By: Joshua Bolkan
Webinars provide a fantastic opportunity to engage directly with prospective leads from all over the country—without asking them to make a huge investment. They can participate from the comfort of their own homes, after all, and no one even needs to know they’re still in their pajamas. And webinars work. According to the Content Marketing Institute, “marketers consistently rate webinars among the top five most effective tactics.”
But building and presenting an online session can be a significant investment—in time, if nothing else—for your marketing team, From planning the event to promoting it, and from creating a landing page to following up with participants afterward, webinars are hard work.
So how do you make sure that all that planning, promotion, and follow-up pay deliver the qualified leads you’re looking for? Here are a few tips.
- Offer solutions, not a sales pitch.
Webinars are generally best suited to leads who have largely progressed past the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey and into the consideration stage. Your audience is likely well aware that they have a specific challenge to solve, but they’re not quite ready to make buying decisions to overcome that challenge. What they are more than ready for is information about the challenge they’re facing, so give it to them!
Build your webinar around useful information related to the challenges your solutions address. The bulk of the information you offer should be helpful to your audience whether they use your solution or not. At the end of a successful webinar, attendees feel like they got more out of it than a sales pitch.
Mentioning what you have to offer here and there is fine, and the end of a webinar can be the perfect place for a brief product demo, but your leads will leave the webinar feeling better about your company and more likely to turn into sales if they feel like you helped them understand their challenges and potential solutions.
- Pick a specific topic.
The people you’re trying to reach are dealing with specific challenges, so make sure your webinar is focused on specific information. Instead of picking a title that covers a broad category like, for example, “Project-based Learning,” call your webinar “Tools for Assessing Project-based Learning,” or “How to Scale Project-based Learning.”
With a clear idea of the focus of your webinar, your audience will be more interested and engaged, and narrowing the topic frees you to build your webinar around particular areas where your solutions shine the most.
- Encourage interaction.
No matter how useful or relevant the information you present is, people tend to get bored listening to someone talk after a few minutes. Try to sprinkle moments of interaction throughout your presentation.
Many webinar platforms offer polling functions. Polls not only activate your audience, but also give you a clear sense of who they are—the best webinars are tailored not to theoretical customers but to the people who are actually “in the room.”
If there’s a chat function in your webinar platform, you might encourage attendees to share examples from their professional lives. Even something lighthearted and fun, like asking an audience of teachers for their favorite missed assignment excuses given by students, will break up the monotony of a presenter talking and talking, and it will likely help your audience connect more personally with the rest of the presentation. Just make sure your discussion topics are related to the rest of your webinar.
Look for ways to break your information into a few chunks and offer question and answer opportunities between them, rather than doing one long Q&A session at the end. This will keep things lively and give your listeners time to think about the information you’re presenting in the specific context of their organization and its challenges.
- Practice. And then practice some more.
Webinar audiences tend to be relatively forgiving of not-quite-professional production quality and delivery, but your delivery should still be as polished as possible.
Practice your presentation a few times before the date of your event. If possible, try to get the moderator and guests (if you have them) together once before the big day and do a full run-through. Make sure all of your equipment, from microphones to cameras to your presentation slides, all work smoothly, and have a plan for how the webinar will continue if your tech fails: don’t depend on slides or videos to carry the day. Record your practice run and watch it to see if there are any areas you can smooth out.
- Get ready for the next one.
At the end of your webinar, take advantage of having an audience full of potential buyers. Ask them to take a brief survey about the webinar you’ve just presented, and include a question about what topics they’d like to see covered in future webinars. You may gain some unexpected insights that’ll help bring more leads in the door for your next webinar, along with helpful feedback to make sure subsequent events are even more successful.
Thanks for sharing!
