Webinars as a Marketing Tool – Assessing ROI

Web Conferencing solutions are being used with great success to help communicate more efficiently. Interestingly however, businesses have been relatively slow to pick up on Web Conferencing as a marketing tool.
A likely reason for the hesitation in adopting webinars as a marketing tool, is perhaps the challenge marketers see in determining and assessing ROI. Without which it is difficult to validate these marketing efforts.

When considering webinars as a marketing tool, business leaders should consider the bigger picture by tracking and reporting on KPI’s that support the following key areas:

1. Webinar Participation

Participation is a relatively obvious first step – without it your efforts are futile. Outlining KPI’s in the process of registering participants will identify where problem areas are and what can be done to improve the process.
KPI: Conversion from page views to registrations
Analysing information gathered from your webinar micro-site is key in improving your registration experience. The number of views, click through rates on the registration page, and completed registrations will give you invaluable insight as to where in the process you are losing potential attendees.
If your conversion rate from the registration form to completed registration is low, it could be a result of having too many registration questions. These kinds of insights will help resolve any possible issues in getting registrations.
KPI: Registrations
Achieving a good number of registrations is a key starting point in this kind of sales process. Registration numbers start with the promotional effort so if your numbers are low here, analysing and revisiting your topics, target audience, and promotional effort would give you an idea of what you may need to change.
KPI: Attendance
Live attendance is just as important as the number of registrations. These are the people who have scheduled time to engage with the content you offer.
Tracking the average duration of a participant’s attendance may help you better your content delivery – you will know at what point in the presentation the average participant logs out or loses interest. You also can adjust the length of your webinar.
Average live attendance rate also will reveal if your post-registration process needs some fine tuning. If attendance rates are low, rethink your confirmation landing page, confirmation email, reminder emails, and their timing, as well as how easy it is to access the webinar.

2. Enhancing customer engagement

KPI: Engagement scoring
Engagement scores will give you an idea of how interesting and engaging your topics and speakers are, as well as which audience segments tend to be more actively engaged during webinar content delivery.
Track engagement scores across your program, and consider averaging engagement scores across similar webinars, similar audiences or the same speaker. You may also want to consider including engagement scoring in your lead-scoring algorithm if you’re running lead-generation webinars.
KPI: Recording views
Recording your webinar and providing the recording link to all your registrants immediately following the live event is extremely important – so too is the tracking of views of the recording.
If a webinar registrant consumes the content via the webinar recording, this is important information to pass to sales and important to include in any lead scoring you may do.
Track recording viewership overall will help you understand how many webinar registrants are truly interested in your content, but unable to attend live. A recent study of an Adobe webinar program found that 50-60% of webinar registrants watched the recording. When added to the 30-40% live-attendance rate that’s nearly 100% content consumption.
In reporting on webinar ROI, showing a combined content consumption total for each webinar, as well as for the program overall, in addition to the attendance and recording views numbers, will provide a more complete picture.

3. Accelerating buyers through the buyer’s journey

KPI: Post-webinar next step (path takers)
Meticulously track which of your webinar attendees respond to your call-to-action, and present this data in your webinar ROI story.
Every webinar you produce should have a clear call-to-action at the end guiding viewers to the next step in the customer buying journey. Consider presenting a slide at the end of the webinar or during the Q&A session with information on the next step, such as a link to a product trial. Ensure that you reiterate the call-to-action in a post-webinar follow-up email.

4. Identifying shoppers early

KPI: Content consumed live
Strategically providing further content for webinar attendees to look through during a live event will give you information on the audience’s level of interest in particular areas. Making a product-solution brief available for download during the live event via file share, could indicate which attendees are shopping and considering your product.
If an attendee downloads an eBook on best practices related to your product, that might indicate that she is the right person in her organisation to talk to, but she may not be shopping yet. Offering further resources such as product briefs, even in a thought-leadership webinar, allows prospects to accelerate themselves through the buying cycle.
If you provide similar files across your webinar program, you can start to track which files are of more interest and which audiences are gravitating to certain content. This will also allow you to track what content your audience is most interested in, as well as track attendees who demonstrate shopping behaviour.

5. Furthering brand awareness

KPI: Social shares
Providing social media sharing buttons gives attendees a way to easily share your content.
Tracing Tweets and shares from your micro-site can be a valuable way to increase your reach and contribute to ROI for the project. Ensure that your event landing page/registration micro-site has social sharing functionality to generate more registrants and track tweets, “likes,” and shares.
KPI: Thought-leadership advancement
Successful thought-leadership webinar series can contribute to strengthening your brands positioning.
If thought-leadership webinars are part of the marketing mix at your organisation, in addition to webinars at other stages of the marketing funnel, you will want to develop a webinar ROI narrative specifically for this series – calling out the KPIs separately.
For a broader story, you may want to track overall impressions from your promotional efforts for this particular series, thus measuring the exposure of your thought-leadership efforts. Partnering with other organisations or key industry associations and thought leaders on the series will help to maximise the exposure of your brand.
After you have done the work to generate registrants and engage with them during the live event, find ways to nurture the relationships you’ve begun to establish with prospects during the webinar to grow and thrive long after the event. Consider driving registrants additional thought-leadership content or social media accounts. This will help you measure your traction through views and followers, as well as will allowing your company to solidify its reputation as a thought leader by keeping the conversation around best practices going continually, rather than periodically during one-time events.
A final tip on thought-leadership ROI measurement: Consider setting up a subscription to your thought-leadership series and concentrate on tracking subscription and interest.

6. Adding to the bottom line

KPI: Closed deals
Identifying and reporting on closed deals that were influenced by your webinar series is key to establishing ROI. Not only will you want to report on sales resulting directly from your webinars, but also on the contribution of your webinar program to the bottom line. By contribution, I mean how many closed deals were touched by your webinar program, even if the webinar program was not the last touch before the purchase.
To this end, it is important to track the progress of webinar attendees through the sales process and establish what impact it had on their decision to purchase.

Web conferencing solutions such as Adobe Connect have built in functionalities to assist you in gathering the data necessary to measure webinar ROI. For more insights into Adobe Connect’s webinar features and how it could work for your business, you can sign up for a free trial here.
See the orginal article on the Adobe Connect Blog.