SaaS webinars can remove the doubt between your prospects and the sale.
You can show your product’s real-life use cases and interact with prospects who are seriously considering signing up for your product.
But how do you run SaaS webinars that hit these goals?
You have to put many things in place in terms of the host, collaborators, and attendees.
In this guide, we’ll explore the important aspects of launching and running SaaS webinars.
Not just that, you’ll see how to get the best results and examples of companies that get it right.
Let’s dive in.
What makes SaaS webinars different?
SaaS webinars are online seminars organized by a software as a service (SaaS) company to educate leads and customers about trends, new product features, product use cases, and other topics that may interest the company’s audience.
So, what makes them different from webinars in other industries?
The main difference is that businesses weave their products into SaaS webinars.
While a SaaS webinar may not be just about your product, the webinar topic must be relevant to your product. In other words, your product should play a role in your webinar’s topic.
For example, in an ActiveCampaign webinar (with Slack), the companies tackle how marketers can turn leads into opportunities.
In the webinar, both companies showed how you can use their tools to leverage business data to convert leads faster.
Why should you run SaaS webinars?
First, a webinar can bring in high-quality leads. Think about it, only people highly interested in your product will commit an hour of their lives to watch your webinar.
According to GoTo, 73% of B2B marketing and sales leaders says webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads.
Second, webinars can help you nurture and convert leads. So, you have potential customers who have signed up to your email list and visited a few website pages.
SaaS webinars can show prospects how your product solves problems that matter to them.
Third, SaaS webinars provide a platform to educate customers to get the best from your product. You can run seminars about your product’s new features and show real-life use cases that customers can exploit.
These potential benefits can help grow your SaaS blog to achieve your marketing goals.
Moving on, SaaS webinars usually fall into two main categories:
- Live webinars: this is a webinar where participants join you live for your seminar. Some benefits of live webinars lie around engagement features with attendees. You can run polls, take comments, and do a question and answer (Q&A) session after your presentation.
- On-demand webinars: these are usually recordings of your live webinars. Even though they may lack the engagement features of live webinars, they let you reach thousands of people after your live events. Viewers have to submit their details before accessing this webinar. So, an on-demand webinar can continue to generate high-quality leads months after your live webinar has ended.
Now, how do you organize and run SaaS webinars that achieve your goals?
Read on to find tips to keep in mind before, during, and after your SaaS webinar.
SaaS webinar tips before your event
Create a webinar for a persona at a stage in the buyer’s journey
Just like other marketing tasks, a buyer persona should guide your webinars. Of course, you may have many buyer personas, but each webinar should target a single buyer persona.
Approaching your webinars this way will push you to create helpful presentations for a specific audience. Then, you can increase your chances of getting them to take your intended action after the webinar.
In most cases, settling on the right topic for your webinar can take a bit of research. Some common ways to find topics include:
- Running polls on your website
- Creating surveys
- Using common questions your customer support reps receive
- Going through forums like Quora to find questions
When phrasing your topic, it’s important to do so from the direction of benefits for your attendees. And if the benefits can land in a short time, add the time frame.
Once you find an interesting topic, you can now move on to other steps for your SaaS webinar.
Determine webinar structure & create a slide deck on Canva
Getting your topic right is one thing, but you also have to deliver a webinar that solves problems around the topic.
This starts with your webinar structure.
Your webinar can have a simple structure like:
- Intro (5 minutes)
- Presentation (25 – 30 minutes)
- Question and Answer (Q&A) (10 – 15 minutes)
- Outro and CTA (5 minutes)
So, your webinar should run between 40 to 60 minutes.
You need to keep in mind that whatever topic you pick, there’s probably content for it online. But no brand can talk about your unique experience better than you.
So, to deliver a unique webinar, you need to tell your expert story and leverage personal experience to help your audience.
For example, this can be how your brand solved a problem prospects want to solve.
Then, you can include these details when creating slides for your presentation.
An easy and fast way to create your slide deck is to use Canva. You’ll find many presentation templates on Canva for different uses.
All you have to do is select a template that fits your needs and edit it with your images and text.
Once you create a slide deck that works, duplicate and edit it for future webinars.
If you’re hosting a guest, ask for their slide decks before the webinar to ensure everything is in place.
Create automated email outreach and registration page for webinar
Imagine a SaaS webinar without attendees.
You’ve put in a lot of work that will produce little to no results.
That’s why webinar marketing must start long before the event.
