It doesn’t matter whether you call them web seminars, live seminars, or teleseminars; webinars are a highly effective, yet underused, marketing channel.
The current marketing trend shows that webinars are, for the majority of niches, the most important lead generation tool for driving new traffic and converting those visitors into leads.
Webinars also help move newly acquired leads through the buyer’s journey from awareness to purchase. In fact, a lot of marketing experts seem to agree that webinars are one of the most effective demand generation tools.
If you’re wondering what a webinar can do for your business, look at these staggering results:
LeanData uses webinars to accelerate leads through the pipeline at a 4.5X ROI.
According to Femtrepreneur.com, Jenna generated $5,000 from her first live webinar, which drew only 30 participants. However, her second attempt didn’t generate nearly as many sales.
But Jenna didn’t just give up and assume defeat. Instead, she took a proactive approach and figured out how to capitalize on the webinar recording. Since she’d already done the work with the live webinar, she decided to use the pre-recorded version to bring aboard more customers. As part of this strategy, Jenna sent out a series of post-webinar emails. From those emails, she earned $12,000 in just 24 hours.
David Siteman Garland sold $38,336 worth of his online programs on a small webinar, which was more than double compared to his previous webinar.
Then, he decided to roll it out on a bigger scale and his next webinar brought in an additional $121,724 in sales.
See the potential of hosting a well-designed webinar?
By the way, our software, Scriptly, has a built-in smart webinar wizard that allows you to create an engaging webinar script in minutes not days, even if you’ve never written a line of webinar script before. Here’s a video preview of the wizard.
Best tips for improving webinars
In this 5-minute guide, we are going to give you our top tips for running a successful webinar.
These tips are basically about:
- Becoming a better presenter, and
- Engaging your audience.
These are the two areas that most webinar creators struggle with. Without further delay, let’s get started with the tips for driving sales through quality webinars.
1. How to become an exceptional presenter
You are here because want to host better webinars; to do that, you first need to start by improving yourself as a webinar presenter. Most people are not very good in front of the camera. As a matter of fact, one of man’s greatest fears is speaking in front of an audience.
Don’t worry, most speakers you admire were not as confident or talented when they first started. They had to practice over and over again, host numerous webinars and challenge themselves every time before they cultivated their presentation skills.
If you feel that you lack the skills to do teaching, public speaking or professional training you shouldn’t hold to this thought. Everyone, including you, can learn how to improve as a speaker.
Practice
The first thing you need to do is understand that practice makes perfect. Without a doubt we know it’s a cliché…but it is 100% true. Your way to successful webinars starts with practice.
So always remember: Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!
Pat Flynn, a successful blogger, product creator, and affiliate marketer with a huge online audience, reports how it was for him during his first public speaking gig.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it and studying all weekend. From time to time I’d spend a half hour to an hour in the bathroom just practicing my presentation while watching myself in the mirror.
With all this practice it is no surprise his first public speaking gig was a success.
Be warned, especially when you hold your first webinar you can’t just wing it. It will be a big mistake!
You don’t want to leave success to luck when it comes to holding an impactful webinar. What you need to do instead is to practice so that you are fully prepared and don’t seem unconfident or unprofessional.
Hosting your first successful webinar is very important because it will give you the faith that you can do it again and again.
Record yourself
When you practice with the aim to become a better webinar presenter always remember to record yourself. Recording yourself is one of the best webinar tips we can give you.
Looking at yourself like you’re someone else will help you be more objective about your presentation skills and style. It’s actually the best way to see how you can improve; we are, after all, our own harshest critics.
When you rehearse your speech without recording, you’re not able to see the imperfections. Of course, you can invite your friends or coworkers over to watch your webinar rehearsal, but unless you record the webinar and view it, you won’t be able to form your own opinion.
The first time you watch yourself, you will probably see a completely different picture than the one you expected. It’s the same as when you first heard your voice from a recording device; it sounded different, didn’t it?
Now, let’s move on to our second big area of focus of our 5-minute guide to better webinars.
Once you feel confident with presenting your webinar material, you now need to ensure that your presentation will be interesting and engaging.
2. How to interact with your webinar attendees
Whether on a stage or on a webinar platform, you always want to maintain your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Interacting with your audience is the key to a successful live webinar. It’s not a good practice to just hit the “go live” button and start talking for 45 minutes.
You need to make an effort to interact with your audience, otherwise the people watching will probably just go surfing on the internet and get distracted while your drone on in the background.
Your webinar should be like a conversation, and there are a few routes to accomplish that.
Ask questions
Start with your presentation and then stop periodically to check that the webinar attendees are still following you. Ask them questions to make sure they understand what you are telling them. The opportunity to type in an answer will also make them feel more involved.
Also, even if you aren’t looking for answers, take the time to actually read or acknowledge a couple of the answers that you are getting. People like getting attention, and the same happens during live webinars.
As a rule of thumb, it’s best to keep the Q&A session for the last 10 or 15 minutes of the webinar. But in addition to that, it’s a good piece of advice to stop every 10 minutes or so to ask questions that will help skyrocket engagement during the webinar. Plus, someone might bring up a question that helps engage other participants.
Additionally, you can ask questions before you begin to deliver your webinar content. This will give you more insight into who exactly is on board. Ask things like “who here has…” or “how many of you have ever…” This sort of questions will give you a better understanding of your audience and make attendees feel much more involved and appreciated.
In other words, the best webinar is an interactive and engaging webinar. You need to stop people from falling asleep or getting distracted during your presentation.
More tips for engaging webinars
But apart from asking questions, what else can you do to make your webinar more engaging? Here are some tips to improve webinar interaction.
- Use slideshows, images, and videos.
- Have a co-presenter and interact with them.
- Keep the chat box open so people participating in the webinar can comment at any time. Allow chat rooms or social media.
- Be relaxed and engaging. Throw in a joke or two to keep people’s attention, and moods, high.
- Keep your voice expressive, by increasing the amount of fluctuation in your voice tone. By watching your own webinar you will know if you are doing this correctly.
- Have a co-worker to assist you in hosting the webinar. They can read comments, questions, or tackle any tech issues so that your full attention is on hosting a great webinar.
- At the beginning, offer gifts and incentives for people watching to stay till the end of your presentation.
- Reduce theory and increase information that is actionable, such as easy-to-follow steps, or information that makes an impact, like a case study. You want people to walk away with a clear benefit.
Can YOU run a good webinar?
As you can see, there is a lot to a successful webinar. But by no means should you be intimidated.
Always remember, success in everything that we do for the first time comes through experience. Be patient and mindful of the learning process and the mistakes you will make along the way.
Even if you’re afraid of hosting a webinar, just do it, because with some work and practice beforehand it will slowly become easier every time. And, after you’ve mastered webinars, each time you go live could translate into thousands of dollars in revenue.
If you follow our tips for producing better webinars, you will be able to hold a live webinar that people find engaging and exciting. Pick your monetization method wisely, and you may see your business audience and revenue grow exponentially due to hosting better webinars.
Done-for-you webinar
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