6 Ways to Make Your Webinars Suck Less

I know, webinars are pretty much a staple in all Marketing organizations, but have you ever taken stock of the content you are throwing at your customers and prospects? Is it up to snuff? Have you reimagined anything about your webinar programs lately???Your metrics should give you an indication of that. Things like total registrations, attendance rate, qualified lead gen are all good benchmarks to track to make sure you are headed in the right direction.??Done correctly, webinars should be one of your top lead gen channels and communication channels.?

At Dean Community College we encourage cheat sheets. Here’s my 6 ways to immediately improve your webinar program performance using my WebinarCheatSheet? along with 3 exclusive Bonus Sizzle ideas.

1.?????Congratulation Marketers – You have been promoted to Infotainment Producers.?Seriously, it’s a fierce landscape competing for people’s time and attention. For context, some of the things your target audience could be doing with their time include work, meetings, lunch, exercise, social media, binging Netflix, siesta-ing, viewing your competitors webinars, walking the dog, staring at the ceiling thinking "I should fix that stain mark", and more. I mean just look at the Internet options alone:

You need to think Hollywood and make your content worthy of someone’s time. That means making it as interesting and entertaining as possible. This includes things like the interface, the speakers, the slides, the length, and how its promoted.?

Pro Tip: Have a friend or colleague watch the video and get their honest feedback. Better yet, watch ON24 's "Webinars That Rocked " webinar and shamelessly steal ideas.

2.?????Re-Humanize Yourself

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people like people. People are interesting - and after 3 years of COVID we’ve all learned to become comfortable on Zoom cameras.??With that, it is no longer acceptable for people to not appear on camera when presenting webinars. Humans are relatable, humans are personable, humans are quirky, and your customers and prospects want to see you in all your relatable, personable, quirky glory. Get over the fact that you don’t look like Brad Pitt, neither do they.??

Pro Tip:?ALWAYS check your background, lighting, and sound long before you go live. Nothing will hasten someone to leave your webinar quicker than bad audio and assume people will judge you by what’s in your background. Also, rehearsals aren't optional, they help root out any potential issues before the live event. Some speakers will claim "I don't have time" or "I don't need it". Trust me, they need to make time and yes they do need it. Even the Rolling Stones do a sound check for a gig.??

Also, ALL participants should shut down alerts, browser tabs, and anything else not used for your webinar. It will only distract you or the audience - cuz we all will look at your browser tabs to see what you’re up to and the embarrassing IM your buddy Dave sent you about Saturday night during the presentation.

3.?????Ride Coattails

The calendar year is chock full of opportunities to coattail your content off of. Leverage?events, holidays, pop-culture, and trends ?to help plan your content calendar.??For example, everyone has heard of Shark Week, right???OCERACH uses 赛仕软件 software to study shark behavior. For SAS, it’s an opportunity to ride the wave (pun intended) of a pop culture mainstay to promote their analytic software. Wait! A webinar on sharks by a boring B2B Analytics company? Yes please! We did similar webinars during Mental Health Awareness Month (Surfing the Second Wave), Women's Month (Women in Tech) and others. Find cross-sections between your solutions, your customers, and an events calendar to boost interest in your content.?

Pro-Tip: Scour a?holiday calendar ?for popular events that you can tie into your solution offering and spark your creativity.?

4.??????Think Like Netflix - Serialize your Content.

If you are like most B2Bs, your target audiences are segmented (by industry for example) and you probably produce webinars as a single-serve disposable, ‘one size fits all’ approach. Create, promote, present, move to the next. A better idea is to think of your segmented webinars as a series and present them as such.?

So, for example, if the target is the Health Care, nestle all your Health Care field-related webinars under one umbrella. Think of each webinar as an episode in a series, where each focus on a different health topic.??At SAS we just did that – creating an ongoing health industry series called “Analytics in 20” where we presented both an information webinar paired with a companion demo.??Prospects could be directed to the campaign page and browse the available content and choose what they wanted to watch, all at their convenience.??We created a common branding theme and promoted the series across all channels (email, social, website, etc.) to our intended target audience. This improves discoverability of the content for your audiences and creates an association between the umbrella title and the content. Binge baby, binge!?

Pro-Tip: Design your campaign pages for a register once, watch all campaign content, or at minimum pre-populate registration pages.??Imagine if you had to enter your Netflix password every time you watch a show on the platform.?

