Avoid These Five Webinar Mistakes
You know that running webinars is a great way to gain exposure for your business and generate leads and sales. In order to get the best results from your webinar, it is essential that you avoid the most common mistakes that others make when running your event
Here are the five most common webinar mistakes that you need to avoid:
1. Misleading Titles and Descriptions
Obviously, you want to attract as many registrants to your webinar as possible. In order to do this, it can be tempting to oversell your webinar or announce things that you won’t necessarily deliver. There can be no worse mistake than this. Misleading your webinar registrants is a road to disaster.
Besides the fact that the participants will not stay until the end of your webinar, they will also leave with a negative image of you and your business. You must do everything that you can to protect your reputation. While it can be scary not to have enough attendees at your webinar, it is better to accept a smaller audience whose expectations you will meet.
2. Not Keeping To Your Own Time Schedule
You need to decide how long your webinar is likely to last and let your participants know this. A successful webinar generally contains three parts: the valuable content, the special related offer, and the questions and answers.
Someone who makes the effort to attend your webinar reserves time for you in their schedule. If your event goes way beyond the time you announced, it can generate a lot of dissatisfaction.
3. Refusing To Use An Expert Presenter
Your performance should be the best it can be. With this in mind, you need to use an expert to present the content of your webinar. Participants are going to ask questions on your webinar, and the presenter needs to be able to answer these in a professional and confident way. If they are not an expert in the subject, this will damage your reputation.
To avoid any embarrassment, make sure that the person you choose as the presenter has a perfect understanding of their subject, as an expert.
4. Using Your Webinar Only To Promote Your Stuff
Your attendees are signing up for your webinars to learn something from you. A common mistake is to use webinars to promote products and services at all costs. People do not like to be sold to and will quickly leave a webinar like this.
Instead, focus on delivering quality content to your audience. Provide solutions to problems that people have in your niche. You will then have time to talk about your products and services after having satisfied the participants. Once the value delivery is over, your attendees will be more likely to listen to you talk about your offer.
5. Not Making Your Webinar Interactive
One of the biggest advantages of the webinar is that it is marketing content that enables interaction. In addition to the time spent with experts (an average webinar lasts 42 minutes), the possibility of interacting with them is one of the webinar’s greatest attractions for the attendee.
However, to succeed in triggering an exchange, it is necessary to know how to break the ice, to respond to questions as soon as possible, and to encourage participation. Sadly, a lot of webinars overlook these important points.
Now that you know five very important things not to do when presenting your webinar, let’s focus on the things you should be doing.
5 Best Practices For Webinar Success
The webinar is an increasingly used tool to attract prospects and interact with customers. However, running a successful webinar isn’t easy, and it can be tricky to truly engage your audience and assess its effectiveness.
Fortunately, a comprehensive study by GoToWebinar sheds light on the best practices for a truly effective webinar.
1. Promotion Of The Webinar
Promoting a webinar is an essential step in making it known, registering as many registrations as possible and, of course, attracting as many participants as possible during the broadcast.
After the corporate website, email is the most frequently used channel to notify customers and prospects of a webinar. Partnerships and social media are also often used, although GoToWebinar notes that emailing is by far the channel generating the most registrations.
2. The Best Time To Promote Your Webinar
Based on the research, Tuesday would be the best day to communicate via a webinar. The other days of the week have decent performance, although inferior. The weekend, meanwhile, is to be avoided.
The study also tells us about the ideal time to promote a webinar. The most effective time slot is between 8am and 10am (although this can vary depending on the industry and the marketing channel used).
3. When Is The Best Day And Time To Hold Your Webinar?
According to the study, Thursday is the best day for webinars, followed closely by Wednesday and Tuesday. The other days of the week are to be avoided for broadcasting, under penalty of losing potential registrants.
The time at which your webinar takes place also has an impact on its attractiveness to Internet users. Prefer late morning (11am) or early afternoon (1pm to 2pm). Your niche will dictate the best time. If you are in the make money online niche then it is best to hold the webinar in the evening as a lot of potential attendees will have full time jobs.
4. The Content Of The Webinar Itself
The first lesson of the study was that webinar length is not an issue when it comes to webinars. Indeed, the majority of them last 45 to 60 minutes and a significant number (11%) exceed 1 hour 30 minutes. Best of all, duration is not a barrier for participants, who attend an average of 70% of a 90-minute webinar.
Another important variable is the webinar’s ability to generate engagement among its audience. Surveys and polls are widely used for these purposes, as well as the use of a learning aid.
More surprisingly, only 40% of “Demand Generation” webinars (that is to say, roughly speaking, prospecting) use this type of tool to engage their participants. All webinars should have Q & A sessions.
5. The Performance Of The Webinar
Evaluating the success and performance of a webinar can be tricky if you don’t have a point of comparison. The study provides us with useful data in this regard, starting with the average attendance of webinars.
Two-thirds (2/3) of webinars have fewer than 50 participants, which means that if you don’t exceed that number, you’re average. So don’t necessarily try to attract a large audience.
But what about the attendance rates? The finding is clear for marketing webinars – only 37% of registrants actually participate.
With these insightful statistics, you will be able to optimize your webinars and better assess their success.
