The Seven Biggest Webinar Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

It’s the eternal marketing question: how do we more consistently move people through your sales and marketing funnels?

Webinars are a great tool for educating and warming up leads – especially if you’re asking them to buy a high-ticket product or service. Potential customers can spend time with you, the expert, and develop a crucial sense of trust as you give them clear value and explain why your offering is the best solution to their problem.

But not all webinars are created equal. Use this blog as a checklist to make sure your webinars are effective.

Here are seven webinar mistakes, along with tips on how to avoid making these errors.

1. It’s a Boring Webinar
   It’s easy for us to talk about our businesses – we’re up close and personal with them every day. In fact, it’s so easy for us to talk about our businesses that we don’t stop to think about doing so in a way that’s engaging to our audience. And it’s always about our audience. The best webinars bring concrete value in terms that meet the attendees where they are in their various customer journeys. Your webinar engagement must be over 90%. You can keep engagement high by using an experienced webinar facilitator along with a key content expert. Keep the content simple and highly valuable or people will lose interest and leave the webinar.
2. The Webinar is not Interactive
   As you’re creating your outline, build in interactive ideas. Review real things and talk about real stories. Nothing engages audiences more than their own goals or problems – in fact, during our own webinars, we will often conduct live critiques of audience websites to keep the content and focus as relevant to the attendees as possible.
3. Your Visuals are Terrible
   In further service of relevancy, keep your slides simple, informative and nice to look at. These slides reflect your company, so hire a professional designer to help you present them tastefully. Avoid video streaming during the webinar. This helps with bandwidth issues and keeps the attendees focused on the content. You want your audience completely engaged and off auto-pilot.
4. Technology Breakdowns
   What can go wrong often does, so be prepared. Practicing your presentation should include practicing the webinar technical set-up. Use the most reliable equipment you can afford – especially a microphone. The perfect webinar is useless for your company if attendees can’t hear the presenters clearly and at the right volume.
5. Webinar Content is not Mid-Funnel Strategic
   Every piece of your webinar content should be focused on researchers in the middle of the funnel – keep things as simple and high level as possible so they’re clear their questions are answered and confident in moving forward as your customer. Because webinars can be so information-heavy, it’s important to speak the language of your target market. So get really clear on providing content focused on meeting attendees’ needs and solving their pain points.
6. The Webinar does not Generate Leads
   Webinars are not going to provide leads without very specific call-to-actions. Webinars must be engaging, but you’re not just doing them for fun! If they’re not helping your bottom line, there’s a problem. An issue we see with many webinars is no clear call-to-action (CTA). Whether it’s a free trial, audit or review, the CTA should facilitate a deepened relationship with your business. And don’t forget, webinars can still pay dividends even after the live stream has ended. We’ve found that 40% of the people who registered will attend the actual live webinar, but many more will watch later. So make sure you are archiving all your presentations and people know where to find them.
7. No Plan for Follow-Up After the Webinar
   It’s worth repeating that webinars are a great way to build trust with your leads. Even if they don’t buy when the live webinar ends, they are still warmer than they were when your presentation started. So have a plan in place to follow-up with all the webinar attendees. They may need a bit more exposure to your company to move forward.

Speaking of webinars, watch one of our recent ones. You’ll see a lot of us practicing what we preach and gain some insight into how to better set up your next one. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to a consultant at Intuitive Websites to get them answered.

Register for our upcoming webinar here: http://bit.ly/2kMr7mE

See a complete list of our digital marketing webinars here.