As a marketer, you know business-to-business (B2B) buyers don't wake up and decide to buy on a whim — there's a process. Whether you visualize this process as the traditional, linear buyer's journey or as a marketing funnel, each model illustrates the path a buyer might take on the road to a purchasing decision. Both diagrams group buyers into distinct stages, such as awareness, consideration, and decision, or labels, such as the top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. Each stage requires different tactics and content to best meet the buyer's needs at any given time, with the goal of pushing them through to the next stage until they reach conversion. 

Though we'd like to think of the process as straightforward, neatly fitting buyers into their respective boxes, the reality is that the buyer's journey is a complex, non-linear process that doesn't always follow the same path. The marketer's job is to create a plan that will lead buyers down the most direct and efficient route — no easy feat. 

This job is made easier, however, as marketers use each interaction with the brand to collect important details about the buyer until a clear and complete profile emerges. A powerful tool in the marketer's toolbox to accomplish this objective is the webinar. 

Webinars help give your brand a voice and face, offering personalized interactions that allow the audience to engage. By utilizing best practices specific to each stage, webinars and other virtual events are impactful tools that can be leveraged to gather buyer data and accelerate prospects through the buyer's journey. In this guide, we'll walk through webinar best practices specific to each stage: top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.