Yesterday, I did a thread on Twitter on webinar marketing. As promised, I'm releasing part 2. This part is +/- 3k words and could be a course in and of itself. Enjoy it for free and if you need or know anyone who needs to set up the automation systems I mention in this article to go hand-in-hand with your webinar marketing, please do refer to me.

If you haven't read the introductory thread or want a recap, you can find it here.

So we've established why webinars are one of the best ways to drive sales. Before we move on, I'd like to mention an interesting question I've gotten on yesterdays thread.

Olivier asked if there's a distinction between pre-recorded and live webinars, a good point. There definitely is, however it depends on your goals. You can have a very systemized business, and if you prefer efficiency above all else, then pre-recorded is the way to go. However, one of the benefits of a webinar is that people feel heard and therefore itdrives higher customer/prospect engagement, and this is obviously only possible with live webinars, or is it? Engagement can be replicated with pre-recorded webinars as well by adding forms, questionnaires or chatbots that handle questions the attendee might have.

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Now, onto today's topics. The ones I've promised.

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Why do webinars fail?

There are many webinar success stories, but there are plenty failed ones as well.

Usually, it's because of poor execution, as in many things.

The first mistake many make is that they think of their webinar as nothing else than a digital lecture. Of course the prospects are there to learn more about the topic that you've hooked them onto. But when you treat your webinar as a lecture, a script, a monologue, you're invalidating it of the above-mentioned humanity and interactive nature that sets the digital experience apart.

The second mistake is when you underestimate the marketing of your webinar. No matter how epic your webinar is, you won't have half of the results if you actually paid attention to a few crucial steps before and after the webinar.

Previously, you could put together a simple signup form, send some generic invitations via e-mail and some half-assed follow up. Would've worked just fine.

But today we have advanced much more technologically and those possibilities combined with more competition in the digital world, make the expectations prospects have higher than ever.

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The ideal webinar experience is customer-centric.

The webinar is not about you, it’s about your customer.

To run a succesful webinar you should keep three things in mind:

  • Real-time, Asynchronous Interactions
  • Personalized Approach
  • Ongoing Value

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Real-time, Asynchronous Interactions

Itʼs no secret that long waiting times proportionally lower your ability to convert. You canʼt expect your users to listen when you are ready to talk or ask when you are able to answer. Strong conversion is driven by realtime, asynchronous communication, meaning communication that happens on customer time. Chatbots provide the best form and channel to kick start the conversation that will peak during the webinar.

The bot can serve as a:

  • Source of information on the webinar and your company
  • Conversational registration form
  • Webinar questions submission form

The best part is, it can do all those things wherever and whenever your customers have the time to listen and ask.

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Personalized Approach

Personalization is not just about remembering your customerʼs name. Itʼs about the profound simplification of customer experiences across their journey. Automated conversational experiences land your brand a:

  • Omnipresent friendly “human face” without over-burdening your support team
  • Comfortable conversation experience that doesnʼt force prospects out of their routines
  • Context as the bot is able to recall the prospectʼs personal data and past interactions minimizing the number of actions to take to proceed down the conversion funnel  
  • Personalized post-webinar interaction based on participation/engagement

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Ongoing Value

The trick is to stop thinking about your webinar as a straight road with a dead end. The power of your webinar marketing shouldn't die with your live stream. There are two ways to yield ongoing value from your webinar efforts:

  • Through post-webinar engagement in the form of further conversations, special offers, additional content, and resources, etc.
  • By repurposing your webinar in different formats through other marketing channels

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Webinar Marketing Framework

To turn a webinar into a full-fledged strategy, you need to define your steps across 3 key stages of the webinar marketing framework: Pre-Webinar (Acquisition), Ongoing Webinar (Engagement), Post-Webinar (Conversion).

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Stage One: Pre-Webinar

To maximize the potential of your webinar, you need to start building the webinar with marketing goals and values in mind. Going through the motions will help you focus on your idea into a clearer and more concise value proposition.

