However, before even thinking about how webinars can contribute to your business, work on mkaing you webinar a successful one! And for that a unique webinar marketing strategy is needed. And few things are as important as audience engagement when it comes to making a webinar strategy work.
So a question might pop up in your mind that how to execute effective engagement among the webinar audience? Do you need to focus one delivering valuable content to the attendees? Or is there more to a webinar’s engagement rate than just meaningful content?
As per the experts, boosting engagement Which leads to the overall success of your webinar marketing strategy, choosing the ideal audence for your webinar is needed! it is imperative to make sure that you target the right audience. In this article, we will guide you through all you need to know to master the art of webinar audience targeting.
Webinar Audience Targeting – Ways you can reach your ideal webinar audience
A large part of attracting the right audience for your webinar depends on how thoroughly you have researched the market to know whom to cater to. This research involves multiple sources and channels, so it is fool-proof and the chances of success is maximized. The better your research, the higher the chances of targeting your ideal webinar prospects, and in turn, the higher the chances of conversion and overall webinar success.
Here are some tried-and-tested ways to get to know your audience better and ace your webinar audience targeting research:
- Lead Generation Forms – Lead generation forms in your registration landing page will help you to secure information about your prospective attendees. This form can include fields to capture their job titles, the industries they work in, company size, etc which can help you understand your target demographic better.
- Surveys & Quizzes- Just like lead generation forms, you can also conduct surveys on your website for understanding the preferences of your target audience and identify if or not your webinar topic aligns with their interests, helping you to target people more efficiently.
- Pre-Webinar Registration Questionnaire – Create a quick and effective questionnaire for your registrants and have them complete it before the event. This can help you access a variety of data, which you can leverage to guide your webinar strategy. This way you can better cater to the needs of your registrants.
- Networking at Events- A great way to research your audience is by attending industry events and creating a network. You can engage with fellow participants and peers, understand their pain points, their needs and challenges. Inviting relevant audiences from your network to your subsequent event can prove beneficial to you as well as to them.
- Analyze Webinar Chat Comments – Webinars that are hosted on a solid webinar platform give you access to the chat comments, which is a treasure-trove of audience insights. Make sure you go through your webinar chat thoroughly, as this can help you identify the level of engagement among attendees, the questions they have, the concerns they bring up and so much more.
- Join Online Communities – Becoming part of online communities can bring you a wealth of knowledge and insights regarding the industry you’re working on and get a first-hand understanding of audience expectations, preferences and needs.
- Social Media – Social Media is arguably the greatest platform for marketers looking to expand their audience base. But it can also prove crucial in understanding your target audience better. By observing rates of engagement, reach, visibility and other metrics, you will be able to assess what works with your audience and what doesn’t.
- Industry Specific Publications – Being tuned in on industry specific updates via publications can deliver you with some unique perspectives and insights on your target market, allowing you to target your audience with more relevant webinar content accordingly.
Understanding Audience Motivations for Improved Webinar Targeting
So what is the process of defining the ideal target audience for your webinar so that you can leave a lasting impression on them with your message?
Just delivering the message that you want to convey to your audience will simply won’t work. To make a significant impact on the listener’s minds push yourself beyond just listening and guessing demographic traits. Analyze the ideal pain points that can ttrigger your audience and what can motivate them to take a step forward with you.
And as the talk about the motivations of the audience goes, there are primrily two types of motivations, generally seen among participants –
- Intrinsic Motivation – It is a type of motivation that reflects on the internal drive a person is seeking, which can be any sort of personal satisfaction or any emotional connection.
- Extrinsic Motivation – Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, reflects on the external rewards that push a person to take action, which can change their current situation.
Once you’ve started to understand these psychological things which include the challenges that your audience is probably facing, the consequences they want to resolve their challenges, as well as the emotions that guide their decisions, targetingdefining the ideal audience will be a cupcake walk! And as you get to know what they want and what they know, crafting a compelling webinar will be easier which will providing solutions to people’s problems.
Hence, for to make a webinar impactful, addressing the intrinsic and extrinsic emotions of your audience is necessary! A couple of frameworks for addressing these motivations exist:
- The Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory
- The Story Brand Framework Theory
Now we will help you leverage these frameworks with which you can define your audience and provide a unique understanding of your webinar audience targeting!
JTBD -Jobs to be Done Theory
JTBD or ‘Jobs To Be Done’ theory refers to a business theory or a framework which reflects on why customers should buy a particular product or a service. The theory states that people primarily don’t buy a product or a service, their intention is to buy them and make them do the job of solving certain problems or fulfilling certain desires.
How to Define your Audience via JTBD Theory
If you want to make your webinar an effective one, you need to provide your audience with the solution they need to accomplish their job-to-be-done!
For instance – You organize a webinar showcasing your software but if you don’t mention its uses in detail and how the webinar attendees can benefit from the product, there will be zero engagement level and the participants will also lose interest eventually!
Hence, to maximize your webinar ROI based on the JTBD theory, establishing your target audience’s pain points and how your webinar will help them accomplish their tasks better is a must. A webinar can’t be built entirely around a particular product or service; rather, identifying and prioritizing the outcomes that your audience might expect is necessary.
To make this theory work for your webinar, consider answering the following questions:
- Why do your webinar participants need your products or services?
