In this webinar, Twenty Over Ten‘s Samantha Russell discusses how webinars can be one of the most powerful and high-value tactics to directly connect with your audience. Not only are webinars an effective marketing tool but they’re also an effective sales tool. If you missed the webinar, click here to watch the replay and don’t forget to take a look at the webinar worksheet as well.
Why Host a Webinar? [2:48]
40% of webinar attendees according to research we could find become qualified leads for people. Someone’s going to give you an hour of their time; their typically really interested in what you have to say and webinars are a medium that allows you to spend so much more time with a potential lead or customer but for them, it’s a really soft way to get to know your business. They’re getting to hear you talk, they’re getting to see how educated you are on a topic or what your area of expertise is, a feel for what you are like as a human being but they don’t have to actually book a time on your calendar. So it’s a little bit less scary than making the commitment to book the time on someone’s calendar.
What Are The Four Key P’s To A Successful Webinar? [3:35]
There’s four key P’s to a successful webinar: prep, promotion, presentation, and then post-event. These are the four areas that you should be thinking about in the back of your mind as you are setting up for a webinar. What do I need to do to prep? How am I going to promote it? Then, the presentation itself. Then, what are all the steps afterward to convert the people who attended to leads? That’s the process we are going to walk you through today.
What Should You Do Before Your Start Your Webinar? [6:00]
Let’s talk about what you need to do when it comes to prepping for the webinar. So, you need to choose a time, and we are going to talk about what times are best. Choose your title and your topic. Identify your technology and test it. Appoint a moderator, this is crucial. If I didn’t have Amanda in the background helping me put things into the chat long, there would be a lot of things I would miss and she’s also able to answer all of the questions live written without me having to say it over the screen. Having someone in the background to help moderate can also help with tech issues. This could be an admin on your team, another marketing person, another advisor. Make sure that you test before you go live your first time. Set it all up as a practice session, go live, launch it, and the two of you can practice and make sure you have the technology down. Of course, you want to plan out your promotional schedule.
What Days & Times are Best to Host Your Webinar? [6:55]
You’ll notice I said we do ours the third Thursday of every month and that’s because we have found, and studies also show, that Thursday’s are best for webinar attendance. So, if you’re thinking of doing a webinar, Wednesdays or Thursdays are best. If you’re wondering what time to do, we always do 3pm because we find it’s near the end of the day, that a lot of people their brains are getting tired, they’re ready to learn something rather than be actively working on something else more complex but they’re not leaving for the day already. So 3pm is a really good time for us, however, if your audience is retirees or your audience is you know doctors, you’re going to have people on different schedules. So, it’s not always going to be this one-size-fits-all approach; you might need to play around with different dates and times.
How to Choose Your Webinar Topic & Title [8:11]
Once you decide what time you’re going to do it, you want to think about what your actual webinar topic is going to be about. When you are titling it and coming up with the description, always keep in the back of your mind, what is this person going to get by giving you an hour of their time? You want to be the expert, or you want to invite an expert in who can really dive deep and give really great little tidbits and answer questions. When you’re thinking about titling it, any sort of how-to, you know, “learn how to do this” or “how to do this in 5 steps” is really going to get the highest number of registrants. People like webinars as a learning tool to learn about things they don’t yet know. Be very specific about what somebody will learn when they sign up.
What Tech Should You Use to Host Your Webinars? [9:01]
I know a lot of you might already use something like Zoom for meetings or GoToMeeting for me meetings; those two platforms are by far the most popular that I see other people using for webinars. If you’re already using one of them using their webinar platform I think it is a great way to just stay within that ecosystem. Livestorm is one that’s new to me that I just learned about, but they have a beautiful user interface and its really user-friendly. These are all options for you if you’re just starting out from scratch you can check any of them out.
These are the things you want to consider. What is it going to look like when you want to set it up and put that registration page on your website? How many seats can you get? For most of you, realistically you’re probably never going to get more than about 50 people signed up, so, you might not need that many seats. How do they help you sequence people in an email once you have the webinar, that’s something to look at, and then any of the in-app engagement features. So, for instance, with Zoom, you can put a green screen behind you and have your logo up there afterward or they have a retouching tool so if you feel like you don’t look great you can retouch it.
