How to build a powerful webinar series to drive engagement & revenue

Webinars are now a top demand generation strategy for 95% of marketers. The last thing you want to do is prepare a webinar series where no one engages with your content. Or worse, no one even attends.

So, how do you create the kind of online experience that your audience remembers and wants to tune into?

Well, good thing you’re here because I’m going to tell you the most important steps to executing the webinar series strategy you’ve been dreaming of.

These are the 7 steps we’ll cover to help you build a powerful webinar series that drives conversions:

Step 1: Understand what your audience cares about
Step 2: Define a repeatable process
Step 3: Prepare your content ahead of time
Step 4: Drive webinar registrations
Step 5: Optimize for show rates and engage attendees during the webinar
Step 6: Follow up, iterate, and repurpose
Step 7: Distribute high-intent leads to your team to nurture further

Now, let’s dive in!

1. Understand what your audience cares about

To get started you need to tap into the mind of your audience.

Ideally, you already have a good idea of what your audience cares about from past product, competitor, and customer research. Once you can answer this question, it will be easier to outline what you want to achieve and how to directly appeal to your community.

Listen to sales and customer success calls, join conversations in communities, see what people are saying on LinkedIn, and have one-on-one interviews with people that fit into the target audience you are looking to engage with. Maybe you’ll even find some thought leaders you can invite as speakers along the way!

As you are documenting insights on what your audience cares about, you can start looking for recurring themes. These themes will be your fuel to develop effective webinar series content.

2. Define a repeatable process

This first step is core to setting the stage for your series. Without it, you won’t have a framework for adapting and growing your webinars into powerful lead-generation engines.

No matter what you want to achieve with your webinar series, you are most likely going to be collaborating with various people. To make sure you and your team know exactly what needs to be done and when you should create a comprehensive process with a base timeline.

For example, my team and I host a weekly webinar series called Game Changers that brings in some of the most influential marketers in the world. Because there are events each week, we need to make sure the recurring process is 100% clear, every person involved knows their role, and the process is efficiently using automation and hand-offs.

One thing to keep in mind that is pivotal in the success of every engaging webinar are the tools you use to make the process as seamless as possible & hone in on engagement. I recommend using a solution that hosts your webinars on your website so that you can collect all the attendee behavior right in your web analysis tools.

Other helpful features you should look out for are automated email reminders & signup flows, attendee engagement features (ie. polls, chat, etc.), and AI repurposing features that allow you to take your webinar content and turn it into articles, social posts, and more.

There are a lot of other moving parts when executing a webinar series. The good thing is we’ll dive into each part in the following steps.

3. Prepare your content ahead of time

At this stage in your process, you will be focusing on 3 things:

Alignment
Content
Assets

Align with the speakers

Once you have decided on who will be your guest speaker(s), it’s important to get them comfortable with the technology you are using, the host and/or other speakers involved, and the content they will be speaking about. The more comfortable they are, the more fluid & engaging the conversation will be. No webinar attendee wants to listen to someone reading off a script – am I right?!

To do this, you will most likely be engaging with the guest speaker at least 3 times. Once, to discuss potential topics, once to do a dry-run, and once to appear on the live webinar.

*Note: When you are aligning with the speaker on the content of the webinar, make sure it aligns with what your target audience cares about, provides valuable insights, and connects to your overarching webinar series theme.

Outline the topic and webinar content

Once you have spoken to your partner, you will have a better idea of what the core topic of the webinar will be based on their expertise. You’ll then need to outline all the questions and topics that should be covered, keeping in mind the flow between each point.

Don’t forget to send them the final draft so that they can prepare before they hit the stage.

This topic outline will be the main source of truth that you can use to define the:

Event title and description
Key takeaways
Promotional messaging (e.g. email and social media copy for your company, guest(s), team, etc.)

Create branded assets

It’s best to be as consistent as possible with the branding around your webinar series — just like you would a company brand. That being said, you can build templates that help you create assets more efficiently for every webinar. Think about templatizing the following assets to make it faster for you to promote and get registrants flowing in:

A landing page or CMS page to embed your webinar and collect form submissions
A feature image for the webinar, highlighting the core topic and speaker(s)
A post-webinar video clip design where you can share the key takeaways on social media
A promotional banner for your website and/or platform

Check out this example from Carta. They create a branded experience for attendees by making sure that:

Their webinars are embedded on their website, so they don’t need to update the design for every event
Their featured image clearly shows what the webinar is about
If you take a look at their social media, you can also see these assets carried out through their promotion plan

4. Drive webinar registrations

When done well, a webinar strategy is a superfood for the entire organizations. Sales and marketing can work together to identify key accounts in the pipeline to invite and establish high intent within a lead list.

That’s why your distribution and promotion is so important. Without a distribution plan, your audience might not even know your webinar series exists – meaning less leads coming into the pipeline!

