Webinars are a great way to bring awareness or do group demos of your product. But it’s easy to mess it up. A webinar that yields conversion (new signups and/or payments) requires great planning, some of which can be done using LaGrowthMachine.

Looking to build the strongest webinar strategy? Read-on

Table of contents :

During the first two years of LaGrowthMachine commercialization, we’ve been operating on a closed onboarding process: even though you signed up, you’re added to a waiting list.

This waiting had one main goal: filter out people that signed up only out of curiosity, to do a demo only with people that were really willing to pay.

To identify the highly motivated signups, we were inspired by Superhuman closed access onboarding process, which is highly detailed here. Basically, the idea is to add a few additional steps post-sign-ups that will scare off unmotivated people, typically a Typeform. That Typeform also provided information on the account and should be prioritized on not.

After this, we’d do a personal product tour lasting 55min. Only then would they get access to LGM.

It worked great: 31% of people that had gone through the personal product tour eventually became a client. It’s 3x the average conversion rate. Great, but it doesn’t scale much!

Quickly, because of the increase in signups and word of mouth, we were limited in our capacity to onboard. It became frustrating :

That’s when we gave grouped demos via Webinar a try. The idea :

After two months of experimentation, we can truly say that grouped webinars, when handled well, works great :

If you have a product that is fine for a grouped demo, you should definitely consider it.

Obviously, there is no free lunch: this requires a perfect execution before, during, and after the webinar, to create a customer experience that looks great.

Let’s deep-dive into what you should do and how you should do it.

Livestorm is a perfect tool to host webinars. We had other tools on our test lists, but Livestorm won our heart for many reasons :

It’s easy to set up, and in the end, quite inexpensive.

Obviously :) It will be a key part of your strategy to :

That’s it. Probably some Google Sheet too to sort stuff!

Let’s talk about pre-webinar strategies. First and foremost, the big question, when should it happen? This is the main reason Webinar is a problem: they happen live with a set date.

If they can’t attend, people don’t sign up. Some of them might be in our to get the replay then, but it’s doomed to fail.

Recurring webinars are a great workaround: defining a set day and time each week during which your grouped tour happens, so anybody can attend.

Especially for grouped demo webinars: in the end, the content is the same. If you have a great influx of registrations each week, you’ll be happy to host them.

Having a recurring date makes it easy to have it part of your customer experience! Many product-led companies have weekly group sessions, and they should be embedded in your communication to make sure people are aware and attend.

The goal of a grouped demo is to have people be excited about the topic of the day/product you’re showcasing. For that, nothing is better than group enthusiasm :

You’ve understood: the key to a successful webinar is to have people interact during the webinar.

But to succeed in doing so, you must reach a critical mass of people attending: in our case, we’ve seen that whenever we have lower than 15 attendees, the webinar fails :

Your critical mass number may be different, you’ll need to test it out.

But wait, why should I need 40 registrations if critical mass is 15? Because not everybody will show up!

The webinar average attendance rate is 40%. This means that out of the 40 people, only 16 will probably show up. In our case, our average attendance rate is 60%.

You need to account for this in your registration rate. Do account also that about 51% of people that visit your registration page will eventually sign up, so in the end, for a successful webinar, you need a good reach!

Let’s discuss strategies to build awareness around your recurring webinar.

Since the goal is to onboard customers, it should be part of the customer journey.

At LaGrowthMachine, the invitation is visible two times :

Obviously, you don’t have to be in closed boarding to do the same. Here are some other examples :

If you have a decent amount of signups each week, this should drive a bulk of registrations

Another great way is to outreach to your ICP to invite them to the webinar.

Using Sales Navigator, it’s fairly easy to identify them.

Import your search results or list on LaGrowthMachine, and run a sequence to invite them.

We’d suggest a LinkedIn Then Email sequence, with 2 follow-up (no need to push too much) to invite them to the webinar

Aim for a 3-8% registration rate on average - higher if you’re highly precise in your target and/or have a great product! This means that you’ll have to outreach to 500 people on average per week to make sure you reach your 40 registrations goal!

