The Ultimate Way to Plan and Promote Your Webinar

Thinking of hosting a webinar? Surely, you have a topic in mind, but have you considered whether it truly meets the needs of your audience? Does it answer key questions about your industry and help solve a problem or two your audience may be struggling with?

Answering those questions are merely the first steps to what is a major project, but one you can OWN with a little preparation. Webinars don’t have to be complicated and they don’t have to cost a fortune - BUT - without a proper plan in place, you’re leaving yourself open to a major league headache and the results won’t be what you want, or what your audience wants and deserves.

And that’s why we’re here today. If you want a great webinar that builds trust and authority for you and your brand, grab a coffee, sit back and dive into Onboardly’s guide, the Ultimate Way To Plan and Promote Your Webinar.

Webinar Best Practices

1. The Topic
2. The Promotion
3. The Presentation
4. The ‘Show’
5. The Follow-up

1. The Topic

As we’ve already mentioned, choosing your webinar topic is one of the most important parts of this process. It needs to:

• Cater to your target audience
• Answer one or more of their burning questions about the industry
• Help solve their problem(s)

Here are some places to get your webinar topic ideas from:

• Your most popular blog posts (Use Google Analytics to find which posts have performed the best.) Which ones can you speak about for 45-60 minutes?
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs). Check your email, your customer support and ask your team what are the most frequent questions that customers ask.
• Your competitors. See what content they are publishing and what is getting a lot of attention. Can you upgrade that content, make it your own and turn it into a webinar?
• Your customers. Talk to a few of them (phone, Skype) and ask them why they chose your product as the solution to their needs?
• Keywords. If you are running any sort of SEO or using keywords for paid ads, you can take your top converting keywords and turn them into a webinar.
• Your programs, courses or workshops. Is there anything you can turn into smaller presentations?

2. The Promotion

This is equally as important as the topic you choose. How are you going to drive enough traffic to a registration page to get enough people out to a webinar?

There are three conventional ways to do this:

1. Your email list
2. Social media
3. Paid ads

1. Your Email List
Start promoting your webinar at least one week before the event. For best results, start two to three weeks out. The majority of registrants will sign up the week of the event, but it’s still good practice to start promoting it as soon as you can. You don’t have to have the actual presentation complete when you send out the emails, but you’ll need to remain consistent in terms of what you are promoting and what you’ll end up presenting.

According to the 2013 Webinar Benchmark Report, starting promotion at least seven days out can increase your registrations by over 36%! The percentages start to go down, with 2 to 7 days at 27%, day before at 16%, and day of at 21%.

Here are some things you should know about using email to promote your webinar:

• Use email as your primary way to promote the webinar: Email remains the top way to promote a webinar. The second top way to promote was social media, (we will get to that below).
• Frequency: It is industry standard to send three emails in a webinar promotion campaign, but that standard is leaving too many potential opportunities on the table. Here is what I am suggesting makes for a thorough email campaign:
• Email one: The teaser: If you send out a newsletter or weekly touch points to your list, include the webinar in the piece. Don’t mention the solution, the point is to tease them to get them to sign up!
• Email two: The PS: This email will reveal the date of your upcoming webinar, with a reminder of the thing you teased them about in the previous email.
• Email three: The invite: This email talks about the topic and the problem it will solve for the readers.
• Email four: The informative: Send two days after the invite. This email should include the subject line including any guest speakers or results-driven language.
• Email five (registered): This is a simple reminder email that mentions what the viewers will learn in the webinar.
• Email five (not yet registered): This is the last ditch attempt to get people registered for the webinar. Keep it short, simple and full of call-to-actions. All copy should lead to signing up.
• Email six:  The last minute hustle: This is your last chance to potentially double your registrations. Adding that sense of urgency will get people to commit — people WILL postpone, delay or otherwise clear up their schedule for your webinar if you give them a good enough reason to do so. So, let’s talk about segmentation and how this can help increase your attendance rates.
  • Segment 1: People who opened one of the initial emails but did not click. Ask them what’s holding them back. Maybe it’s the day or time. Feedback is important.
  • Segment 2: People who opened email four (The Informative) but did not click. They likely had intention but got distracted, so excite them. Keep it short and simple, lead and close with the call to action.
  • Segment 3: These are your true ambassadors - the ones that open all your emails and truly engage with your content. Let them know that you will be blowing their mind today, so why not join you? Make them feel guilty for not showing up; I mean, who can miss a world class event anyway?!
• What day to send the emails: According to ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays.
  • Tuesdays have the highest number of registrants with 24%,
  • Wednesdays with 22%, and
  • Thursdays with 20%.

