Webinars have increased in popularity in recent years, and can be a highly effective way of engaging with your audience no matter the industry or niche of your business. Even bloggers have found webinars to be effective strategies in engaging and keeping subscribers to their blogs.
However, as with most things, there are things you can do to ensure you create one of the better webinars; by avoiding the five main mistakes listed below, you should hopefully be able to produce a high quality webinar.
Table of Contents
1. Your Objectives
What are you hoping to achieve from this webinar? How do you measure the success of the webinar? What is the point of your session? These are all critical questions that can all too easily get overlooked. If you are unable to find a good reason to attend your webinar, or state what the main objective of it is, you are unlikely to get many attendees. The best webinars have a clear aim and objective which is communicated to potential attendees, and is measured after the webinar. This can be hard to do, but you need to know if and how your webinar has been a success in order to plan the next one.
2. Audience
A webinar is not much use without an audience and would probably be considered a marketing disaster. One of the first aspects of running a webinar you need to consider is your audience – how are you going to get people to turn up? There are several aspects to this, but essentially, targeting your webinar at a specific audience and then engaging in effective promotion should cover it. If you are hoping for plenty of audience participation, it may be worth limiting the number of attendees, and therefore placing some sort of ‘entry requirement’ on those wishing to join. This ensures you have the best group of attendees who will all gain the maximum benefit from your webinar.
3. The Invitation
The invitation is the single most important piece of promotional material you have. Bad ways to invite people include sending a quick email without much real content, sending a very long piece of dull text that no one reads, or not sending one at all. To avoid this, plan carefully what you want the invitation email to say. It needs to be interesting enough to draw people to your site, without being overwhelming and leaving nothing new to be covered in the webinar.
4. No Follow Up
It is likely that many people who attend the webinar will make suggestions, have follow up questions or like to discuss issues raised further. By not providing such facilities, you are missing a key opportunities for networking, future business and just interesting conversations. Ensure you provide a way for attendees to contact both you and each other if they wish. Furthermore, there may be questions asked during the webinar that you are not able to answer at the time. By creating some kind of question and answer platform you are enabling the discussion to continue, and more importantly, answering the questions asked during the webinar.
5. Excessive Vagueness
By being too vague before the webinar in the promotional material, invitation and the webinar itself, you will ensure a negative reputation and poor feedback. You need to give potential attendees, and those who actually attend a reason to do so. They need to know that the content you are providing is worthy of their time and effort, and will benefit them in some way. If you intend on running more than the first webinar, you would be unlikely to get any attendees based on this feedback. While you do not want to give all the information away so there is no point attending the webinar, you need to give potential attendees enough information to make an informed decision about attending.
6. Not Using Dynamic Visual Effects
One of the best parts of using a high end webinar platform, like ClickWebinar is that you have your choices of adding many dynamic and interesting visuals, such as images, video, charts, graphs and desktop sharing. This means that you can create a truly dynamic and interesting presentation that takes advantage of these visuals to engage your audience and prevent boredom and disengagement.
7. Not Having An Assistant
If you are the presenter without an assistant this means that all tasks within a live webinar fall on you. This means that any tech issues, questions from the audience or any problems that may arise will fall on you to deal with. This is a major issue as having to deal with such problem will only distracts you from your primary job and that is presenting.
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