10 Most Common Webinar Mistakes. I bet you make #6

Webinars have become one of today’s most important and productive tools for lead generation, pipeline acceleration and the education of customers and prospects. As more and more marketers rely on webinars to engage with their customers, competition for the time and attention of those customers intensifies.

Introduction

Today, simply giving a webinar isn’t enough. Companies must deliver great webinars that really stand out.

If 99 things go right in your webinar, and only one thing goes wrong, that one wrong thing is what people will remember. No surprise there, because it’s the same in everyday life, whether it’s at home or on the job.

Your webinar is not exempt. In fact, there’s some added drama because the meeting is held online without the presenter directly facing the audience. Give them a reason to lose confidence, and they’re out of there quicker than a raccoon in your trash bin as you walk up the driveway.

That’s a little different than what happens at a physical meeting. It’s less likely for someone to walk out of a physical meeting because of a minor glitch. Their peers’ eyes are upon them. But when it comes to webinar problems, you can bet that your participants will web-surf, walk away from the screen, or worse, log out.

But not all problems are related to the actual presentation. In fact, many mistakes are made in the early stages and resonate until the end.

In order to put on a successful webinar and draw the most participants, it’s important to understand the common mistakes and avoid them upfront.

#1. Thinking a Single Promotion

Unfortunately, some marketers send out their e-mail list just once and settle for the results. Studies show that attendance can increase when sending multiple e-mails at least seven days before the event. Although it’s commonplace for some organizations to kick off a webinar in seven days or less, it’s usually not a good idea.

This approach involves sending the invitation a week before the webinar and then following up a few days before. But studies show that audience size increases by 36 percent when you start promoting the event more than one week before. By changing to a two-week promotional strategy, you can bring in more participants as well as work several angles to register them.

Your first invitation could be HTML — that’s when it’s formatted as a web page and includes pictures, graphics, and color — and focus on the event at a high level.

The second might be plain text — less razzle-dazzle, but certainly readable on any device. The art of driving webinar registration is all about catching people at a moment of receptivity with a message that resonates with them.

According to a GotoMeeting research, 36% of registrations occur between 8-10 am.  Make sure your email invite is at the top of your recipients’ inboxes right when they get to work. Avoid promoting your webinar in the afternoon as there is a steep drop-off in registrations starting around 2 pm.

Extending webinar promotions beyond a week and delivering multiple messages and email types increase your chance of successfully hitting that moment of receptivity.

#2. No Optimized Registration and Confirmation Pages

Here’s an alarming statistic: Fewer than half of the people who begin registering for your webinar will complete the registration form. That means marketers are losing more than half their prospective audience members at the point of registration.

And what’s driving them away? It’s the registration page itself. This failure to optimize registration (and confirmation) pages is easy to fix after you recognize the problem.

Here are some ways to get your potential attendees to follow through on registration:

2.1 Avoid lengthy registration forms

Nobody likes filling out lengthy forms, yet some organizations think that it’s a good idea to ask for far more information than they really need.

Busy customers take one look at these long forms, decide they will be too time-consuming, and exit the registration process. Don’t make the mistake of scaring off your audience with overly complicated registration forms.

Just ask for basic demographic information such as company, name, title, industry, revenue, and contact information. This is enough information to determine if the prospect is right for you, but not so much information that prospective attendees will get turned off and quit.

2.2 Embedding helpful tools

They enable registrants to place your webinar on their existing business calendar increases the likelihood of them attending the live event.

2.3 Inconsistent creative expectation

The old “bait and switch” has become so commonplace that prospective participants need reassurance.

Attendees need visual confirmation that the event for which they are registering is the same event they saw in the promo, but often there is a visual mismatch from promotion to registration. Avoid this potential miscommunication by assuring your prospects they are in the right place.

Use consistent creative information on every page, including consistent pictures, icons, and logos. Make sure those items are on e-mails, registration pages, and landing pages.

2.4 Don’t forget about the confirmation page

That’s the page that tells them they’ve successfully registered. Many promoters don’t take advantage of it, but there’s so much you can do with one.

Think about it: When you buy something online, e-commerce retailers confirm your purchase, and then offer you other opportunities such as purchasing a similar product. But not all webinar producers have caught up with this concept, thereby limiting the growth of their audience and brand. The confirmation page is the perfect place to grow your audience numbers by telling them about your upcoming events.

#3. Making Your Console Too Vanilla

You’re asking your webinar participants to stare at a screen for an hour. If that location is not visually engaging, you will see them drop off quicker than flies around a bug lamp.

So what makes a great console? In the abstract, it’s one that helps retain audience focus and attention throughout your presentation. But more specifically, it provides an opportunity to reinforce your branding and message. Remember, a well-designed console will engage your attendees and establish your brand.

#4. Leaving the Audience Out of the Conversation

It’s ridiculous to expect your attendees to stare at a screen watching a talking head or worse looking at slides, for an hour. It’s simply unacceptable. You have so many audience participation tools at your disposal. It’s important to change the thought process from talking at your audience to having a conversation with them.