Your webinar marketing tasks include creating an automated email sequence. You also have to build a registration page.
Your webinar outreach can contain three or four emails over two weeks before the event. This could be something like:
- The first email to tell subscribers about your webinar topic, a summary of main points, hosts, and time of the webinar.
- The second email to remind people who didn’t register after the first email.
- The third email can be a reminder a day before the webinar.
- The fourth email to provide the webinar link an hour before your event.
But to do this, you need an email marketing tool and a landing page builder.
A product like GetResponse can help you create both the email sequence and your registration landing page.
Beyond that, it also provides the tools to host your webinar. You’ll see the other webinar software options later in this guide.
Check out this webinar email from Semrush:
If you click on the CTA button, it will take you to the registration page.
Semrush has done many things well on its registration page. First, the email design is consistent with the registration page, and the date and time are at the top of the page.
Then, Semrush displays the experts you’ll learn from in the webinar. The page also lists what to expect from the webinar.
And lastly, the registration form asks – apart from the name and email – for the registrant’s industry and company size.
These are details Semrush can use to understand the webinar attendee’s needs.
Apart from outreach emails, you can also share your upcoming webinar on your social media pages and a blog page.
These outreach tasks will attract more attendees to your live events.
Use a webinar tool with features you need
Have you ever attended a concert with poor sound? No matter how good the singers are, the overall concert experience will be horrible.
A webinar tool is even more integral to your online seminar.
Why?
A webinar software provides the following features during your SaaS webinar:
- Video tools for presenting
- Holds your slide deck
- Hosts your attendees
- Engagement features
- Recording features
In fact, some webinar software packages let you create automated email sequences and webinar registration pages.
So, it’s clear a dodgy webinar platform can destroy all your preparations.
But before you pick a webinar tool, you need to define what you need for your webinars. For most people, the features above are the bare minimum.
With a little research, you’ll discover many webinar tools. Some of them are:
Livestorm
Even though Livestorm was founded seven years ago, it’s now popular among SaaS companies. The software provides email automation, registration pages, and webinar hosting features.
On top of that, you can add custom branding to make your presentation unique. In terms of engagement, you can customize your room and divide participants into smaller groups.
Not just that, but you can also host a question and answer (Q&A) session. Livestorm allows 500 attendees and more with the paid plans.
Lastly, Livestorm provides contact records and engagement metrics to know how your webinar performs.
GoTo Webinar
With almost 3 million events annually, GoTo Webinar is a popular option for businesses.
GoTo provides webinar templates and engagement features such as polls, surveys, and raising hands.
Its cheapest paid plan lets you host 250 attendees, and you get up to 3,000 with higher plans.
Zoom
Zoom became a household name due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated remote work for many companies.
Zoom Meetings is the most popular feature for users.
While you can run webinars with traditional Zoom Meetings, it lacks some premium features you may need for your webinar.
Zoom’s webinar add-on lets you collect payments, create registration pages, create automated emails, do Q&A sessions, and get reports.
The Zoom webinar add-on lets you host from 100 to 10,000 participants depending on the plan you select.
GetResponse
Let me put it this way.
While the other software options here are webinar tools that offer emails and landing pages, GetResponse is an email and landing page tool that does webinars.
But that’s not to say GetResponse’s webinars are inferior. On the other hand, you’ll get better email and landing page features with GetResponse.
GetResponse also has an autofunnel feature that makes it easy to build a funnel, including your automated emails, registration page, webinar, and other lead nurturing features.
GetResponse allows you to run webinars for up to 1,000 attendees. So, if you expect more attendees, you can opt for any of the other tools.
Picking the best webinar software for your needs will help to execute your webinar strategy effectively.
Collaborate with other SaaS companies
In the world of SaaS, no product works in isolation. Your SaaS product probably integrates with other products to improve its capabilities.
What does this mean for you?
You can collaborate with other SaaS companies to host your webinars. The first step is to find a topic relevant to both products.
Then, you can have experts from both companies as hosts for the webinar.
Hosting a webinar with another SaaS company makes sense for a few reasons:
- Your webinar will gain more credibility.
- You can reach a bigger audience as the other company will promote the webinar too.
- Users of the other product can try yours out after the webinar.
So, whenever you get an opportunity to collaborate with another SaaS company, you should take it.
SaaS webinar tips during your event
After your pre-webinar activities, it’s now time to run your webinar for an expectant audience.