What Other Tech Tools are Necessary for Hosting Webinars? [13:14]
Let’s talk next about what other tech you need. I do not use a headphone and I think the quality of the audio is fine. But, depending on your computer that you have you may want to use headphones and if you’re turning your webinar replay into like a podcast you definitely want to make sure that you have a microphone and headphones for the best audio quality. Again, I have found that it’s okay without it so I don’t use it, but if you’re really going to convert it into an audio file you want to use that.
Once again, I love Google Slides, I know Microsoft has their own tools that you can use. I always suggest when you’re doing these to make sure you’re hardwired on your internet connection and don’t use Wi-Fi if possible so that you don’t have to worry about that going out on you.
Top Tips to Promoting Your Webinar [14:13]
Now you have to create the webinar and start promoting it. So, you’ll go to Zoom, you put your title in, you put all your info in, and it’s going to create a registration page for you.
If you come here into Twenty Over Ten’s Webinar page, you’ll see that we have it set up so that anytime we create a webinar in Zoom it just feeds into our website as a new webinar option. So, it’s feeding that into our website. Now, we have to do a little bit of coding to make this happen.
If you’re not hosting as many webinars us, which most of you will not because you’re not technology platforms, instead, what you’ll be able to do is just take the registration link and set up a little display for it. So here I have an example from The Financial Gym today, they have an image they have the name and the title and then you can click RSVP here and it takes you to that registration page. So it gives you either more information and you can register for it. Then once they’ve got their sessions that have already happened, you can click “watch the recording”, now they are using go to webinar, but you can see in order to watch the recording you have to put your information in so it’s getting it. So, either way, on your website all you’re doing is taking that link and hyperlinking out to either the recording or the registration.
What Post-Registration Communication Should You Use? [31:10]
So once somebody has actually registered, don’t just register and say okay you’re all set. Here’s a great example, once they’ve already signed up you can have a request that they do something else. So, I keep a couple examples here you can ask them to complete a survey or tell you two questions they have about the event, you can encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter or blog for more tips or follow you on social media. So, it’s a good time while they’re already invested and interested in your content to ask them to do something else and you’ll get a pretty high conversion rate. Just only choose one of these things.
What Content Should You Present On? [31:53]
Let’s dive into the actual presentation. I’m going to go through these kind of quickly I just wanted to show some examples from other advisers. So the first thing to keep in mind is a lot of people have asked me how much time do you spend talking about what services you provide and you know how you help people and your pricing and all of that good stuff. I really suggest that in the very beginning you do what I did today, you say how many of you would like to stay on and learn more about what we offer. Let people opt into that and tell them you’ll do it at the end. You hopefully will give them so much great content value that they will want to stay and learn how they can work with you but, if you front-load it like that you’re going to get a lot of people that sign off who think you’re just trying to promote your services. So you want to provide really good value and then for the people who really are good for your business, they’ll stay on if they want to learn more.
What should you present on? Here are some topics I’ve seen that are getting the most sign-ups, so any kind of Tax Strategies, tax options, David Zoeller I follow him on LinkedIn he’s great and he does little video clips on longer-form content. So you can also take a webinar and then when it’s done edit out part of the video and post it on social media so you’re not showing the whole webinar but showing part of it. Anything to do with money and relationships; so how do you talk with your spouse or your partner or your kids or your elderly parent about money? Any kind of behavioral finance things. Also, think about the holidays. So, if your demographic is a lot of business owners and they want the end of year strategies or you work with young families and it’s back to school time or parents about saving for college you know you can think about the time of year and plan content according to that as well.
What Should You Do Post-Webinar? [37:33]
How do we actually convert the people who join us into prospects for a business? This is incredibly important you go through all the work and effort to create this amazing content to put this webinar together you don’t want people to just join you and then disappear. So, you want to make sure that you can follow up with them and you know get that information.
Looking for More Marketing Webinars?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel or check out our webinars page to peruse all of our completely free webinar replays with helpful marketing tips and tricks for your advisory business.
