How to Use Webinars and Attendee Intelligence to Turn MQLs into SQLs

Over 60% of businesses leverage webinars to fuel their lead-generation strategies. 38% of marketers believe webinars provide more leads than other channels. 

Clearly, webinars are one of the most effective sources of marketing qualified leads, but how many turn into paying customers? And how can companies create a more effective pipeline?  

The solution is data analytics, which gives you vital information about your leads and helps you turn MQLs into SQLs. To uncover how marketers can get more out of their event data and data for events, Hubilo's Director of Field and Product Marketing, Kathleen (Timbol) Abdeen, was joined by industry veteran Johanna Reyes, the VP of Segment Marketing at Bombora. 

Here are the key takeaways from their discussion.

Build relationships with data to take the guesswork out of marketing.

With such a dynamic market and evolving customer expectations, knowing what exactly strikes a chord with your target audience takes time. Industry leaders recommend gathering data to truly understand their target audience better and using it to guide their plans.

The key to converting your visitors into paying customers is identifying their pain points, showing them what you can do to address them, and ensuring a great experience. Data helps you get exactly what you need to know about your customers. 

For instance, consider your content team, who receives valuable customer insights from this data, to create pieces that deliver your brand value and USP more effectively. Knowing what your customers love and interact with, you can precisely pinpoint the areas that help you nurture the relationship you build with them.  

Event hosting platforms such as Hubilo help you gain access to this data and know what exactly your audience is engaging with. Or get their pulse to schedule further touchpoints. 

Using intent data effectively throughout the customer journey

Once you've captured the required data, the next step is to use this essential intent data. The most crucial aspect, however, is how you're using this data. 

Johanna suggests the following steps to break down this overwhelming task:

• First and foremost, use data to build your audience. For instance, analyze the market if you have a topic you want to cover. Check out the companies that are currently interested in the topic. You can also scan the target accounts you want to go for and see what they're interested in. Once you know that, send them an invite to the webinar and casually get into their heads using those primary and secondary topics. 
• Secondly, invite lookalike companies to your target account list and start the net new lead gen process with them. Gain insights about the customer journey before, during, and after the webinar.

Read and Learn: How to Harness Webinars for a 2X Pipeline Boost

Adding personalization to webinars or events

By now, marketers know that personalization is crucial to getting even a hint of attention in all the noise. Personalization is how your audiences know you empathize and recognize them more thoughtfully.

To better personalize your next demand gen webinar or event, consider checking off these objectives:

• Does the message resonate with my audience? 
• What activities are they performing before and after registering for the webinar? 
• Which pages are they visiting, and how far are they getting into the content?
• Are they ingesting specific content for that webinar topic?
• Did I incorporate what I already know they're interested in?

It is also good to scan the email data to know whether they're engaging with the content and which subject lines appeal to them the most. Finding these answers will give you signals you can use to pivot during the activation stage, get the message across that they want to hear, and get them excited to join.

Addressing challenges associated with using webinars for lead generation

Quality lead generation can be challenging with webinars. Johanna suggests the following strategies for fewer headaches with lead-gen: 

• Align your goals to your strategy and your webinar to your goals. A strategy gives you clear direction from the planning stage so your cross-functional teams are on board and marching toward the same goal.
• Leverage all event and intent data to nurture your leads authentically. "It's tough to know how to prioritize that nurture, and I think that results in a lot of nurture follow-ups being just okay," Johanna says. "You get four emails, and these are the set content pieces — they're not personalized, they're not addressing perhaps some of the questions that came up in a webinar that you brought up."  

• A great way to address this is to get into the data to know what kind of content your audience is interacting with or what they have questions about — this is the key to personalizing your content in a meaningful way.

Best practices to use engagement data after an event

Arm your cross-functional teams to put the data to work. "One crucial aspect is inviting salespeople to listen to the webinar. This allows them to listen and identify the right product or service due to the questions that may be asked in the webinar," states Johanna. "Post-webinar, they can aggregate this data to activate the nurture in the right way. The timing is essential, and I do stress that because there are certain times when people want this beautiful package. You are a week after the webinar, and the data is now stale. We like to say that intent data is refreshed weekly, so it has the shelf life of dairy."

No matter what you want to know about your customers, the right way to do it is through data. We agree with Johanna when she says, "don't give up on data." 

Visit Hubilo Insiders for the complete webinar, and check out the many more we have planned for event marketers and sales professionals like you.