This was written for a Webinar company to give to potential customers. It was one of a series.
Who Needs a Webinar?
You’ve got the right message, you’ve got the right product, and you’ve got the right price.
Isn’t it time you got the right audience?
Isn’t it time to get your sales program really powered up?
Can I ask you to imagine what it will be like if all of your hottest prospects asked you whether they could come and listen to your sales pitch? You’d probably find it hard to believe right? Well, it’s something you can do, right now, easily and quickly, and you’ll probably never have to leave your computer.
Let’s stop beating around the bush, stop the procrastinating and get down to business.
Webinars offer you the best opportunity to get all of your prospects together at once, and to maximize the impact you can make on them with your presentation. You can do this at very low cost, and with a little planning you will really get your sales page pumping.
What’s more, this can all happen in just 30 minutes, sometimes less.
- To get the best bang for your buck you need to make some careful plans. It is a known fact that if you structure your webinar correctly and have punchy and emotion driven content, you will get more sales, signups and registrations than you ever thought possible.
- With the right publicity you can put together a list of prospects that you can use over and over again. In other words a carefully prepared webinar not only gives you a one-shot chance, you will also end up with a list of prospects you can sell to over and over again.
It’s a marketer’s best dream come true.
So let’s prepare for the best sales webinar ever, step-by-step.
1. Clarify Your Objectives. What do you want to get out of your webinar? It’s a simple question but it will take some serious thinking to get the answer clear in your mind. Remember that the best webinars do not aim to make direct sales. Webinars are a great way to introduce your concept or product and an even better way to demonstrate benefits and features.
To put this in a clearer perspective, think of a webinar as a sales page. You’ve got to start with a punchy headline and then follow up with outlining and detailing a problem you are going to solve. Follow this up with a description of how your product is going to solve the problem. Give your participants the opportunity to ask questions about the product and then offer helpful answers.
The overall aim is to make the webinar experience a useful one for your participants, one where they will feel they have obtained real value for free. This is a great opportunity to hand out something of value to every participant and you can make this a feature of your pre-webinar campaign.
2. Prepare Your Content. The content of the webinar is by far the most important aspect of the entire event. When preparing your content you will need to anticipate questions that may be asked, so you have answers at the ready. In the best case scenario you will have prepared such detailed content that there will be no questions in anyone’s mind. The overall focus of your content is one of generating value for your participants. Give, give, and give some more. The more you give the more you will receive later down the track.
A webinar gives you an unprecedented opportunity to present yourself as an undisputed expert in your field. Your content should be full of confidence and detail that leaves nothing to the imagination. Your participants need to know that they are listening to someone who knows their stuff.
Once again, think about your content in the same way you would as if you were crafting a sales letter. Go to some websites and look at how some of the great copywriters have written lengthy sales letters that make their readers want to buy straight away.
Use the same structure and language to make your content excite, as well is educate, your webinar members. But remember, you are not trying to make a sale. You are simply whetting their appetite for later; so make sure you get their personal details and e-mail address.
3. Make Your Content Standout. You might have written the greatest content, but it is going to have to look good on a screen too. If you are not skilled in the crafting of an effective PowerPoint presentation or some other web-based application, you should seek the services of an expert because this is a vital feature of any successful webinar.
The presentation has to have a wow effect, whilst at the same time being balanced so as not to distract participants from the message. It needs to flow smoothly and may contain audio to supplement the specific effects that you would like to create. Video is a great way to present new information and can create a great deal of excitement as well as being an attention grabber.
The attention span of most people is surprisingly limited, so your presentation needs to be pitched at just the right length for your particular audience.
Remember all those boring classroom days you spent watching tedious films or presentations from teachers? Learn from that experience and make your presentation exciting and to the point. There are plenty of resources you can access on the net, or as mentioned previously, you can hire an expert to design this presentation for you.
4. Practice Your Webinar. Once you have your webinar ready, run through it to check for timing and prepare for possible glitches. All successful webinars have been practiced dozens or more times to make them perfect. You can hardly expect your first presentation to be perfect. Run through it again and again and again, making small adjustments, checking the times, making sure everything is perfect and smooth.
Get your friends or colleagues to watch it over and over again so that by the time you are ready to run your webinar, the whole show will be etched into your brain.
Become the producer and director of your webinar, make it a big event.
Find some presentations on that you really like and copy them. By that I do not mean plagiarize, but look for successful structures, the use of pauses and special effects, and how music and audio are used to create drama and attention.
5. Get Your Giveaways Ready. With the webinar structure and content now in place, you should turn your attention to the giveaways. These need as much attention as the webinar itself as they will become a constant reminder for every participant of what happened on the day.
The giveaways can take the form of a written copy of what happened during the webinar, or may take the form of another useful product that they will value. Whatever it is, it should be packaged appropriately and made available either as a download or made ready for direct mailing.
