How we crushed our first webinar with zero budget and a non-existent email list
You know that marketing advice that says you need a massive email list and a budget bigger than the GDP of a small country to host a successful webinar? Yeah, so do we.
As Nine Lives Digital celebrates its first year of business, it felt like the perfect time to share our riskiest and most significant accomplishment so far. The challenge: Take the skills we’d developed running webinars for billion-dollar tech companies and apply them to hosting a webinar for our boutique marketing agency.
Meaning no big email list. No five-figure ad spend. No team of designers and developers behind us to ensure it all goes off without a hitch. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, not that much. After an intense month of planning and promotion, we walked away with one of the highest live attendance rates in our careers (a 58% turnout) and a ton of valuable content.
If you’ve been holding off on running a webinar because you don’t have a significant list or your promotion budget has dwindled, the good news is you don’t need much to make an impact. Here’s how we did it.
The secret sauce for successful webinars
1 - Know your audience and offer them something of value
This all started with a need to solve a problem. In the lead-up to the Google and Yahoo email sender guidelines' changes, there was a lot of confusing, conflicting information swirling around. With the potential for plummeting email deliverability, anyone running an email program was on edge.
As email deliverability nerds, we knew we had valuable insights to share on the topic. When it came to running our webinar, instead of pushing a product or service, we focused on creating content to help our audience navigate the new email marketing landscape.
Far too many companies hold webinars to check off a box on a list of to-dos. Strategy and brand building become secondary to ensuring leadership is happy you got the event out the door. And forget about it if you’re promoting a new product to cold prospects. That’s the B2B webinar kiss of death: aka abysmal attendance and crappy follow-up results.
With so much competing noise, your audience wants to see something that will solve their problem, not a sales pitch. Your audience is smart. A session that’s been cobbled together for the wrong reasons is easy to spot. Webinars must provide something tangible, with a clear goal and audience-centric value proposition that can be easily communicated through your promotional strategy.
When you deliver a step-by-step, interactive session that helps your audience solve their biggest pain points (where your product just so happens to be one of the linchpins of the solution), you’re going to build a lot of goodwill and see a lot more traction, both immediately and down the line.
It might sound simple, but providing something authentic and worthwhile, strategically planned for your audience, really is the key to success.
2 - Segment appropriately
No, we didn’t have millions of subscribers or hordes of SDRs ready to send 1:1 emails like their computers were on fire. But we did have a small, targeted audience we could reach out to with a message we knew would resonate.
Point two goes back to point one (because your audience influences everything): If you don’t have an established marketing list, leverage the contacts you do have and offer them something of value they can’t say no to.
A small, engaged segment is so much more valuable than mass emailing your entire list. Remember, if you’re producing something for “everyone,” it’s really meant for no one. And that’s what you’ll see when you look at your registration numbers.
3 - The power of partnerships
It's always good to borrow someone else's audience if you don't have one yourself. By partnering with deliverability expert and email geek Laura Atkins from Word to the Wise, we were able to significantly expand our reach beyond our existing network.
Partnering with established experts in the field instantly boosted our credibility. Attendees knew they were getting insights from the best in the business, solidifying our position as a trusted resource. As a result, we gained exposure to a wider group of people who wanted to ensure their messages landed in inboxes instead of spam folders.
Like Captain Planet, when your powers combine, you build something so much greater than the individual parts. And that’s exactly what happened with our webinar: we combined our skillsets and expertise to create a successful event.
4 - Have a strategy
Despite some degree of "winging it" going on, we still followed a well-designed plan and process to get our webinar live by the deadline. After spending years running webinars for other companies, we knew what worked and what didn’t and had the documentation to back it up.
Investing in creating a rock-solid standard for how your company runs webinars means you’re not reinventing the wheel whenever you need to put on an event. So you can spend your time creating content that sparks interest instead of trying to manage your webinar team.
What we learned
The takeaway from our experience? Don't be discouraged by a lack of resources. With a focus on providing valuable content, building strategic partnerships, and having a comprehensive strategy, you can create successful webinars that put you at the forefront of your industry.
We saw this webinar as an opportunity to build brand awareness and establish ourselves as a trusted resource (plus have fun with our friend Laura!). Instead of bombarding attendees with sales messaging, we offered personalized follow-up emails and answered any lingering questions.
Plus, it proved the power of great content, strategic outreach, and the fantastic email community we're part of.