Consider tapping into the channels you used to understand what your audience cares about. If you don’t already have a distribution or promotion strategy for your content, think about starting with what you know and continuously testing other channels.

For example, you might already have a great following on social media. Start promoting your series there while testing channels like specific communities or activating partners. Once you have the results from your tests you can hone in on the channels that work best for bringing in registrants.

Here are some other channels outside of social media that you should consider to attract more people:

Inviting people through email and your newsletter
Empowering speakers to build awareness by providing them with creative assets
Working with partners to promote to their community
Adding a website banner or pop-up
Sharing the event in various communities

5. Optimize for show rates and engage attendees during the webinar

This step will be as easy or as hard as you make it for yourself. One of the most effective methods to get people to attend your webinar live revolves around emails. You can send out emails, reminding people to sign up for the event manually (1 week before, 1 day before, and the day of), but we all know those should be automated. This is where your webinar tool should come in handy.

If your webinar platform doesn’t send automated reminders to webinar registrants, create an email template that is at least a little bit quicker to send manual email reminders. But if I were you, I’d go the automation route. It makes your life so much easier!

Once you go live and your audience is buzzing with excitement, it’s your job to keep them from dropping off. Let me reiterate that: you need to be SO engaging that they don’t want to leave. No pressure!

Here are some tactics for engaging live webinar attendees:

Ensure them that the recording will be available (don’t forget this as people will ALWAYS ask)
Ask them to comment in the chat where they are tuning in from and what they are most excited to learn from the session – this is my personal favorite
Prepare polls that are relevant to topics throughout the discussion to get the audience’s perspective
Allow attendees to ask questions or even hop on stage with the speakers
Send out resources or giveaways that are exclusive to live attendees
Encourage people to engage with each other or better yet, break out into smaller networking groups
Use a tool that allows live reactions using emojis. It might seem like a detail, but it makes the whole experience so much more engaging and the speakers feel more comfortable getting instant reactions from an audience they can’t see.

Also, if you are using the chat, it’s always nice to have at least one person manning people’s messages to make sure everyone’s questions are answered.

‍Sophia Amoruso is a true Girl Boss when it comes to engaging webinar attendees. In her series “Anyone can start a business”, she is personable, asks the audience questions, and encourages people to connect in the chat. She even offers special freebies at the end of the session to keep the excitement going throughout the show!

6. Follow up, repurpose, & iterate

So you are hosting a killer webinar series, but it’s not over after you end each session. It’s now time for you to do 3 important tasks:

Follow up with registrants

Send everyone that registered a short recap with resources and a link to the webinar recording. You can customize this message for people that attended live and the ones that weren’t able to make it. The nice thing is that if you host webinars directly on your website (meaning the live and on-demand versions are embedded into the page), you can send the same link from the registration page since the webinar replay is automatically available after every session.

Repurpose the content into other formats

Being in marketing, you know how important it is to repurpose content into various formats to attract more people. But it can take a lot of manual work – if you don’t have the right tool.

To make this process easier, I use Sequel AI. It’s connected to the webinar tool we use – actually, it’s built directly into our webinar tool. Where the real magic happens is after a webinar ends. I immediately receive the webinar replay (which is automatically on-demand on our website), the webinar transcript, a social post highlighting the key takeaways, AND… an SEO-optimized blog post!

Now, if we are talking about creating content at scale you can’t get much better than this. As a Content Marketer, I wish I had this ages ago. I don’t like to admit it but there were too many times when I let amazing webinars stay as is without repurposing it. But I am happy to say this is a thing of the past – for me and marketers around the world!

What worked & what didn’t

This is an opportunity for you to find out how to consistently improve your series and engage your audience at a deeper level.

Did you learn something throughout the process that you could implement next time? Maybe you should try promoting through different channels to reach your audience better.

Record these learnings, find the ways that you can improve and continue bettering your bulletproof lead-generating webinar series.

7. Distribute the high-intent leads to your team to nurture further

73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say that webinars are the best way to generate quality leads. So it’s important to create a strategy that aligns closely to your audience’s interests and nurtures them to take the next step in the buying process.

Generally, your goal is to get them to your website. If they are already there, it’s easier for you to create a seamless next step in their journey. This might be a newsletter CTA but many times it’s nice to show your audience that you’re there for them when they want to check out your product. And voila! That’s where the beautiful high-intent CTA comes in.

Final thoughts

Webinars are one essential tool for marketers.
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To maximize engagement and revenue, we must understand what the audience cares about, define a repeatable process, prepare content ahead of time, drive registrations, optimize for show rates and engage attendees during the webinar, follow up, iterate, and repurpose, and distribute high-intent leads to the sales team.

By following these 7 tactical steps, you’ll be able to create a memorable and valuable online experience that drives conversions and helps achieve business goals.

Remember, successful webinars require collaboration, careful planning, and consistent branding. With these steps in mind, no doubt you’re on the right path to build a successful webinar series that drives engagement and revenue.

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