Fact: About 42% of registrants will actually show up to your webinar.

Subject lines and from fields: This is an important process in increasing your email open rates. It is common practice for a traditional company to use the brand name and/or the representative's name. The key is to test what subject lines and from fields work for your email list. Try something like:

• From: Ryan from Unbounce
  Subject: [Webinar] 7 PPC Landing Page Hacks Your Competitors Would Kill For
  - Ryan uses his first name and company name to give people context and personalization.
  - He emphasizes that it is a webinar in brackets
• From: Lewis Howes
  Subject: Get More Customers On Live
  - Lewis uses his own name only
  - He emphasizes the webinar benefit (get more customers) without indicating it’s a webinar.

3. The Presentation

Now that you have all your marketing set up, it’s time to complete the presentation. Before we get started here, you need to determine what a level of success is for the webinar (i.e., what you want to get from this event). Here are my thoughts:
You need at least 100 people to attend your webinar to truly know if your content was any good. Anything less than that is not enough to accurately gauge whether your content has any ability to convert. This number allows you to formally test your content and your close.

When testing, start by doing two-week iterations. So do a webinar this iteration, tweak something, do it again, learn, tweak. The tweaks can be the Facebook ads or a content upsell. Don’t do more than one tweak per iteration or else you risk not understanding what is either improving or making matters worse. This means, don’t change something in your email sequence until you’ve tested Facebook iterations first. It’s OK to test different stacking (more on this below) or upsells at the end of your webinar slowly as you’re testing the one promotion tweak, but make it gradual.

Once you’ve tried two-week iterations for a couple months, speed things up by doing one-week iterations.

The Deck
Many people start the entire webinar process by creating the deck first. This is a HUGE mistake. You need to take the time to create the flow, sequences, the storyline and the stack. Use a blank Pages or Word document to start with, then transfer the necessary content over to the deck.

Your presentation should be broken down into eight main sections:

• The Introduction: This slide shows the title, the names and photos of the presenters, your logo (or sponsor logos) and contact information (email address is great). I use this slide for the ‘waiting room,’ where the attendees literally wait for the presentation to begin.
• The Logistics: This slide explains to newbies how the webinar works, where and how to ask questions, how to reach you in the event of any technical difficulties, if there will be a recording and anything else that you think the audience will need to know.
• Agenda: Here you will briefly state the main things the audience is expected to learn (take away) from your presentation. Do not list all the things you will be discussing, just the main (juicy) points.
• Your Story: This section should include about 4-5 slides.
• Credibility: This is the ‘about the presenter’ slide. This gives you the opportunity to introduce yourself, state why you are the authority to be giving this presentation, your contact details again, and to include any outstanding business/industry accomplishments (like a published book, a keynote speaking engagement, or even a list of your successful companies/skills) that would be relevant to the topic.
  • State the Struggle or the conflict that the audience is likely experiencing.
  • What is the Cause of this struggle?
  • Provide the Solution to that struggle. What are the benefits and likely outcome of this solution? What are you suggesting to fix it?
• The Content: This section should take you about 20-30 minutes to deliver. It’s the meat of the presentation. It’s what the people signed up to see and learn. But here’s the kicker: be specific, and dive deep into one main argument. For example, instead of “How to Grow Your Blog,” present “How to Write Effective Content To Get Traffic.” You’re teaching them something more specific. This opens the door to other content possibilities that will allow you to invite these people back to another presentation, a book, or a blog post. The content section can be broken down into four sections:
  • Data and statistics: Show them the proof that your product/service industry can actually solve their problem. Remember, most of your attendees won’t likely know you so you need to establish proof of concept before you can deliver your good stuff.
  • Case Studies (show the proof): What have YOU or someone in your industry done to solve the problem? What was the outcome? Use 2-3 great examples to get your point across.
  • The What: Teach them what they should be doing.
  • The Goal: Your entire webinar should be geared towards one goal, that is: what the audience will do when the webinar is over! This goal needs to be a task that your audience can accomplish for free. One that will take your audience closer to the goal. All that you should offer (in the close) should be an easier, faster and more complete path. Now, about the close…
• Your Close: This is far more important then you could ever imagine. You just spent the last 45 minutes giving away all your good stuff to an audience that paid $0! Now is the time to offer them a great, fantastic, only-solution-in-the-world offer that will keep them coming back (and pay you!). Now is your time to teach them the how:
  • Introduce the new problem
  • Introduce the new solution
  • Introduce the benefits of your product and what’s included. Teach them how your solution will make accomplishing this task easier and better. Your product should offer a necessary enhancement and provide easy beginner steps to solving the problem.
  • Provide testimonials and a guarantee
• The Stack: A large part of your close is in the offer stack, also known as ‘price framing.’ This is a way to show the total value of your offer broken down into different components, thus making your offer more appealing. It looks something like this:
  • Offer, offer, bonus, offer, another bonus, offer, total price
  • Add scarcity and explain how this is a once in a lifetime offer
  • Offer the discounted price. By stacking, this allows you to fully provide the total value of what your product/service would have cost if they paid at face value. But since you are bundling the entire solution together, when you do drop the price, it makes it look incredibly affordable. Your stacking should look something like this:
• Price Framing: Add up the prices of all the offers and bonuses and then break that down to the final price.
  • Make an incredible guarantee so people don’t hesitate to buy.
  • Take screenshots of your checkout process to show how simple it is and to show exactly what the process will be.
  • The last thing your attendees should see are some FAQs to limit hesitations, answer questions, remove objections and to state the offer again.

