Three Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Webinars to Attract and Engage New Customers

Have you seen the rulebook for B2C marketing?

Trick question! It doesn’t exist. And even if there was a rulebook for consumer marketing, COVID-19 has changed everything.

B2C marketing is personal. You need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, share a better story about how they can transform their lives, and keep them coming back for more.

As you plan the future of your business in a post-coronavirus world, you need to engage potential customers on their terms. This is where B2C webinars can give you a huge advantage. B2C customer webinars are a great way to make your business more personal, form authentic connections with your community, and write your own rulebook.

Let’s get started. 

Wait… Aren’t Webinars Just for the B2B Crowd?

If you want to create your own best practices for B2C lead generation, take a page from the B2B playbook. B2B companies produce webinars because more than 70% of buyers have used them to make a purchase decision in the past 12 months. And if webinars can help B2B buyers navigate complex solutions, they can definitely help new customers understand your company’s value. B2C webinars are a fantastic way to highlight your products and services, attract new customers, and grow your community.

But there are lots of ways to do webinars wrong. Here’s a quick list of what to avoid:

• A non-stop commercial. People don’t like being sold to, but they love to buy. If your customer base is already carving out time in their busy schedule to learn from you, make it worth their while. 
• A 30-minute monologue. It’s possible to make this work, but you need to be an amazing storyteller. 
• 20 PowerPoint slides with flashy animations. Seriously? This will send your attendees running for the hills. You can do better.

So, if the examples above aren’t the right direction, what are the elements of successful B2C customer webinars? How can you use these online events to attract people to your site, engage new customers, and drive repeat business?

Best Practices to Secure Registrations and Attendees for Your Next B2C Webinar

People crave connection. And if they’re on your, site they’re open to learning something new. Webinars merge these twin interests to tell a more powerful story. Here’s how to launch a successful B2C webinar series:

• Write a list of potential webinar topics based on keyword research and your ideal customer profile.
• Be consistent. Pick a day to broadcast your webinars and stick with it. Treat B2C webinars like a blog, a podcast, or any other form of content. If you’re consistent, it will be easier for you to schedule your webinar and easier for your audience to plan their schedules around it.
• Practice beforehand, especially if you’re going to invite guest speakers to share the spotlight with you. Sometimes the best ideas are spontaneous; they come from brainstorming and thinking out loud. You can learn a lot just by bouncing ideas off someone in a rehearsal. Then you can take that same energy into the live webinar.
• Do it live! Treat each of your B2C webinars like the blockbuster event it is. When you do it live, you can take questions from the audience in real-time and give people the answers they’re looking for.
• Have fun! On webinars, people will pick up on the tone of your voice and your body language — sometimes even more than what you actually say. Your enthusiasm will shine through and punctuate your messaging, so make sure to make it exciting!

These are the basic steps to producing successful B2C webinars. But how do you get people to attend once you’ve put all the pieces in place?

• Think “focus group.” Before you announce your first webinar to the masses, plan and produce one just for your top customers. You can either prepare a presentation in advance and take their questions at the end or ask them to submit their top questions and turn the whole thing into a live conversation. Offer them a coupon code in exchange for attending the webinar and submitting their comments and questions. Your biggest fans have valuable insights that can make your next webinar even better. 
• Treat your B2C webinar like a new product launch. Each of your webinars deserves a dedicated landing page where people can register for the big day, top billing in your B2C newsletter, a headline in your email marketing outreach, and buzz on social media. Integrated growth marketing platforms like Act-On allow you to manage all aspects of your webinar campaigns in one place.
• Always bring it back to what your customers want. Again, you can draw inspiration from social media posts, keyword research, and what your competitors’ customers say about their products on review sites. Then record a quick video with the same format as your webinar, “We often get questions about ‘How do you ABC?’ or ‘How do you get better at XYZ? So we’re holding a webinar to answer your questions like this and much more! Join us next week…” You can either livestream these previews through Facebook and YouTube, or record them for playback on Instagram TV. If a guest speaker will join you, invite them to join you on the teaser video.
• Be patient. The more often you do B2C customer webinars, the more you’ll understand what makes them a success. The flipside? You probably won’t get 1,000 highly qualified leads from your first attempt. But good things come to those who wait. And B2C webinars are the perfect complement to everything else you’re doing to generate demand and attract new customers to your business.

Every time you plan a new B2C customer webinar, you should map out three different email nurture campaigns:

1. Emails for your target audience with an invitation to RSVP
2. Another series of emails for people who register, so you can encourage them to share details of the webinar on social media (and also remind them to attend)
3. After the webinar, send an email to everyone who registered and thank them for attending. You can even write two different versions: one for attendees, one for people who skipped out. Both versions should include a link to the recording so they can watch the webinar on-demand. 

Emails in the first two sequences will point people to your landing page where they can register for your email. But the third campaign transforms your webinar from a one-time event into a piece of evergreen content. 

Hosting On-Demand Webinars as a Lead Generation Tactic

Anyone who visits your site is looking for ways to become a better version of themselves. And when they think of your products and services, you should think “on-demand webinar lead generation.” B2C webinars are premium content designed to address your new customers’ questions in depth. If you’ve done your homework, your webinar will be just as relevant one year from now as it was the day you recorded it. 

Once you record the webinar, embed it in a new landing page on your site. Then update the original landing page with a new form to gate the embedded webinar. The same keywords still apply, which means you can add this webinar to your email marketing sequences as well as your organic & paid SEM campaigns. And when it’s time for a refresh — for example, if you have updated keyword results or you identify a new influencer who would make a great co-host — plan a new webinar and begin the whole cycle again.

Plan and Execute Your B2C Webinar Through Act-On’s Marketing Automation Platform

If you wrote your own rulebook for B2C marketing, what would be rule #1?

Allow us to make a suggestion: 

“Give the people what they want!”

Remember, people do not want your product. But they do want a better story about how they can transform into a better version of themselves. 

Producing a successful B2C webinar requires a lot of moving parts, so you need a marketing automation platform that’s up to the challenge. In order to produce a webinar that drives more qualified leads to your site, you’ll need…

• A seamless webinar platform integration
• Automated email nurture sequences inviting people to attend your webinars
• Social media management tools to schedule and manage posts
• Flexible landing pages and form builders to collect your guests’ information

Act-On’s marketing automation platform has everything you need to make your webinars a key part of your demand generation strategy. To learn more, reach out today and schedule a quick demo with one of our marketing automation experts!