We talk a lot about the value of webinars – and for good reason.

Why? Here are some of the best things about webinars, in our opinion:

  1. They get you quality facetime with your exact target buyer.
  2. They help you show off your industry expertise.
  3. They’re massively cost-effective.
  4. They’re a win-win: your attendees get valuable information they can apply right away, and you get a list of warm leads who are already pre-sold on your awesomeness. How often does that happen?

Hands down, webinars are one of the best marketing tools for marketing agencies. You can host webinars for clients or strategic partners to help them reach a broader audience, or you can create your own webinar topics to drive more business for your agency. The sky is truly the limit.

Regardless of why you’re creating a webinar, it’s the how that’s important. After all, if you’re going through the effort of planning a webinar, it needs to be as effective as possible.

So how do you increase the effectiveness of your marketing webinars and drive conversion rates up? There are a few different things that need to come together to create the perfect marketing webinar. Once you master these points, you should be able to wow all attendees with your webinar wizardry.

The Perfect Audience

The very first thing you should do when planning your webinar is determine exactly who your ideal audience is. Not having a clear target in mind when creating a webinar puts you at a significant disadvantage because you can’t plan the webinar around your attendees. It needs to be a bit more specific than “potential clients,” too. Here are a few ideas of potential targets to get you started:

  • B2B business leaders
  • People working in a specific industry
  • Individuals holding a certain position in companies
  • Businesses of a certain size (e.g., small businesses, large companies)
  • Consumers who have already made specific purchases

The list could very easily go on. The more specific you are with your target audience, the more effective your webinar will be.

The Perfect Hook

Once you have a target in mind, it’s time to think about the perfect hook to entice members of your target audience. Stop and ask yourself what the people in your target audience care about and how that relates to the purpose of your webinar. Webinars must be as actionable as possible. Otherwise, you’ll see attendees dropping off within the first few minutes – or worse yet, not even showing up.

You should also incorporate some version of your hook in the invitation you send out to clients and others on your mailing lists who fall within your target demographic. Crafting a strong invitation is important to keeping attendance high, and ensuring the webinar invite reflects the same talking points as your hook is one way to accomplish this.

The Perfect Pitch

You’ve identified your audience, you’ve dangled a hook to get their attention — now you need to plan your content so they understand how your agency can address and alleviate your audience’s pain points. This means creating clearly defined takeaways that provides a definite benefit alongside resources or offers that are hard to resist.

You can accomplish this through limited-time discounts, a limited number of offerings (because scarcity will always prompt some sales) or some other angle that creates a clear value to act now. Once you have that pitch in mind, figure out a few points you can include in the webinar that will lead directly to your offers and mentally prepare viewers for the exclusive offer to come.

The Perfect Objection Strategy

You’d be surprised how many webinars don’t include an objection strategy. In live seminars and other face-to-face sales scenarios, it’s only natural to face opposition from potential customers or clients and put their fears to rest to make the sale. For webinars, though, many people just put their pitch out there and make no effort to try and anticipate potential points of objection. If you don’t try to come up with at least three or four points in your pitch strategy where viewers might dig in their heels, you’re all but throwing away those potential sales.

Instead of just taking what sales you can get, anticipate the objections and call out the potential problems people might have with your pitch. Use them as a means to reinforce your pitch and the value you have to offer. Let viewers know about the potential issues, even if not everyone will think of them during the pitch, and drive home how you can prevent them or overcome them. An effective objection strategy will make your pitch look that much stronger and will cement commitments from those viewers who are on the fence.

The Perfect Funnel

By this point, we’ve looked at four of the biggest points of any webinar: identifying an audience, crafting a hook for that target, designing a sales pitch and creating an objection strategy to reinforce that pitch. All that’s left is to bring it all together with a script to move you effectively from hook to pitch without seeming forced, dull or too salesy.

Treat your webinar treatment as just another sales funnel to design, because that’s essentially what your webinar is. Even if you’re just presenting information and aren’t going for an actual sale, your goal is still to sell potential clients on your agency. Design your webinar to funnel viewers from the hook to that pitch, and you’ll see an amazing influx of clients as a result.