Wayne Lockwood: How to Generate More Leads from Your Webinar Recordings

Thursday, 9 March 2017

How to Generate More Leads from Your Webinar Recordings

Author: Jon Spenceley

Everyone loves attending webinars, right? They provide you with all the education from a conference session without having to leave your desk or change out of your pajamas. But for many marketers, webinars are a one-trick pony: running the webinar program, getting the leads, following up on questions, and then you’re done. Right? Not exactly.

As more webinar platforms offer users the ability to download a recorded version of the webinar, marketers are realizing that webinars are an excellent evergreen asset. I can attest—unless the product we’re talking about is obsolete or the concepts we’re discussing are outdated, we offer our recorded webinars indefinitely at Vidyard, and we reap the lead generation benefits!

Webinar recordings offer a really great benefit that many marketers overlook: They extend the lifespan of your content for as long as you want to promote it. Webinars take planning, and you promote the heck out of them to build your live audience. Continue to do that with the recording! You can even ask for the same lead information: name, email, job title, and anything else.

In this blog, I’ll explain how you can generate leads from your recorded webinars and make the most of every asset:

Scoring Leads with Recorded Webinars

When someone watches a two-minute video on your website, you can update their lead score pretty easily based on that activity. But when someone watches your recorded webinar, are you scoring them based on their on-demand webinar registration, whether they actually watched the webinar, or how much of the webinar they watched? Someone who watches the whole 45 minutes of your recorded webinar definitely deserves a few more points than someone who drops off after a few minutes!

Here’s an example of how you can score a video view versus a recorded webinar view:

	2-Minute Demo Video	60-Minute Webinar
Pressed Play	2 Points	2 Points
25% Viewed	5 Points	10 Points
50% Viewed	10 Points	25 Points
100% Viewed	25 Points	50 Points

If you’re using a scoring model to qualify leads or accounts, leaving out data on how much of an on-demand webinar a prospect has consumed is a detriment to your program. Accelerate lead flow to your sales team, and start scoring leads by how much they’re engaging with your recorded webinars. An advanced video management platform that integrates with your marketing platform can help you track this data and sync it to your campaigns.

Segmenting and Nurturing Leads

Being able to segment your leads by the amount of video they have consumed is a powerful tool all on its own, but combining it with your recorded webinars is just a no-brainer. Content from recorded webinars is both long-form and high-value, so by segmenting leads based on this data, you can pull a list of, say, folks who have watched 100% of your last webinar or watched 50% of three or more webinars and send them over to your sales team for further qualification.

If you are hosting a product-focused webinar, you can segment your list based on how long leads watched it to enable your salespeople to have more in-depth conversations. Knowing someone stuck around to see the full demo leads to a very different conversation than knowing someone watched a minute or two but closed the window thereafter.

The same goes for nurturing your leads with additional content. Perhaps your are unveiling a new account-based marketing product, and you want to send the announcement to an audience of people who are likely to find the most value in it. You can look at the leads who attended a live webinar on a similar subject, but you can also pull a list of everyone who tuned in for more than 50% of the recording as well. These leads are just as qualified and just as likely to be excited about your new product as those who tuned in live. You can even use the recorded webinar in your nurture track before you launch the product! Send out an email promoting the webinar recording and then flag anyone who watched more than 50% for follow-up.

Improving Your Webinars—The Added Bonus

Recorded webinars are a gold mine for lead generation, especially when you plug viewing data into your marketing platform. But can recorded webinar data help you run better webinars? If your video platform tracks how long specific viewers have watched, what they re-watched, and what they skipped over, you can use this data to see what parts of your webinar resonated with viewers and what parts fell flat. Some organizations have found that their webinars are too long, as few people make it past even 75%. Others have found that while some viewers dropped off during the introductions, others re-watched certain points over and over again, revealing exactly what they were really interested in.

All in all, having real-time viewer data on who watched your webinars and what portions they were excited about is powerful data for your marketing, sales, and creative teams. It helps you extend the value of your live webinars well beyond their broadcast date and gives you deep data on what your viewers are really engaging with.

Are you making the most of your webinars by generating leads from the recordings? What other tips and tricks do you recommend?