Webinars as Demand Gen Infrastructure
Forrest Leighton, SVP of marketing at Chatmeter, on the webinar stack
Using webinars for retargeting turns paid clicks into a warmer mid funnel audience instead of wasting them on another generic demo ask. At Chatmeter, the job is not just getting registrations, it is moving people from light intent, like a Google click or LinkedIn engagement, into a longer, higher trust interaction where marketing can see who registered, who attended, who asked questions, and who is worth a sales follow up.
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The key economic advantage is reuse. In the interview, webinars are described as content that keeps working after the live event through replays, snippets, website embeds, and follow up nurture. Wistia builds product features around this same behavior, including on demand viewing, channels, registration forms, and registrant analytics.
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This works especially well for paid retargeting because the audience already raised its hand once. LinkedIn’s website retargeting product lets marketers build audiences from prior site visitors, and those audiences can then be shown new content instead of another hard sell. That makes a webinar a practical next asset in the sequence.
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The operational constraint is that webinars only become a repeatable machine when the stack is simple and connected. In the interview, the pain points are invitation workflows, ugly confirmation emails, poll data getting lost, and weak HubSpot or Salesforce handoff. The real product battle in webinar software is less about stage effects and more about reliable downstream data.
The market is heading toward webinar systems that behave more like demand gen infrastructure than one time event tools. The winners will make every webinar easy to launch, easy to replay, and easy to pipe into CRM and marketing automation, so one paid click can compound into multiple touches, richer intent data, and a smoother handoff to sales.