Here’s a checklist of some tasks to perform just before and during your webinars.
Conduct sound, video, and background check
Before attendees start joining your webinar, you should check your microphone, camera, and background to ensure everything is in order.
Engage attendees at the beginning
At the beginning, it’s important to summarize what you’ll cover and what the webinar attendee will gain. Then, you can continue with a question.
For instance, if your webinar is about improving Instagram marketing, you can ask attendees to post in the comments if they’ve ever run an Instagram marketing campaign.
This will get your audience engaged at the beginning of your webinar.
Use your expert story and experience
Chances are your webinar topic has been covered somewhere before you.
One way to make your webinar unique is to tell your expert story and your experience on how you solved the problem your audience wants to solve.
Mention your SaaS product at the right places
While your webinar is not to overtly promote your product, you should mention where your product can solve attendees’ problems.
For instance, if your webinar is about lead generation, how does your landing page software help in lead generation?
Keep your webinar to an optimum length
Most attendees expect a SaaS webinar to last between 30 and 60 minutes. So, ensure you structure your presentation and Q&A session to fit into that period.
Engage attendees during your webinar
You can use polls to get more information about attendees’ needs. Beyond that, you can conduct Q&A sessions to help attendees, learn product features to add, and topics to create content around.
Use a CTA relevant to your webinar
After your webinar, tell your audience what you want them to do. This can be to sign up for a product demo, free trial, or check your pricing page.
Record your webinars
While you can reach 200 attendees during your live webinars, recorded webinars can reach thousands.
Your recorded webinars can live on your website’s webinar page as on-demand webinars.
With recorded webinars, your content will continue to exist like your blog pages, but in a different format.
SaaS webinar tips after your event
After concluding your webinar, do you pop champagne at the great work you’ve just completed?
You can do that, but remember there’s more to do even after your webinar.
Track webinar metrics
Since SaaS webinars are a marketing tactic, you want to achieve a goal for your business.
The main way to determine the success of your webinars is to track relevant metrics.
Most businesses run webinars to:
- Generate leads
- Drive demo signups
- Drive free trial signups
- Drive paid plan subscription
You can achieve some of these goals before or after your webinars. Of course, you may need to track some of these goals with your CRM software.
Beyond these, most webinar tools will provide engagement metrics for your webinar participants.
So, you can see the number of people who answer your polls, how long attendees stayed on your webinar, and how many attendees posted comments.
These details can help improve your future webinars.
Reach out to audience after webinar
After your webinar, you can run an email sequence containing a few emails.
First, you have to send all attendees a “Thank you” email. You can also provide a link to the webinar recording.
This is for people who want to rewatch your webinar. In some cases, recording can be for people who joined late or left early.
Here’s an example from Wynter:
But even for people who registered but failed to attend your webinar, you can send a recording to them. This way, they’ll gain benefits from your webinar.
Apart from that, you can also send a few emails relevant to your CTA. This is for attendees (and non-attendees) who are yet to act on your CTA.
When you reach out to webinar attendees after the virtual event, you’ll build trust for future interactions.
SaaS webinar examples
Sometimes, the best way to learn how to run webinars is to see examples from SaaS companies.
Why?
You’ll see how they run all the stages of the webinar. Then, you’ll see how they engage their audience and weave their products into webinars.
These are examples of SaaS content marketing done properly.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation product for businesses. The SaaS company runs webinars to address problems its potential users may have.
For people unable to attend live, you can watch on-demand webinars on ActiveCampaign’s webinar page.
To tell customers and prospects about exciting features, ActiveCampaign runs product updates webinars every quarter.
You’ll also find ActiveCampaign has collaborated with other SaaS companies for its webinars.
AB Tasty
AB Tasty is an experience optimization company that lets businesses run A/B tests, personalize websites, and create product recommendations for their stores.
So, the company addresses customer experience and experimentation topics in its webinars.
On AB Tasty’s webinar page, you’ll find on-demand webinars and notice of upcoming webinars.
I think before you run webinars, you should sign up for a few webinars by SaaS companies and see how they go through the process.
Conclusion
SaaS webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality leads and engage current customers.
But to get the best results from webinars, you have to pick the right topic, engage attendees, and follow other best practices.
If you don’t currently run webinars, you can start planning for the first one. And since a tool like Livestorm even has a free plan, you can try a mock webinar for a start.
If you’ve found this guide helpful, share it with your friends who may need it.
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