Fixing Your Webinar’s Problems

You know how to do a B2B webinar.

You know how to use the webinar software, and how to go live.

Now you want to actually succeed with webinars.

This book fixes the 10 biggest problems you’re facing.

It’s blunt. It doesn’t pull any punches. And it’s prescriptive. Just do what it says, and your webinars’ performance will improve.

Enough Mr Nice Guy.

Let’s do this.

Chapter 1

You’re choosing the wrong topics and titles

You think the process is:

1. Decide what you want to say
2. Figure out how to say it
3. Attract an audience to listen to you
   

That’s wrong.

The process is:

1. Choose a problem or topic your audience cares about
2. Figure out how to talk about it so you’re in their story
3. Tell people you’re going to talk about solutions to that problem
   

You want to tell people their story, with you in it.

Not try to get them to sit still while you talk about yourself, or your product.

Getting people to register, attend, and pay attention to you talking about them, is MUCH easier than trying to get them to register, attend, and pay attention to you talking about yourself.

If you pick topics they are interested in, and that you have something valuable to say about, every other problem in this book is easier to solve.

In B2B webinars, the audience doesn’t know the speakers(s). And they don’t have a strong relationship with the company (it’s a company, and not even the one they work for). So the topic carries 98% of the weight of getting people interested.

Are you still sure you want a topic about you, instead of them?

Chapter 2

No One Opens Your Emails

Here’s a line of fifteen uppercase Xs:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The closer you can get to keeping your subject line that short or shorter, the more of your emails will get opened.

But let’s start with your name.

The From: name your email ships with matters. Emails from Olyvia at Avesha will get opened more often than Marketing Team. Use a person’s name. And if that name sounds or looks slightly unusual or exotic, all the better.

Now, back to subject lines.

They’re not for telling people what the email is about. They’re for getting the email opened without lying.

That it. If you try to make it do more than that, it can’t handle the weight you’ve put on it, and it breaks.

Your email will sit in a list of emails (the Inbox), and it has to look interesting enough to spend a few seconds on.

People at work scan their Inbox, before or between meetings or other stretches of work, and open things that look urgent. Then they open emails that could be interesting. Finally, they open things that will require mental or emotional investment.

You’re not urgent to them. And you never want to make readers/prospects work. So your emails live in the “potentially interesting” category.

Remember your place. You’re a distraction. You’re offering a webinar — basically the only sanctioned type of work-entertainment.

The subject line’s job is to get the email opened, without lying.

Make it short. Understand that you’re “selling” a distraction from work. And resist the urge to educate the reader about the email’s contents.

Chapter 3

No One Clicks Your Email’s Register Button

The subject line’s job is to get the email opened, without lying.

And the email’s job is to get the Register button clicked. Nothing more.

The email’s job is NOT to educate the reader with everything the webinar will cover. Or to repeat what the registration webpage will say.

It’s job is to get that button clicked, so the reader goes to the registration page.

So your email is written with what copywriters called ‘behind the curtain’ language.

You suggest, allude to, and even tease the contents of the webinar. The value of it. The positive future the reader could live in, afterwards.

Include some questions the webinar will definitively answer. Suggest that the speaker is someone the reader should listen to. Tease the revelation of something not widely known (yet).

These sound like B2C webinar tips, but we only make B2B webinars. Sound professional, even reserved. But sell the value of clicking that Register button.

Chapter 4

No One Registers on Your Registration Page

High-performing B2B webinar registration pages have a few things in common:

1. They’re as short as they can be, without leaving out great reasons to register
2. They don’t promise fun, but they do promise a good experience. B2B webinars are work-entertainment. If they seem like they’re actual work, or worse… hard work, then people either won’t register, won’t attend, or won’t stay.
3. They ask for the least amount of personal information. Stick to a field for the Name, and one for Email. Skip all the other things Marketing or Sales wants from strangers who haven’t been convinced of the value of giving up more than that. The more info you ask for, the lower the percentage of people who will register at all.
4. Imply the good experience with your graphic, too. Graphics on registration pages are basically a free second communication channel that get much less scrutiny.
   

