Hands-on lessons and walkthroughs help you connect to your audience in a way that can build trust quickly. If this sounds like something your business should do - it’s time to build a webinar!
Webinars allow you to share your knowledge, in real-time, with people whoa re interested in learning. They also allow you to connect your knowledge to the product or service you are selling to a highly interested audience.
Are Webinars Right For You?
While webinars can be a great value to many businesses, they won’t work for every business audience. Consider using webinars in your marketing strategy if you offer:
While webinars can work for other products and services, it won’t be as obvious how to format and utilize webinars to reach your audience and sell.
Set Goals
Before we get to moving forward with your webinar, you need to establish what you want to accomplish with it.
What do you hope to achieve with this webinar? Meet a certain sales goal? Build your email list? Enroll people in your course? Get more downloads for a free resource?
Whatever your goal is will help dictate what your topic should be. For example, if I want to get more clients for social media consultations, I would want to have a webinar about how to double your Instagram traffic.
This topic attracts people who already know their Instagram and social strategy needs to be improved, are looking to improve it, and maybe interested in hiring someone to get one-on-one advice specific to their profile.
Deliver Valuable Content
One of my biggest gripes about webinars is often people use them to sell, sell, sell and not deliver the intended information.
People do not like feeling duped and running a webinar that’s actually a very big sales promo is a big dupe!
Attendees of your webinar want to learn, so make sure you are teaching and sharing! You want to demonstrate your authority and knowledge on a topic, that you’re in-tune with your industry.
Aim to make your webinar topic something that people can walk away feeling like they have learned important targeted knowledge from you. A large topic, such as content marketing, would be very difficult to cover in a webinar, but a webinar on “getting started blogging” will not only interest people, but allow them to walk away from the webinar with full knowledge.
Remember, you topic needs to connect back to your goal. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to host a webinar on getting started blogging if I’m trying to sell social media consultations.
If you’re struggling to think of an idea, consider:
FAQs: look through frequent questions your asked
Google: what do people often search on Google to come across your business
Social media: what are your social media followers commenting and interacting with most from your content
Ask your audience: ask what your audience would love to learn more about
Competition: look at what they share and what ideas you may want to adopt and make your own
Focus On Your Deck
Now’s the time to create your actual webinar presentation! I like to start with an outline before I begin creating, building a flow from one slide to another.
Next, I figure out what I want my deck to look like. There are thousands of webinar templates out there, so if you’re not a creative type or don’t know where to start, try using one of those (just make sure you incorporate your brand colors and fonts!).
As you build your deck, don’t give away all your content on each slide. Play around with words, phrases, or images to convey your message. You don’t need to worry about having too many slides, a 60-minute webinar can easily have 80 slides.
Remember: more text does not mean more information!
The more interactive or visual a deck is, the more likely people are to listen to you and mobile viewers can enjoy it.
Focus On Your Product
After you’ve built your deck, go back to it and see where you can feature your product, hint toward your product, or outright promote your product.
Many webinars wait to talk about their product until the end, but if you have an opportunity to highlight your product, don’t hesitate to mention it and tell viewers you’ll talk about it more at the end.
Not only does this tell visitors you have additional ways to help them, but that this webinar isn’t solely about selling your product!
If you’re worried, even at the end of your webinar, about promoting your product and being too “salesy” - don’t! You’ve earned the right to sell your product by delivering value throughout your entire webinar.
Your product should only add more value to your viewers! Make sure when sharing your product (especially at the end of the webinar) you answer any objectives people may have to your product, share why it adds value to their life, and how it will help them long term.
If you could remove your product from the webinar entirely and it still provide value, then you have created a webinar your audience will enjoy and build trust in your business.
Practice!
Beautiful slides and a well-thought out webinar will make no difference if you don’t practice! Run through your webinar at least two times after you believe you have completed it. It will help you figure out what areas don’t flow as well as you thought and let you know which areas you may stumble through.
You should also take a trial run through your webinar software, especially if this is your first webinar, to make sure it’s functioning correctly and you know how to use it.
Anything that can go wrong during your webinar, likely will, but if you practice you can know how to navigate as many situations as possible.
Ask For Engagement
Now has come the time to hold your webinar. You’ve prepared it well, practiced, and have an audience ready to learn.
While your webinar will teach them, in our modern age, it won’t captivate them entirely. Throughout your webinar, ask yes or no questions to your audience to respond to in the chat, call out the people doing other activities to listen in on important points, and respond to comments, by name, as they appear.
Always Hold A Q&A
Along the idea of asking for engagement, always hold a question and answer portion at the end of your webinar!
A Q&A section allows you to interact with people highly likely to convert and purchase your product or service because they have remained through the entire webinar and are still interested in learning more.
Start your Q&A with a prepared common question you’re asked and continue to answer questions until there are no more quality questions. Do not put an end time on your Q&A! Doing so, cuts off highly engaged leads and potentially cutting off more conversions.
Follow-up!
After the webinar, make sure you follow-up to all attendees and registrants with the replay, allowing more people to be exposed to your webinar and act on your call-to-action.
Don’t just stop there! Continue to share your product or service in connection to your webinar topic over the following two weeks and share more resources you have available. Continue to counter any concerns webinar viewers may have and the opportunity your product or service provides them.
Don’t forget to keep in connection with your webinar attendees in your regular newsletter and on your day-to-day CRM platform. At Wavoto we make this easy, integrating with Webinar Jam, Ever Webinar and Zoom to easily tag attendees and have them included in future email marketing campaigns.
Try Wavoto for yourself, for free, today!