Engagement
Encourage audience participation. Throughout the course of the presentation, take mini breaks, add pauses and ask your audience some questions. Just random yet relevant questions to keep them engaged. I will often point out certain people specifically (GoToWebinar has a nifty engagement rating you can use to see who is actually paying attention). Call out the people who are borderline ready to leave and ask them something specifically.

“Hey Shawn, what do you think about your startups marketing plan?”

When the audience sees that you’re pointing out specific people they tend to start paying more attention. But this also gives everyone the chance to participate and learn from each other. Starting organic discussions on the webinar has proven to be extremely beneficial to most other attendees as they seem to ask the questions every else wants to hear as well.

Polls and polling
Use polls and Q&A to gather more information about your prospects -- 54% of marketers used questions to engage their audience and 34% used polls, according to ReadyTalk data. This is where you can truly start the conversation with your prospects and learn more about them.

And, finally…

4. The Follow Up

• Post-webinar follow-up emails: Here is the interesting thing about these follow-up emails: most people don’t do them! And if they do, they really suck at them. Here is your last chance to shine and to make a sale or close a deal. Upselling on a follow-up email is totally acceptable given you just finished giving them FREE content to begin with. This is permission-based marketing at its finest.
  • Follow-up email one (attended): Truth be told, only 39% of attendees actually watch the webinar recording but it’s still a good idea to include it in the follow-up email, as long as you only make it available for 24-hours to one week. Giving it a self destruct mechanism forces people to watch it right away.
    Here’s what else you should include in this email:
    • Thank them for attending
    • Provide a quick bullet point recap of what was covered
    • A link to the recording (self destructible in a set amount of time)
    • Repeat the call to action and your offers with their deadlines
    • Additional resources, especially any links or PDFs you may have referred to in the presentation.
    • Any promised followup material
    • Links to your social media accounts
    • Registration information for your next event
• Follow-up email two (attended): This is important if your webinar is part of a funnel to sell an information product, course or other relevant materials.
• Follow-up email one (missed the event): ‘Sorry we missed you’. Things happen. Last minute meetings occur, deadlines loom, or (worse) another more appealing webinar took place during your event. Here is where you have to make the decision on whether or not to include the recording. My opinion is that those who attended the event should have access to the recording, however if you are not going to present this topic again or any time soon, then including the recording in the Sorry we missed you email is fine. But include a caveat: time based or discount based limitation.
  • Time based: Only give them 24 hours to take advantage of this deal before it goes full price (attendees have 2 days — but they don't know that). 
  • Discount based: Offer a lower discount to those who missed the event (again, they don't know that).

Lead nurturing: Once these final follow up emails are done, you need to place these leads into a proper nurturing sequence. As prospective leads move through the buying process, nurturing reinforces your working relationship, positions you as a trusted source, differentiates you from your competitors and builds a preference for your product or service. Implementing a comprehensive lead nurturing methodology not only improves results — it gives you an ROI.

And that’s it! Simple, yes? If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s understandable. But you want to be ready to OWN this webinar and to show yourself as a trusted source to your audience, so they will be eager to return next time you reach out to them. Maybe they’ll even tell a friend. And once you get the hang of it, these guidelines we’ve provided will become second nature to you.

So, now that you’ve studied to become a webinar pro, you can really start to plan for your big debut.

Any questions? Comments? We’d love to chat more about this, so hit us up in the comments section below!

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