How to Measure and Improve ROI from Webinar Marketing Campaigns

Webinar Marketing ROI: The Basics

The basic formula for webinar ROI is the same as any other marketing campaign:

Output Value minus Cost of Investment = ROI

But there are a few important factors to consider when looking at your expected ROI:

What Metrics Matter Most?

Webinars can support a range of marketing goals, from generating new leads to accelerating sales. While you don’t have to choose a single target outcome, it’s useful to know exactly what you want to achieve—so you can optimize the event around that specific metric. 

This can be complicated because webinars don’t exist in a vacuum. The true “return” of your webinar might not be clear until months later, and it might be complicated to track the true influence the event had on specific leads or revenue generated.

How Can You Reduce or Offset Costs?

The true “cost” of a webinar is often down to execution. Generating promotional content, setting up hosting platforms, sourcing speakers—these all eat up time and resources. But many of these costs can be reduced or offset through the right strategy.

A simple example is running multiple events

Many of the most labor-intensive tasks can be completed once—then reused in future events. Once you have a framework for promotional content, future campaign messaging can quickly be “slotted” into that framework and produced much more quickly.

Given these long-term gains, the ROI of an individual or one-off event might look very different from a series of events run periodically throughout the year. We often find companies can produce the highest ROI by investing more, but benefiting from growing efficiencies

How Much Extra Value Can You Generate?

Marketers often underestimate the extra value webinars can generate. From conducting research to creating reusable content, a single event might produce several types of “return”—much of which is hidden within standard projections or ROI calculations.

Given all that, it’s important to start every campaign with a simple question: What can we do to make this campaign generate more value?

5 Underappreciated Ways to Maximize Your Webinar ROI

Webinar marketing has a ton of moving parts, all of which should be optimized to deliver the best results. But there are a few steps we believe every company can take to significantly increase its event ROI: 

1. Equip Speakers to Promote Your Event

The value of proper multichannel promotion can’t be overstated. We could easily talk about the value of creating a LinkedIn Events page, deploying a proper warm email sequence, or using retargeting to boost awareness—and all this is covered in our guide to webinar promotion.

But the single highest ROI promotional strategy is simple: give your speakers promotional scripts. Your panel should feature respected, credible professionals with a strong network; the challenge is often getting them to post or share content about the event.

Simply creating emails or social posts they can use probably takes an hour—and could double your registration rate, depending on their following and reputation. You won’t find a more efficient way to drive sign-ups to expand your reach.

2. Prioritize Attendee Experience

The long-term “return” of your webinar can be significantly damaged by poor execution. You could drive 100s of registrations and convince them all to attend. But if the actual event is a mess, all you’ll end up with is 100s of disqualified leads.

Our experience helping 50+ companies host webinars suggests a few steps are essential:

• Use a Zoom integration to make joining the event fast and simple for the average attendee
• Leverage a LinkedIn Live Events to provide another easy access point for registrants
• Plan a dry run for 1-2 weeks before the event to help your panel prepare (and identify potential hiccups ahead of time)
• Use a branded waiting room to create a sense of cohesion and subtly promote your company

All of these steps are relatively cost-and time-efficient—and can have a big impact on the overall experience you deliver for attendees.

3. Generate Research

Webinars offer a unique opportunity to speak directly with your audience—and find out what they really think and feel. Companies with limited time or resources for market research can generate significant value by remembering to use their event to generate audience insights.

We always recommend clients generate extra “returns” from their events by:

• Using polls and surveys within the event to generate data and deepen your understanding of the audience
• Including a short (optional) question during sign-up to ask registrants what topics they care about—and then store the information in their HubSpot contact

4. Prepare Follow-Up Sequences

Lots of companies run excellent webinars—and then wait weeks before contacting their attendees. But there is a very short window when your event feels fresh and relevant; missing that opportunity is a major blow to your overall ROI.

The post-event follow-up should be prepared during the promotion phase. Identify the offer you want to present, how you want to connect it with your webinar topic, and generate promotional content (emails and social posts) that help you capitalize on the momentum of your event.

5. Repurpose Webinar Content 

Webinars are not the cheapest marketing campaigns to run, especially when you consider the coordination required. However, those costs can easily be offset by being smart about how you leverage the content generated via the event.

A single webinar should generate enough content to produce:

• Multiple short video clips to post on social media
• Event slides to easily generate blogs or even gated content
• Expert insights and quotes to enhance future content like socials or blogs

Whatever you might otherwise spend on generating this much content can therefore be deducted from your ROI calculation—and drive significantly higher overall ROI.