Develop Marketing Angle

A. Goal - What do you want to achieve?

B. Target Audience - Who do you want to reach?  

C. Customer Journey Stage - At which stage of the lifecycle is your target audience?

D. Webinar type - What kind of webinar would that audience at that stage find attractive?

E. Format - Which webinar format is most likely to engage that audience?

F. Frequency - How often should you run this type of webinar for maximum results?

G. Department - Based on all of the above, which department should take the lead?

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Define Webinar Structure

Although a webinar is not a lecture, it also isnʼt an unruly chat over a cup of coffee. At no point should you give your audience a feeling that they are wasting their time. Therefore, after having defined your key marketing objectives and formats, it is important to build the structure of your webinar.  Plan out the content structure of the webinar, allocating each “chapter” a time frame within which it should be completed. The structure will help you stay on track, avoid distractions, and share your expertise in a coherent manner without unnecessary frills that can affect the motivation of your audience.

Develop a Conversational Marketing Strategy

However, having a webinar planned isnʼt even halfway to completing stage one of the framework. Like with any other type of content, the idea itself doesnʼt have any value until itʼs seen by your target audience. The most efficient way to acquire and engage leads in the pre-webinar phase is using a conversational approach. The advantage of using a bot for lead acquisition is it's channel adaptable as well as the ability to personalize user experience in real-time. A webinar acquisition botʼs main functions may include:

  • Collect participant data (new prospects)  
  • Free prospects from re-submitting data (existing prospects)
  • Share webinar details
  • Answer frequently asked questions
  • Generate webinar access
  • Key Update participants Google Calendar
  • Generate a referral link for the prospect to share the webinar with friends  

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In the preparation stage, you can also already deploy your engagement bot. This bot can be leveraged both before and during the webinar. A webinar Engagement botʼs main functions may include:

  • Encourage submitting questions to be answered during the webinar
  • Allow participants to vote on submitted questions so you can easily prioritize among them
  • Ask questions that help you segment the webinar audience

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Stage Two: Ongoing-Webinar

After all your diligent preparation, itʼs time to present your webinar. For things to go smoothly, you need your presentation and viewer engagement to work in harmony.

Webinar Presentation

Practice Your Public Speaking

A crushing majority of people are not born speakers. So, if you are one of those people who get nervous speaking in front of your audience, good news for you:

  • You are not alone
  • Presenting is a teachable skill

The key steps to crushing your webinar presentation include:

  • Expertise: Being an expert on the topic you are presenting means you are unlikely to ever get caught off guard no matter the complexity of the question. This is also one of the main reasons you need to define the topic, goal as well as in what stage of the customer journey is your target audience. When you do this, you are able to assign the webinar to the biggest expert on that particular topic in your company/agency.
  • Practice: There is no shame in practicing your presentation. Even Steve Jobs dedicated hours to practicing his now-legendary presentations so they had the desired effect. Present to yourself or your colleagues, identify parts where you experience friction, and try to improve them.
  • Knowing your fears: This is no time to be a hero. In fact, being aware of and accepting your fears and worries, is the key element in efficient problem-solving. Also, it can help you put things in perspective. E.g., itʼs good to remind yourself that while this is your first time hosting a webinar, you, for instance, present your ideas and work in front of your colleagues constantly or manage much tougher audiences in pitch meetings. Always look at the bigger picture!

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Get Comfortable

‍You would be surprised how easy it is to forget about the obvious stuff when you are caught up in the webinar prep hype. Hence, make sure to: Have some water ready, as speaking dries out mouth and throat and things can get uncomfortable. Take a compulsory bathroom break - you donʼt want to spend the webinar wishing it was over. Dial down on the coffee as one of its common side-effects include nervousness, restlessness, increased heart rate, anxiety, etc. Set up your presenting space in a way that makes you feel comfortable. For instance, some people feel much comfortable speaking while standing. If thatʼs your case, set up a standing desk instead of forcing yourself to sit.

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Minimize Distractions

Nobody enjoys being embarrassed. Though during the webinars the stakes are higher. Itʼs not just your name but also the name of your company that is at stake. Hence, make the necessary precautions to eliminate any uninvited distractions from your environment: Turn off all on-screen notifications. Put your phone on silent mode. If you donʼt have the luxury of a sound-proof room, ensure that everyone in your office or at home is aware when the webinar will be running to ensure they keep noise to a minimum.