#5. Killing Your Audience with 1,000 Bullets (and Text too)

Asking your attendees for an hour of their time and attention is a lot to ask, but forcing them to stare at slides filled with endless text is sheer torture. It’s the easiest way to drive people away from your webinar. The bullet list goes down as one of the great presentation innovations, but unfortunately, overuse has dulled its appeal.

After a few PowerPoint slides crammed with too many large dots preceding some words, your audience will start to tune out. Since the days of the seminar in a hotel ballroom, presenters have struggled with the problem of excessive text, making the bullet list a great way to simplify things.

But too many lists are just as unbearable as the excessive text that preceded them, making bullets more overplayed than Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” A bullet list is still a functional tool, but you need to rein it in. Compelling slides combined with great storytelling is the key to keeping your audience’s attention and getting your message across.

#6. Selling Your Audience Out Instead of Helping Them

Don’t get me wrong — it’s okay to sell products via webinars. Just be upfront about it. Aside from the occasional giggle, no one wants to sit and watch a snake-oil salesman do his thing, especially when an audience member registers for your webinar expecting to be helped.

The looking-to-be-informed masses come to your presentation for answers to their pressing problems, or to consider new ideas.

Now, what do you think happens when they realize they’re just being pitched? That’s right: They leave in droves. And that’s sad because you are missing a valuable opportunity to establish credibility and earn trust. Instead, you must offer prospective participants new ways to think about their toughest business problems.

When you’re direct and helpful, you establish yourself as a trusted advisor — a position that ultimately will enable you to more effectively present your solutions, products, or services.

Although your webinar should help them with topics such as “5 Keys to a Successful (insert name here)” or “How to Optimize (something),” it doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t address your product or service. Just do it from a perspective that helps solve their problem, rather than just making a sale.

Many companies conduct webinar product demonstrations, targeting serious buyers. These so-called “deminars” can be highly effective, but the audiences must know what they’ve signed up for. Don’t pull a bait-and-switch. Attract an audience with the promise of addressing a specific business problem but then give that problem a mere surface-level treatment before jumping right into a detailed product pitch.

#7. Leaving Audio to Chance

Movies, television, and webinars all depend heavily on their visual aspect. Nothing turns off your audience more than terrible audio quality.

If they can’t hear your voice clearly, they can’t hear your message. That’s because what we see on the screen is enhanced by how clearly we can hear it. Poor audio quality can frustrate audiences interested in your content, especially when they struggle to understand what’s being said to them.

They’re busy, anyway, so guess what happens when they can’t even hear your presentation? They drop out! Audio is too important to leave to chance. When it’s less than perfect, it can convey an air of unprofessionalism, which can lead to similar perceptions of your company as a whole.

Webinar presenters should always use landlines with handsets or headsets because the audio quality is much better.

#8. Dissing Your Audience’s Time

Here’s another way to alienate an audience: Don’t respect your attendees’ time. Some producers run their webinars past their end time, whereas others try to fill up the whole session by stretching the content. Avoid both.

Most webinars average 45–60 minutes in length; however, that does not mean that you should automatically schedule all of your events for that length. What if you only have 20 minutes of great content? Should you stretch it out? Probably not because you should never add filler — your audience can recognize it for what it is.

If your webinar is scheduled for one hour, make sure to stop when the hour is up. Respect the audience’s time, and they will appreciate you more.

#9. Not Having An On-Demand Strategy

It’s important to have an on-demand strategy, so those who missed it can watch it later. Studies show that one in four webinar registrants attends a webinar on-demand, and many of them miss the live event entirely.

One reason is that most people don’t have a lot of time during the day, so they are choosing to watch at “off” times, such as during long commutes. Also, remember that your webinar is accessible around the globe. The differing time zones of your attendees make it impossible for everyone to attend live.

A global audience means your webinars have to be available on-demand for instant viewing at any time and on any type of device. With on-demand viewing providing such a massive opportunity to extend the life of your webinar, it is important to have a plan to not only archive the event but to promote it beyond the live date.

#10. Treating All Leads Equally

Although all men are created equal, all your leads are not. Prospects are the people you want to register for your webinar, but some clearly are more suited for your message than others.

By tracking attendee activity and engagement, you can qualify leads. Unfortunately, many organizations have fallen into the habit of taking all the leads from a webinar and handing them over to the sales department without any prequalification.

This leads to sales reps working their way through more dead ends than you have in a fancy gated community. That’s why it’s important to assess each lead with the proper lead scoring. In this case, it refers to assigning leads to a ranking system that prioritizes interest in your topic.

Most of the data you need on the attendees is already at your disposal from registration and their behavior during the webinar. Intelligent lead scoring techniques allow you to evaluate and score leads based on criteria in two primary areas. By simply prioritizing the stronger leads, you will increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts and the return on investment, or ROI, of your webinars.

This data can be combined to create an engagement score that provides you with the interest level of the prospect. This data can include viewing duration, content downloads, questions asked, poll/survey results, and social media engagement.

Conclusion

Throughout the lifecycle of creating and deploying a webinar, there are a number of small things that can determine whether your webinar is a success for you and your audience. By avoiding this
10 common webinar errors, you can take your webinars from good too awesome.

What mistakes have you identified that you are doing?

Let us know in the comments below.