You spend weeks planning your company’s first webinar. You craft what you think is a compelling topic, send out promotional emails, and cross your fingers. Registration day arrives, and you’re thrilled to see dozens of people signed up. But when showtime hits, only a few attendees join, and most of them drop off early. What went wrong?
Most B2B marketers approach webinars like throwing darts at a board, hoping something sticks. They either rush into creating content without proper planning or get overwhelmed by the workload and give up after one disappointing attempt.
Here’s what I learned from my conversation with Vicki Stepherson: webinars aren’t broken. Most companies treat them like one-off events instead of systematic lead generation engines that require proper planning and execution.
Vicki, Director of Client Services and Events, has transformed webinar programs from struggling weekly events to daily lead-generation powerhouses. “Once we had that goal, we were able to really fine-tune our process, and now we’re generating like 600 leads every single day,” she told me.
The systematic approach Vicki developed eliminates the guesswork from webinar marketing, giving you a repeatable process that consistently delivers qualified leads to your sales team. Building that same approach for your webinar program starts with her proven framework below.
Set Your Webinar Goals First
Most companies use “generate leads” as their goal without specificity. As Vicki explained, “You have to kind of go back and understand like goals and really think about like do you want these to generate a specific number of leads or are you wanting to move a lot people along in your funnel.”
Success starts with clarity about what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Your webinar strategy should align with three distinct purposes based on your company stage and needs:
Goal A: List building for companies under 1,000 subscribers (focus on volume). If you have a smaller list, prioritize getting partners to share their audiences with yours. Focus on building your foundation through partnerships and broad-appeal topics that maximize reach.
Goal B: Qualified lead generation for established lists (focus on quality). Once you have a substantial audience, shift toward precisely targeting your ideal customer profile. Focus on creating content that attracts fewer people but ensures they’re exactly who you want to reach.
Goal C: Thought leadership and brand building. These webinars position your company and executives as industry experts. While they may not generate immediate pipeline, they build long-term credibility and awareness.
Choose Topics Your Audience Actually Wants
Vicki shared her three-point topic framework that focuses on addressing pain points, staying current, and showcasing expertise:
- Pain point topics should focus on challenges your target audience faces daily. These consistently generate the highest engagement because attendees know they’ll get immediately applicable solutions. Vicki discovered that sales teams want tactical content over thought leadership—tangible takeaways they can use immediately.
- Current topics tap into industry conferences and trending discussions. Monitor what’s being discussed at major industry events and create webinars around those themes while they’re top of mind for your audience.
- Expertise showcase topics leverage your company’s unique knowledge or data. Vicki’s compensation company client created a benchmark webinar series that aligned their expertise with audience needs, making follow-up conversations much easier.
Understanding these audience-specific preferences helps you avoid vague, fluffy topics that don’t communicate clear value. As Vicki emphasized during our conversation, “You have to do the research” rather than just throwing ideas out there and hoping they work.
Find Speakers Who Can Hold Attention
Four speaker evaluation criteria separate engaging presenters from those who lose their audience:
Start with topic expertise and audience trust. Look at LinkedIn or industry conferences to identify popular speakers in your space. Your audience should already recognize and respect the speaker’s authority.
Engaging presence matters more than perfect credentials. Check YouTube or podcasts to evaluate speakers’ presentation skills. A knowledgeable but boring speaker will quickly lose your audience.
Promotional reach amplifies your webinar’s impact. Seek speakers with lists they can share or social followings they’ll leverage to generate attendees.
Vicki shared a reality check about outreach: “I’ve had where I have reached out to someone five times, and I’m like, come on, please. And then my like host will reach out and they’ll immediately respond to them.” Sometimes, the right internal connection makes all the difference.
Schedule 30-minute pre-calls for relationship building and content alignment. These calls build rapport and ensure alignment on expectations and webinar flow, reducing the risk of awkward interactions during the live event.
Master the Promotion Timeline
Vicki revealed a counterintuitive truth about webinar promotion: 59% of registrations happen in the final week before your webinar. “If you think about it, like I’m not looking three weeks in my calendar to book something onto my. I’ll wait. And then, but like two days before I’ll be like, oh yeah, I have time,” she explains.
Understanding this timing changes everything about how you should structure your promotional strategy.
- Four-week promotional timeline: Start four weeks out with initial emails to test messaging. Use weeks two and three for social posts and partner coordination, but save your heavy promotional push for the final week.