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Have a Backup Plan (live webinars)

No matter how well you think you have prepared, there are elements you canʼt control. The power goes out, the system crashes... Nevertheless, there are precautions you can take to minimize the impact of unpredictable issues during your webinar: Set up a backup computer to be ready and joined to the webinar. Pair the backup computer with your mobile phoneʼs hotspot or an alternative wifi. Have a webinar co-host in the session if at all possible. E.g., having a second fully-charged laptop connected to the webinar and ready to go can save you if the electricity goes out. Mobile data or alternative wifi can help you in case of connection issues. And, last but not least, a co-host means one of you can keep the webinar going if the other is having problems and needs a few minutes to sort them out.

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Audience Engagement

Start Early for Pre-Webinar Banter

While the designated webinar window should stay focused on actionable information, you can warm up by starting a few minutes early with friendly pre-webinar banter. Here are 3 reasons why:

  • It makes the early birds feel goodabout themselves. They get someexclusive pre-show banter as areward for joining early.
  • It helps to reduce your webinar“nerves”. You have time to get usedto the role as participants come inone by one and not all at once.
  • It sets a relaxed and friendly tone forthe rest of the session. It makes itseem more personal and intimate.Everyone feels good.

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Provide an Icebreaker for Audience Engagement

A simple way to boost audience engagement is to kick off with an icebreaker question. This method has proved itself in countless in-person workshops and it also translates really well to an online webinar. Ask your audience an open-ended question that relates to the content in your webinar but also one that anyone will find easy to answer. (For instance, the most horrible customer service experiences, etc.). Next, give a shout out and comment on fun responses as they stream in. It fuels engagement while making your webinar attendees familiar with the chat function of your webinar tool. So, when they want to ask something important, they feel comfortable doing so. Tricks like these are important. In ana-lyzing the average time a participant spends on a webinar, studies have found that active participants in a webinar are:

  • More engaged
  • Stay on longer
  • More likely to respond to your call-to-action

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Get on Camera  

When polling a group of webinar organizers, a surprising 64% said they never use a camera. However, not using it is a huge missed opportunity. Seeing your face on a camera comes across more personal, and projects a friendlier and more candid experience. Furthermore, 83% of webinar attendees said presenters on webcam are very engaging or engaging.

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Prompt Interactivity with chatbots

Chatbots are understated and underused when it comes to webinars. Chatbots yield several great webinar benefits, they:

  • Get your audience to interact and so  increase their engagement and likeli- hood to stay on longer.  
  • Collect audience insights in real-time  which you can use to adjust your presen- tation on the fly.  
  • Provide quick and painless research data you can turn into highly-linkable data content or share on social.  
  • Help you segment your audience and  increase the relevancy of your communi- cation.  
  • Help your sales team understand the customer and so create a much more relevant follow-up.

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For example, to make your webinar as relevant and packed with information as possible, you can share a bot that allows your audience to vote on which questions they want to be answered in a Q&A. Itʼs a great follow up to a pre-webinar engagement bot that collected question submissions in advance.

When interacting with the bot the audience can ask a new question or vote on existing ones. It increases a sense of privacy as the questions and votes are submitted individually and not via the all-visible webinar chat. Furthermore, you are able to prioritize answering the most popular questions in the short Q&A making it feel more satisfying. If you want to improve the quality of your webinar in real-time, you can have your bot run a poll and gather data such as:

  • Whatʼs your experience level with [TOPIC]? Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced / Pro
  • Howʼs the pace of this webinar? Much too slow / A bit too slow / About right / A bit too fast / Way too fast

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Alternatively, to understand and further segment your audience, your bot can ask:

  • What are your biggest challenges with [TOPIC]?
  • What are your main use cases for [SERVICE]?

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Expand Your Reach with Live Streaming Options

Leveraging the live stream options of social media platforms like Facebook and Youtube can help you expand the reach of your webinar to all your social followers for free. When you go live on either of these platforms, your followers receive an automatic notification. Hence, you are able to gain some last minutes attendees as well as score some shares in case they find your content worthy. For instance, to share your Zoom webinar streaming on Facebook or YouTube, follow this simple process:

1) Sign in to the Zoom web portal as an Owner or Account Admin.