- What is their vision for changing their current life situation?
- What are the outcomes they want to secure?
- What are the obstacles they face that prevent them from changing their life situations?
- How can your product or service help them overcome their present situations?
You can also pose these questions to your webinar attendees whenever it is convenient, be it during your live event, via a website pop-up, social media polls, or through post-webinar surveys!
By collecting this information, you’ll be able to define a better target audience for your webinar and eventually promote your products and services to the people who are really in need of them.
The Story Brand Framework Theory
The Story Brand framework is primarily a marketing methodology that assists organizations clarify their message and communicate effectively with their prospects. The theory states that every brand story should comprise a clear structure for engaging the audience!
How to Define your Audience via the Story Brand Framework Theory
Defining your audience based on the story brand framework theory, needs understanding the wants of your webinar audience ! However at the same time it is also very important to see how they emotionally perceive their challenges, and how they are ready to change their situations. The more you’ll be able tp increase and highlight the emotions of your webinar attendees, greater will be your chances in in creating a killer webinar content.
For example, if you have identified a particular problem that you audience specifically find it confusing, then you can make the topic of your webinar accordingly, and and walk the attendees through the topic in a way that will help them resolve their confusion related to that confusion!
So now, to target your audience via this method, try answering questions like:
- How would your audience feel if they can’t handle the problem they are facing?
- How would your audience feel if they were able to handle the problem?
While working on this theory for defining your audience you’ll also get to know about the emotions of people! You can come through the answers of people by executing social listening on social media, where people express their emotions. This will present you with several words they use, like “I feel,” “anxious,” “annoyed,” “excited,” “relieved,” etc, and then you can implement these keywords during the session, helping your audience relate to your message more!
Primary Ways to Target your Webinar Audience
Here are some approaches you should consider for appropriate webinar audience targeting.
Design a Webinar Strategy
As mentioned earlier a successful webinar comes with a unique webinar strategy. And this unique webinar strategy will also help you to find your ideal target audence for the event that focuses solely on the buyers and their preferences. Ask your audience what matters most to them by asking yourself questions like:
- Who from your organization or the industry would your audience prefer to hear from?
- What are some ideal topics that inform buyer-purchase decisions?
- How can we assist the webinar attendees in achieving their goals or solving their problems?
Based on this, select the webinar topic, speakers of the event, and also the format of the event, which can help you align with your audience’s needs and eventually make your virtual event an effective one!
Engage your audience at the Webinar
Engaging your audience is as understatement! You need to put much efforts to make your webinar interactive so that the audence engagegement at your event reaches its epitome. Try to execute as much engagement as possible in your webinar by incorporating some interactive elements like Q&A sessions, polls, surveys, quizzes, etc, to gather some valuable insights.
The data gathered from this will help you connect with your audience, understand their needs, and also improve your targeting capabilities in real-time.
While we are discussing audience engagement, it is also crucial to note that very few platforms come close to providing as wide a range of engagement possibilities as Airmeet’s webinar platform.
Airmeet AX360, helps you to drive meaningful engagement with your webinar attendees.
But why is Airmeet so ahead of the others? What are the features that help participants to engage with the webinar as actively and effectively?
Glad you ask. Here are some of the engagement capabilities that Airmeet empowers you with:
- Speed Networking
- Breakout rooms
- Social Lounges to Interact
- Fluid Spaces for connections that feel real
- Rich Attendee Profile
- Chats
These aren’t all – It also offers Q&A sessions, polls, emoji reactions, leaderboards, inviting attendees to stage, and social walls, games to add some extra fun!
Align your webinar strategy with the sales team
For a seamless buyer experience post-webinar, make sure that you align your webinar strategy with the sales team. Discuss the webinar audience targeting strategy with your sales team. With their specialized skills in segmenting buyers based on their expectations, they’ll align pitch problems with specific buyer problems and leads and create sales enablement materials, through which you’ll eventually experience greater lead generation and be able to convert leads into closed deals!
Secure the Audience Feedback
As mentioned earlier, by soliciting audience feedback post-webinar, you can understand what their needs are, and based on that, you can structure your upcoming events! On the other hand, by securing their feedback on the webinar you organized, you can also analyze who can be the ideal audience for your next webinar.
On that note, investing in the right virtual event platform is crucial to ensure seamless audience feedback collection. With its unique email marketing feature, you can not only create emails and send them out to your attendees, but you can also create compelling templates which encourage your webinar participants to respond to your webinar feedback requests.
Bottom Line
Remember that the primary focus of event marketers is to always provide value to their audiences, which automatically guarantees success of their events! As mentioned in the article, don’t just rely upon the demographic details of the webinar attendees; rather, delve deeply into understanding them,their needs, demands, expectations, pain points and preferences. Leveraging the right technology can also simplify and streamline this process greatly.
Frequently asked questions
To measure the success of your webinar audience targeting efforts, you need to see if there is an increase in attendance rates, if they are engaging to a better extent than before, if they are providing satisfactory feedback, and how many of the webinar participants are converting into leads.
Some of the common mistakes to avoid in webinar audience targeting are – not overgeneralizing, which is trying to reach a broader audience, ignoring data and metrics that can provide you with crucial insights, and wrong timing of the webinar which makes it difficult for your audiences to attend the session!