- Email drives the primary results. Social media amplifies your message, but email generates the bulk of registrations. LinkedIn and other channels create some interest but don’t generate as much as an email will.
- The A/B testing approach helps optimize performance. In the early weeks, test different subject lines and messaging, then use the winning combination during the crucial final week.
- Partnership and list-sharing strategies expand your reach exponentially. Get partners to promote during the critical final week when most people decide to attend.
- Plain text emails outperform designed newsletters. They feel more personal and avoid the deliverability issues that images can cause. Adding images can hurt deliverability.
Execute and Follow Up Strategically
Quality trumps quantity in webinar success measurement. “We’ve also had it where we have low attendance on something, or like registration, but it’s exactly their ICP, right? So like we have, I don’t know, a hundred people show up that are all, like, 80% of them are exactly who they’re trying to reach out to. That’s still a win,” Vicki explains.
A systematic follow-up process maximizes your investment. Segment attendees, no-shows, and drop-offs for tailored messaging. Without proper follow-up, you’re essentially wasting all the effort you put into creating the webinar.
Content repurposing opportunities multiply your webinar’s impact. Transform your recording into blog posts, LinkedIn articles, email sequences, and social media content. If you had a strong guest speaker, they can also help promote the recorded content to their audience.
Pipeline conversion strategies should focus on qualified leads rather than vanity metrics. Track the number of attendees who convert to sales conversations, not just registration numbers.
Webinars provide a unique opportunity for real-time audience interaction that podcasts and recorded content can’t match.
The Six-Webinar Commitment
One of the most valuable insights from my conversation with Vicki was her minimum testing rule: commit to at least six webinars before judging effectiveness. One webinar tells you nothing about what truly resonates with your audience.
Six webinars reveal patterns, preferences, and what consistently works for your specific audience. Experiment with different methods, topics, and timing throughout these six webinars until you nail down your repeatable formula.
Webinars remain one of the few formats people willingly engage with through form fills and live attendance. They’re your direct line to prospects and customers in a way that feels natural and valuable rather than intrusive.
Start with your first webinar, commit to the full six-webinar learning process, and build the systematic lead generation engine your scrappy marketing team deserves.
For a complete step-by-step playbook to implement these strategies, check out Vicki’s comprehensive webinar course with templates, checklists, and everything you need to launch your first high-converting webinar series.
FAQs:
1. What’s a good registration rate to expect from my email list?
You can generally expect around 10-20% click rate for your first webinar email, but the rate varies significantly based on your topic and how well you segment your list. If you have a niche topic sent to a broad list of 10,000 people, you’ll get a much lower rate than a generic topic that appeals to everyone. The key is segmenting your audience so you’re not wasting email sent to people who aren’t interested in that specific content.
2. Should I use paid ads (LinkedIn, display) to promote my webinars?
It depends on your industry. Paid promotion works well for some industries and generates almost nothing for others. The recommendation is to allocate some budget and test it for 2-3 webinars, focusing on the spending during that crucial final week. If it’s only getting you 20 registrations while a good partner list share gets you 400, then redirect that budget toward finding better guest speakers or partners instead.
3. How do I incentivize external guests to speak on my webinar?
Several approaches work: paying speakers directly, offering list sharing (they promote to their audience, you share the leads afterward), letting them promote their books/courses/products during the webinar, or leveraging existing customers who already love your brand. Sometimes, a referral from someone they know works better than cold outreach – it’s common for people to reach out five times unsuccessfully, then have their host reach out and get an immediate response.
4. What’s the best time of day to run webinars?
Generally, between 12 PM and 3 PM in your primary audience’s timezone works best, but you’ll need to research your audience’s location. A 9 AM Pacific time slot works terribly for an audience primarily in the Eastern time zone. Interestingly, there are exceptions—some audiences respond well to unconventional times like 7 PM “happy hour” webinars and even 8 AM sessions, depending on their specific preferences and schedules.
5. How do I handle the content creation process with external guests?
Always schedule a 30-minute pre-call with every guest speaker for more than content planning—it’s crucial for relationship building, so the live webinar isn’t the first time they’re meeting your host. During the pre-call, outline what you want to cover, and listen to the guest’s suggestions since they often know their audience better and can suggest what’s at the top of attendees’ minds right now.
