Webinars have been around for years, and is still a great tool for lead generation and sales for business-to-business companies. A properly campaigned and structured webinar will put the right prospects in front of you, and give you the time to demo a product, or give prospective buyers the information they need to make a decision. With that said, putting up a sign-up form for your webinar and telling people about your products is not enough. Many businesses to business webinars don’t work or are just boring and uninteresting. Sorry. In order for a webinar to work there has to be a thoughtful strategy from beginning to end. And the beginning is not the start of the webinar, but what you do before your prospects even arrive on the live date. Below are five tips to help you get better results from your webinars:
Create Excitement Before the Webinar
If you want people to show up to your webinar, you need to create excitement and a need before the webinar even starts. If you don’t do this, you may find yourself in a situation where very little or no one shows up to your event. So how do you create excitement he for the webinar? The opportunity to get prospects excited about the information in your webinar starts from the moment they land on your webinar sign-up page. Do you have a headline that it immediately speaks to the person you’re trying to attract? Are you addressing an urgent pain? Do you have something new that your target audience has been wanting and you’ll be unveiling it for the first time? The messaging is critical to start that process of excitement which is going to get people to actually show up to the webinar. But, as you know, someone signing up to your webinar is not a guarantee that they’ll actually show up. So even after they’ve signed up for the webinar, you may want to have additional content in the form of videos, surveys or articles that give them a little taste and or expand on the topic of the webinar. Additional content after someone signs up for your webinar keeps you top of mind, and increases the chance that person will show up to your webinar.
Have a stick strategy
Okay, you got them excited and now you have a hungry audience. One of the first things you need to do in your actual webinar is to communicate a reason for everyone to stay on the webinar until the end. We call this a stick strategy. The more people who stay on your webinar until the end get your full message and are more likely to take a desired action. Those who leave early are getting incomplete information and are less likely to buy. One of the oldest and easiest stick strategies on webinar is to offer a copy of the slides or additional notes for those who stay to the end. Whatever you offer make sure that it’s desired an interesting enough for your target audience to stay.
Create a gap
One of the biggest mistakes on B2B webinars is jumping right into your solution. Unfortunately, I see this on the majority of webinars that I attend. There’s usually a little information about the presenter and then a transition directly into the product or solution. This is a big mistake because you haven’t created a gap or a need on your sales presentation. Here are a few questions to help you think through the gap:
- Why did you create this solution?
- What alternative solutions have you been using that are not working?
- What mistakes is your target audience making when going about fixing the problem you are trying to solve?
If you answer these questions before you get into the solution you will have better connected with your audience and where their starting and as a result have better prepared them for your solution.
Make irresistible offers
You’re getting to the point where it’s time to make an offer. My question, is your offer irresistible? You’ve gone through all of this trouble to get your audience excited, to keep them on to the end, to prepare them for the sale. But do you have an offer that is worthy of this? Although were talking about the offer almost last and it usually comes at the end of a webinar the offer is one of the first things you should think through. How will you create urgency around your offer? Will you offer be exclusive? Will there be a discount? Will you add on bonuses? These are all things you need to think about and the combination of these things is what will make the offer irresistible or resistible. The good news is it’s totally up to you.
Campaign after the webinar
Earlier in this article, I mentioned that offering your product before creating a gap is one of the biggest mistakes. However, the biggest mistake may be not doing anything after the webinar is over. What most companies do after a webinar is send out a link to the replay, and that’s okay especially if it was a part of your stick strategy. But going back to the importance of strategy, how do you plan to convert the non-converted? Do you have an email follow-up sequence to follow up with those who stayed on the webinar but didn’t buy? Do you have a sequence for those who left early? Are you going to call or send a survey to find out what people thought about the webinar? Are you to send out additional content after the webinar? These are all things to think about before you even start the webinar. You already know that the majority of people or businesses on your webinar are not going to take action immediately. Though usually need more time or more information. You need to have a strategy and/or a campaign that continues to follow up and provide information that is valuable to your audience.
