Part III: After the Webinar

Congratulations, you just completed a major webinar event.   You had reasonable attendance, there were no technical glitches and the audience was engaged.   You should be able to relax, but here are a few other things you may want to consider:

1. Tell your audience about upcoming webinars. Before you sign off and before you take the last question, pause to thank them and also tell them about the next upcoming webinar.  It often helps webinar attendance to schedule two or three webinars in a row, and allow prospects to sign up for more than one with a single visit.

2. Conduct a post-webinar survey. This is conducted in a screen before the webinar closes.  Ask them what other subjects they’d like covered in upcoming webinars.   Perhaps list some suggestions. Make the survey short.  Avoid questions on how well they liked the webinar.  It doesn’t provide much useful information and it looks like you are asking for a complement.

3. Send the immediate follow-up email. This consists of one of two emails; a) “Thanks for attending, you’ll receive the links to the slides and replay shortly, or b) Sorry we missed you.

4. Track attendance in your CRM, Email, or Lead Scoring system. Capturing a prospects attendance at a particular webinar provides a data point on a prospect.  Attendance patterns may give you valuable interest information.  Too often, this information gets lost if there is no automated way to capture it between systems. Fortunately APIs are becoming prevalent for the exchange of registration and attendance information.

5. Send other relevant materials. For those interested in the subject, send them other relevant materials. For example, a whitepaper or a reference to an industry survey.

6. Answer the unanswered questions. There are often unanswered questions that can’t be addressed during the webinar session. If you send an answer, it provides another positive and trust building interaction.

7. Call to make sure their questions are answered. Avoid stalking your prospects, but you might consider calling them to make sure they did have an opportunity to get their questions answered.  It’s a good conversation opener.  Another possibility is offering a free assessment or evaluation during the webinar.   For example, “Have your landing page evaluated.” Or, “Get your complementary security check.”

8. Track returns and forwards. Statistically, I find that 95% of attendees and non-attendees will not listen to a replay of your webinar.  However, they often download the slides.  This way they can skim the subject quickly.  Making sure you can track this opens and also see when your email is forwarded gives you an idea of their perceived value in your material.

9. Repurpose your material. Turn your webinar into a whitepaper, blog post, newsletter or virtual seminar.   Repurpose, repurpose and repurpose.

10. Get Ready for your next webinar. Making sure you have a regular heartbeat with prospects can be accomplished with a webinar series.  Prospects learn to expect the fourth Thursday of the month as a time when they can learn about your subject.

As mundane as these thirty suggestions are, they form the basics of a successful webinar.  They provide a starting place.   So, I have a request.  If you have tips or suggestions on how you run your webinars, please add them as a comment.  Thanks.

Do great things.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Part II: During the Webinar

There are hundreds of people on standby waiting for your webinar to start.  Are you really ready?  Will you forget some critical detail?   A power cable for your PC and its finicky battery?  Maybe you’ve nervously downed a glass of water and now wonder if you should have gone to the bathroom.   This is the point at which something could go wrong and most likely will.  Some things to think about:

1. Set up in advance. If you do your log-on, sound checks, and slide loads starting 30 minutes early, you’ll reduce the chances of something going wrong.   Give yourself plenty of time.  (PS: If possible, avoid speaker phones. VOIP is good.)

2. Have a moderator. I recommend at least three key positions. 1) someone to run the webinar from a technical standpoint.  This person coordinates questions and tweets. 2) The speaker or speakers.  3) A moderator to help direct the flow, timing and direct questions.

3. Stand up… speak to an audience… enjoy yourself. It’s necessary to project extra energy when you can’t see your real audience.  Standing up, walking with a wired mic and speaking to an audience, even if it is just a few colleagues, is important and will help the speaker focus.

4. Get right into it. Keep introductions to less than two minutes, one minute if you’re really good.  Your webinar will speak for itself.  No one except you cares much about the fact that your company is a world leader or that your speaker has three cats.

5. Make it interactive.  The best webinar I’ve attended took its first question within three minutes of starting.  This established an intimate and interactive exchange that made the event seem spontaneous and involved the audience.   Take questions as you go.

6. Use surveys if relevant. I’m not a big fan of surveys because they are almost always about the company putting on the webinar.  For example, “How many of you are using cloud storage today?”  So what?  If you run a survey, make sure you ask a question that everyone can learn from, and for which you might be surprised by the answer.

7. Limit it to 30 minutes. It’s hard, but very possible.  Make your content so precise and paced that you can cover your key points and questions in thirty minutes.   Few people can entertain for more than this time.  Did I say entertain?  There’s a concept!

8. Involve a client or user if possible. It’s nice to hear from the experts, but it’s also good to get validation from the trenches.  I like web sessions that involve end users, clients and others.  It helps break up the monotony of listening to one person for thirty minutes.

9. Thank your audience.  The first thing many stand-ups do is complement their audiences. If this is genuine and you respect your audience then you’ll be a long way toward a successful interaction.   Thank them.  Lastly tell them there is follow-up and where else they can go to get additional information.

10. Record it. Make sure audio-visual boy pushes the record button.   Damn, this should be the first item on the list. Hmmm…maybe there should be a checklist?

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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