What I Love And Hate About Webinars – And How To Make Them Better

Webinars are consistently rated as one of the most effective channels in B2B marketing.

Maybe I’m the only one surprised by these statistics, but I have a strong feeling that marketing managers, directors, and executives have an overinflated sense of how effective their webinars are at driving new business. Because if you’ve sat in on a fair share of webinars as an attendee and you’re anything like me, the ratio of webinars that suck to webinars that don’t suck is probably pretty high.

Don’t get me wrong. Webinars have the potential to be an incredibly effective means of converting leads at the middle or bottom of your sales funnel – they are visual in nature, allow you to speak directly to your potential customers, promote engagement, and allow you to scale your presentations so that your time is spent more efficiently across a large group of prospects or customers instead of just one.

But let’s be honest with ourselves: the vast majority of webinars are nowhere close to the 10x content standards we have to meet as marketers in 2016. Instead, what we have to endure are clunky presentations that take 5 minutes of valuable information and spread it out across 60 minutes worth of time. And despite their perceived success, the question remains: was that webinar what really convinced these leads to buy? Or did you just spend a whole lot of time and money on prospects that were going to buy from you anyway?

There is a path toward creating incredible webinars that truly convert. By the end of this post, my objective is to help us get there – not just to complain about what’s wrong. But to get there, we first have to talk about what makes webinars suck and why we continue to do these things even when they lead to more suckage:

Reason # 1: Presenters spend too much time chatting amongst themselves or about themselves.

This one is, without a doubt, my number one webinar turn off. WAY too many webinars front load the session with a ton of information about the presenters and their companies. If after ten minutes of presentation, I’ve only walked away with the names of the presenters, the ages of their children, their recent vacation spot, and the name of the office dog, I can already tell that my time as an attendee isn’t being properly valued. Similarly, for those webinars with two or more hosts, when hosts spend any amount of time on catching up or inside jokes, I’m lost again – remember: attendees aren’t generally close friends – they’re people hundreds or thousands of miles away muted behind a computer screen.

Why We Do This:

Because almost everybody is at least a little bit uncomfortable when they present.  And so we fall back on topics with which we’re comfortable. Anyone can call you out on the expert advice you’re about to offer, but at least no one is going to challenge how much you like rock climbing.

What To Do Instead

We need to dive into the content and quit qualifying it. Instead of trying to humanize ourselves or develop credibility via an introduction, our personalities and experience should be conveyed naturally throughout the presentation.

Reason #2: Marketers give people a reason not to attend.

I recently sat in on an incredible webinar by Neil Patel where he did something unheard of: he told people beforehand that they had to show up for the live broadcast. No downloading the presentation afterward. No follow up email with a link to the recording. Attendees could either show up or miss out altogether. The result? Not only was the webinar highly attended, but engagement skyrocketed as well, with all of us sitting there for 90 minutes worth of incredibly valuable information, taking as many notes and asking as many questions in the process.

If I know that I can just watch a recording later, I’m pretty likely to either skip out on the live event or spend the time I am listening live focused on other things. No matter how interesting your topic may be, you’ve convinced me that your time isn’t valuable.

Why We Do This

Because we are deathly afraid of losing out on any opportunity to add one more content offering to our website. But is the possibility of a few more fresh sets of eyes 2 months from now worth losing the attention of the multitude of leads willing to listen to you today?

What To Do Instead

If your webinar is going to be live, make it live. As any good economist knows, a limited supply will only increase demand, especially if what you have to offer is going to be incredible for those who get in on the action in real time.

Since creating hype during your promotion is so critical to pulling off a successful live-only webinar, I thought it would be helpful to ask Neil Patel to share his advice for getting people to show up for the event:

Reason #3: Live webinars don’t produce great standalone slide decks later (and vice-versa).

Number one rule of live presentations: don’t put too much information on your slides – give your listeners a reason to listen to what you have to say, instead of being distracted by a bunch of text sitting behind you. This applies as much to high school speech classes as it does live webinars – most often, an image, infographic, chart, video clip, or title is all you need to get your message across. But when we decide to take the same deck we used for a webinar and share it afterward, all of these visual cues become totally unintelligible. What does this juggling dog on slide 6 have to do with growth hacking?

Why We Do This:

Because only 16 percent of people who watch webinars prefer to attend them live (although I would propose this as a direct result of the reasons outlined in this post), and in an attempt to hastily appease the other 84 percent, we share the unedited deck.

What to Do Instead:

Create slide decks for the context in which they will be viewed. Want to share a presentation on SlideShare? Excellent! Your readers should be able to understand every single slide without explanation. About to present at an upcoming trade show? Awesome! Bring back that juggling dog.

Reason #4: 60 minutes somehow became a rule.

A full 85 percent of webinar attendees prefer webinars that last for 30 or 45 minutes And yet, so many webinars are booked for an hour, even when the presenters only have 20 minutes worth of content to discuss and three audience questions to answer. When this happens, presenters do one of two things:

• Stall awkwardly
• End the webinar early

Neither of these actions are positive. Because even in the case of the latter option, if our audience had known they only needed a 30 minute hold for your presentation, they probably could have better prepared for how they would use the extra 30 minutes.

