Perhaps unsurprisingly, webinars available on digital platforms have seen a surge since 2020. One of the many factors responsible for this is the presence of authentic personalities that deters people from blocking the links. Businesses are incorporating webinars into their marketing strategies because it lets them attach a reliable face to their brand. But the question remains, is webinar marketing as effective as in person? Keep reading to find out.
What is webinar marketing?
A webinar is an online event that targets a certain audience in order to convey useful information about a topic. Webinar marketing is the art of creating and promoting the webinar experience in order to provide leads for your sales team, so the organisation can then sell their product.
Webinars can be a successful lead generation tool when done right, and it’s a great way to engage with potential customers. Your voice can build trust with these customers, and you can then maximise their lifetime value by providing valuable information not found elsewhere.
Benefits of webinar marketing (as opposed to in person)
- Greater content generation
The content you host on a live webcast platform can be recorded, post-edited and then repurposed into additional pieces of content. What’s more, the webinar transcripts can be used for future blog posts or social media updates.
- Improved SEO performance
It’s predicted that online videos will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by the end of 2022. This means it’s likely that your target audience is actively looking for video content. By reposting your webinars to your websites and social media pages, you’ll be able to drive a consistent stream of target traffic to your sites for free.
- Increased brand awareness
Having a recognisable brand that stands out from the competition is one of the key components of having a successful business. Webinar marketing will help you to get your brand in front of more people, increasing your brand awareness every time you host a new online event.
As well as this, webinars allow businesses to build a sense of authority within their niche, cementing your brand as a thought leader. After all, what good is it if your target audience knows about your company but doesn’t respect it?
- Better audience engagement
Webinar marketing will help you to engage with your audiences in real time – a benefit that very few other marketing channels offer.
While you can respond to social media comments relatively quickly, it’s not the same as actively interacting with audiences in a face-to-face way. Using webinar software, you’ll be able to see and hear each other which is almost as effective as if you were all in the same room.
Having this level of engagement will lead to a better understanding of your target audience, deeper relationships with them and, the biggest benefit of them all, greater customer loyalty.
Final thoughts Thanks to its inbuilt technologies, innovative software, and multimedia capabilities, webinar marketing can be just as effective – if not more effective – than in person events. As you can see, those who do it right can achieve great things, and, because webinars can be recorded, they also have longevity.
Related: How to Use ChatGPT for Marketing in 2026
Related: the best content repurposing tools
The Hidden Cost of Webinar Convenience: Why Your Attendance Numbers Don’t Mean What You Think
Here’s what I see happening with webinar marketing in 2026: companies celebrate 500 registrations and declare victory, then wonder why their sales pipeline looks anaemic. The problem isn’t webinars themselves. It’s that we’ve confused ease of registration with ease of conversion.
In-person events force genuine commitment. You block out travel time, you arrive early, you stay until the end because you’ve already invested the effort. Your brain is present because your body had to show up. With webinars, registrants click a link while making breakfast, add it to their calendar as a maybe, and 73 percent never join the live session.
But here’s where webinars win, and I mean win: in the data you collect and the follow-up sophistication you can deploy. I worked with a marketing director last year who tracked which slides her webinar attendees stayed for. She discovered that 60 percent of her audience dropped off during the product demo but stuck around for the client case study. She restructured her entire webinar format, moved the case study earlier, and her conversion rate jumped 34 percent within three months.
The real comparison isn’t webinars versus in-person events. It’s webinars done badly versus webinars done with intention. Here’s what I mean:
- Webinars done badly: broad topic, generic slides, no interaction, email blast to your entire list. Attendance of 12 percent. Conversion rate of 1 percent.
- Webinars done with intention: specific topic for a defined segment, interactive polling every 5 minutes, dedicated follow-up sequence with personalised next steps based on attendance behaviour. Attendance of 45 percent. Conversion rate of 8 percent.
In-person events still own the trust-building space. You shake hands. You read the room. You build relationships that survive a single bad quarter. But in-person events are expensive, slow to organise, and geographically limited. Webinars, when done right, compress your sales cycle and give you a dataset about your buyers that in-person events can’t match.
The shift I’m seeing now is companies using both. They run monthly webinars to build awareness and funnel down their list, then they invite their hottest prospects to quarterly in-person roundtables. The webinar is the filter. The in-person event is the relationship accelerator. Neither replaces the other, but together they’re more effective than either alone.
One last point: the quality of your webinar speaker matters far more than I think most companies realise. If your VP of Sales reads from slides with zero personality, your audience knows it. If your webinar host is interested in the questions and responds with specificity, people feel that too. I’ve seen attendance and conversion swing by 40 percent just because the company hired a proper host instead of assigning it to someone in customer success who had time.
More questions
How do you know if a prospect watched your webinar or just registered?
Use event tracking software that logs join time, exit time, and ideally polls, clicks, and questions asked. I recommend Demio or ON24 if you’re serious about this. Then segment your follow-up email based on whether they attended, how long they stayed, and which segments they watched. People who stayed for 80 percent of your webinar get a different email than people who joined for two minutes and left.
Should I charge for webinars or make them free?
Free webinars get higher registration, lower show rates, lower quality attendees. Paid webinars (even 5 pounds) get lower registration, higher show rates, higher quality attendees. If your goal is lead volume, go free. If your goal is sales-qualified conversations, charge something small. It filters out the tyre kickers and signals that what you’re teaching has value.
How often should we run webinars?
Once per month is the minimum if you want to build momentum and stay top of mind. Weekly is too often unless you have a huge audience and different topics each time. I work with companies running biweekly webinars targeting different buyer personas, and they see compounding results after three months. Start with monthly, measure your conversion rates and attendee feedback, then adjust from there.