Remember the aim of the webinar is to engage and educate. You are not trying to make a sale.
6. Choose a good webinar host. Always choose a professional webinar hosting service and be prepared to pay a reasonable fee. Free webinar services are unreliable at best and if you are trying to present the most professional look you’re going to have to pay for it. Go To Webinar is one such service but there are many more that you can investigate for yourself.
The hosting service will allow you to invite an unlimited number of people and let you send out e-mails and VoIP calls whenever you want. You can also practice your webinar an unlimited number of times as recommended in previous points. It is always a good practice to sign up for a free trial so you can get familiar with the Web-based tools you’ll be using for the real thing.
7. Marketing your webinar. Now comes the important part of gathering together your audience. Let’s look at some ways you can market your event so that your attendance is maximized. You will have already done your market research and you know that you have a product that can solve a problem all fulfill a need in the market place. The best marketing plans never try to sell a product; rather they look to solve problems. Sales success does not come from convincing people to buy things they don’t want.
Remember, one of the basic advantages of a webinar is that you are not confined to any space. You can have up to 1000 people attending your webinar, so this is where you can spend a lot of your time and effort using every means at your disposal to get the word out so that as many people as possible register and attend on the day.
There are plenty of things you can do to drum up publicity, let’s go through a few of them now. First of all let’s examine your personal resources.
- Use your website to advertise your webinar and provide registration facilities. By driving traffic to your site you may end up with more registrations than you thought possible. Remember that it does not matter how many people sign up for your webinar because even though you may be limited to accommodating 1000 if you are able to generate more interest than this, you will create an air of exclusivity so that people will want to sign up for your next event.
- If you have a list you can send out an auto responder series generating interest and creating excitement before the event.
- Utilize every social media strategy you can think of.
- Examine the possibilities of a joint-venture with a suitable partner who has access to a bigger list. Any joint-venture can be an attractive option if your sales potential is big enough. When you think about it, any joint-venture partner will find it easy to promote a webinar that offers free information and giveaway offers for their client list.
- Don’t forget to utilize regular surface mail. Many top marketers still believe that the direct mail campaigns are coming back into their own as a primary source of both lead generation as well as actual sales. A direct response marketing campaign conducted through the mail may give you more qualified leads.
- Give away some pre-registration gifts to encourage signups. The gifts can take the form of a free report or access to some exclusive product has not previously been available. You may give consideration to creating something especially for this particular promotion. People love something for nothing and if you can tie in the actual delivery of the gift to actual attendance on the day, you will find you’re signups increasing to new levels.
- Charging for your webinar. There is a school of thought that charging a registration fee for a webinar will turn many possible prospects away. This really depends on the attractiveness of your product and the content of the webinar itself. If you can come up with an enticing presell campaign and you have a large potential market, charging a small registration fee might actually prove to be a selling point in itself. Imagine the hype you can create by telling your prospects that not only are there limited spaces, but people are actually willing to pay to get in. You can use this method, not to make money, but simply to add spice to your campaign and creating an air of expectation.
You could even create discount coupons for anyone who signs up early. This is a surefire way of locking people into your webinar so you are not guessing about numbers.
Charging for your webinar needs to be used as a selling technique and not a money raising activity, but you need to be very careful of providing excellent value for money. On this point, you need to really over deliver and give people much more than they could reasonably have expected to receive. You might even want to hand out part of the package to the early bird customers who signed up for your discount code, and then ask them for some testimonial feedback to provide evidence for other prospects as to the value that they are going to receive.
Secondly you can look at engaging the services of a publicist. There are services like Web Fishery who specialize in the webinar lead generation on a pay for performance basis. This means you only pay for qualified leads who register for your webinar
Alternatively there are many publicists who can drum up publicity for your webinar in the press and Internet news services. Press releases are a surprisingly effective publicity method that, when used properly, can produce very cost-effective results. For this reason a professional publicist or press release writer should be engaged.
You should leave plenty of time for these activities to take place and start planning at least two months in advance of your desired date.
The secret to publicity is in the numbers. If you expect a 0.1% take-up and you want to have 1000 attendees, then you need to invite or contact 1 million people. If you have done sufficient market research you will have an idea of the numbers you need to work with.
8. Keeping Your Numbers Hot. Once your numbers are starting to look good you need to ensure that they stay warm to the idea and will actually attend on the day. Without wanting to overburden your new list with constant reminders, you still need to devise an auto responder series that can keep them interested with a slow but steady buildup of reminder publicity as the date and time for your webinar approaches.
You could use of video broadcast to not only remind your existing registrants but also use it to attract even more registrations. As mentioned previously, a slick audiovisual presentation will produce an air of professionalism and this will encourage participants to ensure that they attend.
If you follow these simple steps you’ll end up with not just a technically perfect webinar full of helpful information that your participants have not previously heard, but a presentation that crackles pops and zings!
You will have created something that your participants will be talking about for a long time to come.
