Webinars are a fantastic way for mortgage advisers and financial advisers to generate online leads. In brief, here is how this can play out for your financial marketing efforts:
- Design your “Lead Magnet” (i.e. your “free webinar” value proposition).
- Create your landing page advertising the webinar.
- Link your landing page to your email marketing software (e.g. MailChimp).
- Run a digital advertising campaign to promote your webinar (e.g. through Facebook Ads).
However, suppose you get people to sign up to your webinar and attend. What’s next? How do you turn those people into leads for your business?
Here are some tips for mortgage brokers and financial advisers to convert webinar attendees into leads:
#1 Run a Poll
Polls are a fantastic way to engage and interact with your audience during the webinar itself. They capture your audience’s attention, perhaps at a stage where they might be starting to nod off!
Not only that, but polls provide a very useful way to gain insight into your target audience’s needs, interests, pain points and more. They can also help you ascertain whether they are ready to speak to a salesperson, or what other information about your brand/services they might be interested in.
Bear in mind that you will also get a far higher response rate if you poll your attendees during the webinar itself, rather than after it is finished.
#2 Send a Survey Afterwards
Once your webinar is concluded, you can immediately email them a quick survey to capture the momentum and interest you have generated.
You will still need to make the survey worth their while, however. Make sure you ask interesting, meaningful and relevant questions. It is much better to ask questions geared towards your audience, for instance, rather than towards your firm. As an example:
“How would you rate our performance on this webinar?”
This would be much better phrased with something like the following:
“Which part of the webinar did you find most useful and interesting?”
People would much rather ask questions about themselves than about a company!
#3 Quick Follow-Up
Whether people attended your webinar or not, make sure you send a follow-up email within the next 12-24 hours, while the content is still present in their minds. For instance, you could send over a copy of the webinar slides or video transcript.
Alternatively, you could send them a link to a blog or article on your website which expounds on the topic in greater detail. All of this builds trust and relationship with your audience, giving them more confidence to pick up the phone and book a consultation.
#4 Filter The Hot Leads
It’s very important that you separate your leads into different categories, depending on the degree of interest they exhibit in your brand or service. For instance, you might want to divide them into hot, warm and cold leads. The former is ready to be sold to. The latter two will require nurturing.
There are various methods you can use to identify which webinar attendees belong to which group. Gauging response rates and the nature of responses in a survey or poll, for instance, is one good way to do this. However, here are some other ideas:
- Customise your webinar registration process. For instance, rather than simply asking people for their name and email address when they sign up on your landing page, could you ask more specific questions to determine their level of interest?
- Use webinar reports. For example, webinar programmes like Zoom Video Webinar will give you insights and analytics into your attendees’ level of engagement.
- Cross-reference attendees’ information with data from other campaigns or sources, such as previous eBook downloads or webinar registrations.
#5 Tailor Your Follow Up To Hot Leads
For those webinar attendees who can be categorised as “hot” mortgage leads, you might want to consider having a customisable email template ready to hand.
Here, you send a personalised, branded email to your hot leads as your follow-up relating to the webinar content they watched earlier. Your email should be authentic, offer value and be helpful.
#6 Nurture The Others
Another important thing to remember is to not neglect your warm or cold lead. They might not be ready to buy from you right now, but they might want to discuss a sale with you in the near future.
Make sure these people are put into your appropriate marketing automation segments, nurturing them over time. For instance, you could put them into a monthly newsletter list on your email marketing platform. This would allow you to provide them with regular, branded touchpoints which offer them value, and which keeps your company in their minds. When they are ready to buy, they are much more likely to remember and think of you over your competitors.
#7 Use Retargeting
Building on the previous point, another powerful marketing strategy for nurturing your mortgage leads is to use retargeting ads. Here, you set up a Google and/or Facebook Ads campaign to show ads to previous attendees of your webinar.
For instance, you could use this to promote a follow-on webinar to those who participated in the first one but did not convert into a sale. The great thing about this type of marketing is that it is highly focused, and does not require a large pay-per-click budget (PPC).
Summary
In conclusion, there are many powerful ways for mortgage advisers to turn their webinar attendees into hot leads. Many of the above approaches are fairly straightforward to set in place, without breaking the bank with your marketing budget.
For more information about how to start a mortgage lead generation campaign for your financial firm, feel free to contact our marketing advisers for a free, no-obligation phone call. We would love to hear more about your campaign and unearth some exciting marketing opportunities together!