5.?????Scheduling your content – Zig While They Zag

Somewhere along the line someone decided that all webinars have to be on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday between 11am and 1pm ET. The conventional wisdom is that this is the most convenient time for everyone.??While this might seem logical, it’s also true that if everyone subscribed to this theory, then you are in the rush hour of B2B marketing and competing against almost everything else your target can be doing.??Think different, test your webinars at different times, outside the conventional wisdom windows. Try to find places where no one else dares go “because the Webinar Gods said so”.??We did a study of our own internal employees’ calendars, and guess what? Friday mornings are the least scheduled times for people. It’s a time people are clearing up their work before the weekend, when people wouldn’t dare schedule an internal meeting, or when many companies don’t allow meetings. Take advantage of the rare opportunities when someone may have time to do some learning and personal development -like Fridays!

Pro Tip: Also, remember that time is precious, experiment with different length webinars. All webinars don’t have to be 45 minutes to an hour. You might get better attendance with shorter webinars. We had some as short as 10 minutes.?Say what to need to say, nothing more, allow for Q&A, and get out. Your attendees will thank you!

6.?????Connect the Dots

None of the items above work unless you track EVERYTHING. From lead gen opportunities to attendee activity during the webinar, measuring and analyzing the results will ensure you are being given credit for the leads you create and to help you build better, smarter webinars.?

Some of the things we track:

·??????Registrations - Fun Fact: We got most registrations from our Monthly Webinar Email.?

·??????Attendee Numbers - Expect 40%-50% of registrants to attend. Make sure follow-up email messaging is different for attendees and non-attendees ;)

·??????Attendee Webinar Duration - An attendee who stays for the entire webinar is a much different attendee than one who stays for 3 minutes. DO NOT TREAT THEM EQUALLY. One of those people probably doesn't want a sales call 5 minutes after the webinar ends.

·??????Surveys - Be strategic in your survey questions and gather info on topics, speakers, tech performance, and suggestions/feedback for future webinars. This is a gold mine of free consulting!

·??????Resources - Provide webinar-related resources (white-papers, reports, customer stories, etc.) in the webinar console that will give the attendee takeaway materials to extend the engagement after the webinar. Trust me, they will be looking for things to do while watching the webinar, give it to them.

·??????Promo Banners - Promote upcoming webinars or events via a clickable banner - just make sure it opens a new browser and doesn't close out the webinar.

·??????Social Media - Extend the conversation over to social channels and use an event hashtag. Coordination with your social media team is helpful here for additional engagement during and after the webinar.

·??????Book a Meeting Functionality - For those attendees that are thinking “shut up and take my money”, give them an opportunity to request a sales call during the webinar. Even the best funnel tools aren't as good as a prospect deciding he's ready to talk further. Let them qualify themselves.

Pro-Tip: Track, analyze, and report all your metrics. Done correctly, webinars can drive a sh*t-ton of leads, make sure you get your fair share of the glory. Use other metrics to constantly improve fruit webinars.

Bonus Sizzle Tips

7.?????Create a Preview Video - Most webinars will allow attendees to join up to 15 minutes early…. and they do!??Use this opportunity to infotain them! You know how movies have trailers before the feature starts, promoting upcoming movies? We created a 15 minute video that would start when the attendees enter. That video contained short corporate vignettes including sustainability efforts, charitable events, upcoming conferences, employee profiles, etc. You’ll notice none of these are sales pitches. Leave the sales pitches for the webinar, and don’t bludgeon your audience with them before the main event. Think warm and fuzzy brand awareness videos. ?

8.?????Webinar Newsletter - I mentioned that our monthly webinar newsletter was the leading drive of webinar registrations. We spent a lot of time tweaking design, email subject lines, times and date sent, use of imagery, always looking to improve our email metrics.?

Some email tips:

·??????Minimize copy – Just the title and summary bullet points. This is no time for a dissertation.?ALSO, remember you are Infotainers – make your webinar titles interesting! Nobody wants to attend a boring sounding webinar.

·?????Include date and time (including time zone)

·?????Include webinar length.

·?????Include registration buttons for each webinar

·?????Experiment with images but be aware of spam filters that may block them.

9.?????Reuse and recycle - If you don’t a have a campaign page for your serialized content, find a place on your website for a webinar library page. Make sure webinars can be filtered by topic and industry to facilitate discovery of webinar content. Also, be sure to promote the on-demand content. We did that in the Monthly Newsletter to great affect. Remember that only about half of registrants will attend the live webinar, so make sure you make it easy for them to watch on-demand.?You spend too much time producing a webinar to make it single-use content.