Webinars for All Stages of your Marketing Funnel

Looking for new tactics to build out and enhance your marketing funnel? Webinars are a great addition to your marketing plan that can be used at all stages of your marketing funnel. Consider how you can use webinars for lead acquisition or to move your customers further down the marketing funnel by turning interest into consideration and ultimately through to the conversion phase with a purchase or sign up. Enhance your current activities to help drive brand new leads, or foster current leads to move them further down your funnel — adding a webinar campaign just might be the answer.

Never planned and hosted a webinar? We’ve got you covered with everything you need to know on how to host a successful webinar including tips and tricks.

The basic marketing funnel

Before you can start to incorporate webinars to boost your marketing funnel, let’s go over a basic marketing funnel to guide us. The marketing funnel is a business concept about how you will need to attract as much interest with as many people or leads as possible, and then nurture them through stages until they finally become customers. Of course, not every single lead you attract initially will convert, so that’s why we call it a funnel. The top is larger and then narrows as some leads fall away. The four stages of the marketing funnel we will reference today are awareness, interest, consideration, and conversion.

Awareness: At the top of the funnel you cast your widest net to create an awareness level to capture the most potential new leads. 

Interest: This stage of the funnel is where you are creating interest in your brand and services and increasing engagement with the lead.

Consideration: The lead is now considering your brand and will be ready for specific information, demos, and use cases.

Conversion: At the bottom of the funnel, the lead ready to complete the purchase and is now your customer, now you work to keep them happy!

Drive awareness for news leads

The first stage of the marketing funnel is all about creating general awareness for your company, product, or services. Other marketing activities that help to drive awareness include advertising, media coverage, social media, and sponsorships. The type of webinars that are useful to create awareness should cover more general content, such as industry-wide topics including industry pain points, or deliver thought leadership from a notable executive or company leader. Webinars that can support your top-of-funnel activities are meant to create new awareness for your brand with a topic that has broad appeal. Users signing up for these types of webinars will be entering at the top of the funnel.

Increase interest 

Next, if you need a new tactic to build up the interest portion of your funnel, this is a great opportunity to partner with another company that compliments your brand. Partnerships build credibility for your brand that can generate interest with existing leads already in your funnel. Plus using partners to cross-promote marketing events such as a webinar is a great way to bring new leads into your own marketing funnel from their customer database. Other webinars you might consider developing for this stage of the funnel can be more specific about the industry or focus on a subject matter that your brand offers expertise in or a solution for. People love tips or tricks type of content, so you could develop a webinar with tips on finding success in your industry. At this point, the webinar content should still remain more general, as the leads may not be ready to have a deep dive into your product or services, but you are increasing their interest. 

Create consideration 

The consideration stage of the marketing funnel is finally the opportunity to promote all of your features, benefits, and specifics to your products and services. The leads you are engaging with at this point are ready to learn more about your brand. These leads are most likely considering whether your company meets the criteria of what they have been looking for. Now is the time to start showcasing use cases or testimonials in your webinar content. Leads will enjoy learning how another customer utilizes your brand and what problem is solved or the benefits of use. A short demo webinar is also a good option at the consideration phase. The lead hasn’t converted yet, but give them a glimpse into your product or services so they have an idea of what their experience will be as a customer. The webinars focused in this stage of the funnel are most likely going to be smaller audiences, or perhaps you offer them as one-on-one opportunities with a sales representative. The lead is much more qualified at this stage of the funnel so dedicating someone to them is a better investment at this time.

Conversion content

The final stage of the marketing funnel will make all of your previous efforts worth it when the lead converts by making a purchase to become a customer! This conversion phase is not a time to relax however, now you want to turn a new customer into a happy customer. Consider hosting a webinar for new customers to cover areas of the product or as an engagement tool to get feedback or to answer questions. This stage of the funnel is another chance to focus on webinars that might include fewer attendees but is creating loyalty to your brand through customer service. New product launches are also great content for a webinar at the conversion stage of the marketing funnel. It’s your current customers who will benefit the most from updates that make their purchase even more valuable.

So many webinars, so little time

Everyone develops their marketing plan and marketing funnel according to their own business needs and resources. The webinar content and ideas we have outlined above might seem like a lot, so we want to remind you that you don’t need to develop a webinar for every stage of your marketing funnel — rather webinars are useful tactics to incorporate when you need something new! And it definitely isn’t the case where one webinar “fits all”. Choose to develop a webinar on the stage in the marketing funnel you need to focus on the most.

Webinars are campaigns

In addition to understanding the basic marketing funnel, it’s a good reminder that webinars are more than just a virtual event with attendees. Webinars are their own campaigns that you can use to capture new email subscribers, promote with social media advertising, include in your email marketing, and even generate earned media if the webinar is particularly notable. Post webinar marketing is also ripe for driving lead engagement. After the webinar is over, you have another chance to connect with everyone who is registered through emails or social advertising re-targeting. Make sure you turn the webinar recording into more content to promote too. You might also decide to follow up your webinar with special offers or additional content that will move leads towards being customers. Webinars allow for many opportunities to connect with your leads.

Webinar content to impress

During your webinar campaigns, you may decide to leverage existing content such as eBooks, white papers, case studies, or blog posts. Offering specific content as part of your webinar is another great idea. Produce a template or checklist that you will share with your attendees as a takeaway and resource that keeps your company front and center when they use the content. Make sure the webinar content looks professional and is optimized to share online. Don’t just use clunky PDF files, but rather you can publish and share beautiful digital content with your webinar attendees on Issuu.com. Issuu makes it easy to screen share sleek eBooks during a webinar or email a downloadable template for your attendees. Issuu converts PDF files and more into digital files with a unique link that is easy to share — file size and formatting issues are a thing of the past on Issuu! In fact, you can even publish the webinar deck including the webinar recording link on Issuu for seamless post webinar marketing too. 

Ready to develop a webinar for your marketing funnel? Don’t forget to check out how to host a successful webinar including tips and tricks we’ve developed after many years of hosting webinars to increase lead conversions. Need even more webinar examples? Explore the current Issuu webinars and check out previous webinars too. As you can see, webinars are an awesome way to fill your marketing funnel and enhance your content marketing too.

Hey marketers, content creators, publishers and more, Issuu digital publishing is a powerful tool in your marketing tech stack, find the right Issuu plan and join today!