Why We Do This:

I suppose it’s because 60 minutes sounds like a round number (clearly we haven’t been listening to Jason Womack enough).

What To Do Instead: 

Make the length of your webinar match the length of your content. Most often, this should lead you to the side of brevity (why couldn’t you do a 15-minute webinar, if that’s all you needed?). But this isn’t always the case. There have been some incredible 90-minute webinars (not to mention virtual conferences). Much like the recurring myth that blog posts must be under 500 words to capture your audience’s attention, so too is there no hard-and-fast rule to how long all webinars need to be – if you work hard to make every minute count, it’s going to be pretty hard to get it wrong.

Reason #5: We bait-and-switch our industry with our solution.

This doesn’t apply to all webinars, but when it happens, it’s awful. [cliche alert] Creating content is about building trust. What doesn’t build trust is when we tell our audience that we are going to talk about an industry problem, and only talk about the solution we’re selling. Ex: If our agency promoted promoted a webinar on advanced lead generation strategies, attendees would be pretty mad if our only solution was to hire Element Three. That isn’t a market solution. That’s a company trying to sell itself, and doing so in a particularly slimy way (note: we don’t do this).

Why We Do This:

Because at the end of the day, marketing is about generally about driving sales, either today, tomorrow, or in the distant future.

What To Do Instead:

Be honest about what you’re presenting. If it’s a webinar focused on your product or services specifically, be upfront about that in your promotion. You might attract a few fewer attendees, but the ones that do attend will likely have a much greater chance of converting into customers. Similarly, if it’s a webinar meant to be focused on positioning your company as an industry leader, then respond to the industry problem you set out to address. Just as attendees will encounter your personality in how you present, they will discover your value in the effectiveness of your presentation.

Reason #6: No clear actionable strategy is ever offered.

As an attendee, I’m expecting to come out of a webinar with some actionable strategy for applying what I’m about to learn. Just as every blog post should have a call-to-action, so too should every webinar (and this CTA needs to happen during the actual webinar, not in the follow-up email, or worse, the follow up phone call asking attendees if there is anything we can do for them). When all I’m left with are really vague musings on an industry and “thought leadership,” I leave the webinar feeling like I’ve wasted a lot of time.Why We Do This:

Because we want our audience to learn just enough to be engaged, but not enough to be able to take the work into their own hands or to go to our competitors. Our purpose isn’t education, even though it should be.

What To Do Instead:

Tell attendees exactly what they need to do. Give them the checklist of what is required, and let them run. Experience will demonstrate that by doing so, you’ll find that trust is a much better driver of customer acquisition than confusion.

Reason #7: Q&A falls flat.

At the end of the day, the best webinars are those that have attendees hungry to ask questions and then seek to answer them. So when webinar Q&A has feeling more like a dentist pulling teeth than a superhero saving the day, we know we have a major problem. And that problem is that we limited our attendees expectations of how valuable our Q&A really is.

Why We Do This:

Lack of preparation and poor selling. We hope that attendees are going to be incredibly engaged, but we barely do anything to encourage them to be engaged.

What To Do Instead:

Two things.

1. Have enough questions in store to fill up the entire Q&A section. You don’t have to pretend these questions are from the audience (although it’s not the worst thing to do), but you do need to make certain that there’s never an extended gap in information sharing.
2. Motivate attendees throughout the presentation to bring their relevant organizational challenges to the table.

Everybody participating in your webinar has problems that they need solved that they believe you can solve in some way, shape, or form – if they knew everything there was to know, they wouldn’t have attended in the first place. But if you don’t set the stage for them to dive in headfirst, they may not know what is acceptable and what isn’t. So let them know that you’re prepared to respond to their specific problems and that even if you don’t get to them during the webinar, that you will follow up. Once they understand just how big of an opportunity it is to get free advice from industry experts, there is a much better chance engagement is going to skyrocket.

Awesome. Where do I start?

The world needs webinars that not only get people to fill out a form, but that actually compel undecided customers to buy. And while it is undoubtedly true that if everyone who ever hosted a webinar was to fix these 7 reasons, we would be infinitely closer to that world,  these 7 lessons are not enough to get you to the place where your webinars convert like crazy. Because unfortunately folks, these seven steps are only half the battle.

Success from these 7 steps assumes that if we were to remove all the unnecessary fluff cluttering our webinars, at the core, there is valuable information to be shared at a time and place in which people are willing to hear it via a medium that grabs their attention. These lessons are the graduate level webinar seminar for the A+ students who completed their 100, 200, and 300 level classes. If you’re still trying to figure out the basics of how to run a webinar, what software to use, and what information to include in it, go read these 3 blog posts and come back later:

• How to Do a Webinar Your Audience Will Love
  (via Wordstream)
• 7 Dead Simple Ways to Improve Slide Decks
  (via Moz)
• Webinars – The Unsung Heros of the Video World
  (via Wistia)

And then when you’re ready, go make webinars that don’t suck and invite us all to view them.

Any more reasons why webinars suck that you think I missed? Tweet them to me at @howaaronsees_it and I may include them in a future version of this post Want your webinar critiqued by an Element Three team member? Email me at [email protected] with some brief details about when you will be hosting it or a link to the recording if you’ve already hosted it. We will respond to every single webinar you share with us.