Chapter 5

No One Pays Attention To Your LinkedIn Post

Your topic/title, and your graphic, imply something boring, or unpleasant.

The email subject line, the email content, the registration page … see why the topic is so important? And why insisting on one that the audience is interested makes everything else so much easier?

Bonus: have everyone at your company share the LinkedIn post about your webinar. Post about it in every possible LinkedIn group you can. Invite every follower of your LinkedIn business page. And if you use a LinkedIn automation tool, set up a message campaign to tell everyone who might be interested about your webinar.

None of these will fill your webinar. But each one helps.

Chapter 6

No One Pays Attention During Your Webinar

This is BY FAR the most complicated problem.

Here’s a free course on Udemy (just 32 minutes long) that shows you, almost minute-by-minute, how to capture the audience’s attention at the beginning of your webinars: https://www.udemy.com/course/own-the-first-five-minutes-of-your-webinars

And if you’re extra interested in how to get, keep, and even get back, a business audience’s attention, go to https://bestdamnwebinar.com and click the Learn It! menu option in the upper right.

But there’s one lesson to keep in mind at all times — you’re telling them THEIR story, with you in it. Don’t try to keep them interested in you. Use the fact that they are eternally interested in themselves.

Chapter 7

No One Responds To Your Call To Action

There are 3 main types of CTAs:

1. Vague, useless ones
   
   1. “So hey, thanks for being here today, and please visit our website”
2. Soft ones
   
   1. Subscribe to our newsletter, watch this video, download this whitepaper PDF
3. Hard ones
   
   1. You can get into an open Q&A call with our tech leads by going to this URL, book a discovery call with sales, request a demo of the software…
      

Obviously never use vague CTAs.

I prefer hard ones. But if you’re under pressure to have more than one CTA (hey, we all work for someone) use a hard one and a soft one. Never two softs, or two hards.

Never make a business audience choose between two equal or similar things

The easiest and safest for them to do is nothing at all.

That’s why we show them two very different things. They might do the hard one, or they might do both, but at least they will likely gravitate to at least one. Because there’s no choice to make. No similarity of commitment or effort or risk.

Chapter 8

No One Watches The Replay

You didn’t edit the video.

You didn’t even put in enough effort to trim off the dead time at the beginning, when people were still joining the session.

Who are you, to assume I’m going to waste 3.5 precious minutes of my life watching… nothing.

You also didn’t get the video captioned. So if I see an excerpt on LinkedIn as I scroll past, there’s no way for me to know what’s being said unless I stop and turn on the sound.

Good luck with that.

Next!

If you don’t have in-house staff who can trim videos, add captions, or choose a juicy excerpt to post later on LinkedIn, then find an AI tool for that job, or use a webinar producer like bestdamnwebinar.com.

You’re not important enough for strangers to wait around, wondering when the real content will get underway in a video.

Chapter 9

No One Reads The Blog Post

Once you have the edited video, it should become a blog post on your website.

But no one will ever find it on Google, unless you add a transcript under it.

Edit the transcript for clarity. And to remove crutch works whenever you can.

Crutch words are sounds and words like um, uh, so, and….

Brains usually ignore them during a live event, but then notice every one of them when they’re reading them.

So your blog post has the edited video at the top, under the headline. And the edited transcript under the video. The video can be hosted on YouTube, or vimeo. YouTube if you don’t care about people seeing how may viewers it had, and which videos YouTube will recommend onscreen when your video ends. Vimeo if you do care about those things, but don’t care about people finding the video during searches on Google or YouTube itself.

There’s no right answer, just pick one.

Over time, as your transcript gets indexed by Google, people will begin finding your blog post. You can even send a wrap-up email to your registrants (all of them), with a link to it, to drive up early traffic.

Summary

These problems are all pretty simple to fix. Especially if you keep these concepts in mind:

1. Focus on what the audience is interested in, and put yourself in THEIR story
2. Choosing an audience-focused topic & title makes everything else easier and more successful
3. Don’t try to make anything do more than it has to. Subject lines, emails, registration pages, blog posts, are all great at one thing, and break down when you try to make them do more
4. If you can’t get and keep their attention during the live event, this event was a waste of time and effort.