Did you know that using LaGrowthMachine, you could outreach to people that attended an event on LinkedIn?

Do search for similar events, they are a great source of hot leads. Read our guideline on how to import participants of a LinkedIn Events into LaGrowthMachine

You’ve understood it, awareness of your webinar is key to drive sign ups. It’s fairly easy to reach 3.000-5.000 views per post promoting your webinar.

If your webinar is a grouped tour, then you can use customer testimonials as content leading to your webinar!

The main goal of a webinar is to drive excitement about your product or topic of the day. Especially for a grouped demos.

The best way to drive excitement is to have people participate in the webinar via questions.

The problem with most webinar is that you wait until the end to take questions :

This is why we recommend to have two people hosting your grouped tour :

Now here’s the tricky part : you have to push your participants to ask questions for this to work, regularly :

The difficult part is to have your first 3-5 questions. Once people see your moderator does provide a lot of answers live, and that you both care, you’ll see people asking a lot more questions.

Hack: you can have a fake attendee asking questions to initiate that process :-)

Another critical role that the host has is to choose that few questions that the host will reply live. If done very well :

When you have a good duo, it feels very natural and is a great way to make the webinar smooth and engaging. Instead of the usual dreadful 1 hour alone time...

Another way to drive a bit of engagement is to use polls. Polls are another great feature from Live, where you can ask questions with pre-filled answers.

They are extremely useful for :

You guessed it, they are part of your script and should be planned ahead of time.

Let’s take our process as an example :

I’m not going to list every poll that we have, but you get the idea! And, should the audience not be asking many questions, they’re a great back up instead of finishing up early.

“I see we have a lot of people that want to use Twitter. Let’s side-track so I’ll show you how!”

Like any good demo, everything is scripted. But it should also feel very natural.

Great salesmen are able to make people believe they aren’t in a demo, but a casual conversation. But it’s always a script well executed.

It’s the same for a Webinar. If you want your duo to work, you must have your polls questions planned. To have questions planned, you must have a script!

The script will also help you plan the quick breaks after each main part of your presentation, while also allowing your moderator to choose the right questions for you to answer live.

Ok, the webinar went great. People were engaged, a lot of questions were answered, polls were sent! You’re only half way through!

Most people will stop there. It’s a mistake! People are probably excited, and you must engage with them.

What’s great about Livestorm is that they provide you with an export of your event’s data. What you must use :

Let’s start with reengaging with people that didn’t show up. If you’ve followed our recommendations, your webinar is recurring weekly, or at least has several dates planned.

Using LGM, import the people that didn’t attend and have a very quick sequence, using both LinkedIn and email.

LinkedIn is the key component here : Livestorm allows you to send a notification to people that didn’t attend. But here why it sucks : It’s a marketing email : it’s impersonal and people don’t care about it.

Using LinkedIn, and a quick follow-up via email, is a great personal touch. Why great?

Because it drives 41% to register for the next session!

Here’s our sequence on LaGrowthMachine :

Keep it simple and natural, it works great :

Easy, yet so powerful! 41% of people register again!

After reengaging absent people, you now must take care of people that attended. They are two categories of people :

You guessed it, we’ll use LaGrowthMachine for that!

You have multiple ways of segmenting the leads :

Then, proceed to segment according to your ICP. The classic :

You know the drill.

It’s probably not worth your time to engage en 1:1, but always nice to interact with them. The goal :

Here’s our sequence:

They’re mass-market, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push them the right way :)

High priority accounts are the golden goose. Those that you absolutely want them to convert. The sequence above won’t be enough, you have to make them feel special.

Two strategies :

If it’s a B2B startup in early Series A stage : “your sales team is fairly young, but it’s precisely the moment to make the right choice in tools and outbound strategy”

And so forth… Or even better, you can do them manually!

Here’s our sequence :

Here’s how Agathe sequence looks then

About ⅔ of people book a 1:1 meeting. Great success !

We’ve shared with you the basics. Obviously, you can do more :