way back when lockdown first began – and has continued to generate leads ever since.
By promoting a webinar replay with a few simple actions, you can help ensure that prospects continue to sign up to view your content.
3.1 Send the replay video and more information to those who registered
Sending an email to those who registered for the original webinar after it has taken place is a key step. Using Plezi, you can quickly create a contact list based on those who signed up for the webinar.
Recipients receive the webinar replay video and also the slides presented during the webinar which people often request while it is taking place.
💡This is also the ideal time to promote additional resources like white papers or instructional kits. If you have an audience that has shown interest in a particular topic, it’s important to provide them with more information if you can. These will be of value to prospects who want to learn more.
(An example of Plezi’s follow up email after a webinar)
3.2 Promote the webinar replay
Once you’ve sent an email to those who registered for the original webinar, how can you continue to use it to attract prospects over the long term? You can do this by promoting your webinar replay using a few targeted marketing actions.
On social media
Posts that include an appealing visual image and which clearly set out the webinar’s agenda or value proposition often work very well on social media.
You can outline the topics covered during the webinar to attract prospects looking to answer a specific question. Or you can share feedback from those who viewed the webinar to help convince prospects of its value. You can also create a post to highlight the expertise of your invited guests. All of these ideas are designed to show those who didn’t watch the webinar when it took place that they really missed out on something.
(A LinkedIn post after a webinar)
In your email newsletter
Your email newsletter is a great place to promote your webinar to a target audience who has shown an interest in your content and the topics it covers. That makes them ideal candidates to share your webinar with.
In a Smart Campaign
Plezi’s Smart Campaign feature lets you send content to prospects who have shown an interest in the webinar topic and who are in the same stage of the marketing funnel as that targeted by the webinar.
At Plezi, the results delivered by a smart campaign are much better than those from either email marketing or complicated workflows. That’s because the smart campaign only targets those interested in the topic of our webinar and who are at the right stage of the funnel.
In calls to action
By adding CTAs to blog posts that cover the same topic as your webinar, you can direct interested prospects to these and improve your conversion rates.
(Plezi’s blog post with CTA’s to a webinar on the same topic)
3.3 Repurpose your content
A particular webinar topic can help generate a whole lot more ideas for content. Repurposing your webinar for other content formats can be a great way to continue generating leads and to easily create additional content. You can use a webinar to create:
- One or more blog posts
- Small videos clips for sharing on social media that make prospects want to view the whole webinar replay
- One or more infographic
- If you’ve produced the webinar in partnership with another organization or customer, a case study or feedback to download
Webinars are a great content format that you can use to both easily generate leads and create other pieces of related content over the long term. So what are you waiting for?