2) Go to Account Management > Webinar Settings.

3) Click Edit to the right of In Webinar Settings.

4) Enable Allow hosts to live stream to webinars, and then enable YouTube or Facebook.

5) Click Save.

Then, once you are live:

1) Click “More” in the Meeting/Webinar Controls.

2) Click Live on YouTube - or - Live on Facebook

3) After that, you need to sign up to the respective Facebook or YouTube account and complete a simple authentication process

4) For more detailed guides to connecting your Zoom webinar to Facebook and YouTube streaming visit the attached links!

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Stage Three: Post-Webinar

The webinar might be over but your webinar marketing strategy is nowhere near being done.

Answer Questions made During the Webinar

One of the most important ways to engage with webinar attendees at this stage is to review the questions they submitted during the webinar you didnʼt have enough time to answer. These questions are likely key topics in which more potential leads are interested. Furthermore, unlike in the live session, you can go much deeper into the material to offer added value. In fact, you can pass them to your market-ing, sales, and support teams/people to be developed into articles, videos, or sales materials. Not all questions are equally valuable, so donʼt forget to leverage the #votes you received from a Webinar Engagement Bot, to prioritize and qualify the questions to be answered. Better yet, if you answer the questions directly in an Airtable spreadsheet, your responses will directly feed into the Webinar Conversion Bot (WCB).

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Define the Flow of your Webinar Conversion Bot

The WCB is the last bot you need to complete the customer journey in your webinar marketing system. Here, you should focus on achieving these two goals: Converting opportunities into paying customers: Design the WCB flow so that it allows users to quickly buy/up grade your offering if they are ready to buy. Qualifying opportunities for more human-based follow up: If the lead is not ready to buy yet, the bot needs to determine their level of readiness to buy the product - in other words, their stage in the customer journey. The qualification process will depend on the product/service you are offering, but a good place to start is to use the BANT system: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline.

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Launch post-webinar campaign

Once you defined the conversion bot flow, itʼs time to prepare the post-webinar campaign:

a) Webinar PPT + Recording: Review the webinar presentation and the recording. In case the webinar session was not performed very well (anything could go wrong during a live session) you could record a new webinar in private. This could help you present better to audiences that have not attended the live webinar and convert them into paying customers.

b) Email List of Webinar Attendees: Curate the email list and segment the attendees from non-attendees. This will help you personalize the WCB flow and offer relevant information for each segment.

c) Post-Webinar Material: Apart from the PPT + Recording you can also think about some additional content for leads who are not interested in upgrading immediately but might do it in the future.

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Amplify Audience Reach

After launching the post-webinar email campaign, your work is not done yet. You should think about amplifying the reach of your audience, to leverage all the content you have created for the webinar. The idea here is to use the content as a lead magnet to generate more traffic that goes to your WCB and convert it into customers or qualified opportunities for further engagement. There are different options:

  • Publish the webinar recording on YouTube
  • Write a blog post about the webinar
  • Share webinar content on social media

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How To Measure The Impact Of Your Webinar Marketing Strategy

When youʼre measuring the impact of your Webinar Marketing efforts, there are a few metrics you should pay attention to. But the most important thing to keep in mind is: What are the metrics that are important to YOU? Is it emails captured? Is it “meetings booked”? Is it a percentage of traffic growth driven to a certain page? Thatʼs something you should lock down before you go live. Below is a sample list of metrics you can track.

Metrics to track

  • Visitors (users who visit webinar landing)
  • Leads (users who finish the webinar signup)
  • Referral leads (users who have been referred by others)
  • Qualified leads (users who have finished the webinar engagement process)
  • Opportunities (users who have interacted with the company post-webinar)
  • Qualified opportunities (users who have finished WCB and have a lead score>)
  • Nurtured opportunities (users who have finished WCB but do not qualify)
  • Customers (duh)

If you need someone to set up webinar bots (webinar acquisition, webinar engagement or webinar conversion bots), feel free to contact me.