Death By Webinars and What to Do About It
Know your why.
More webinars are happening around the world today than ever before. We were already witnessing a rise in the number of webinars thanks to improved technology and the flexibility of listening in from wherever one wanted. COVID 19 has accelerated this trend. But does that mean that the Audience has well-accepted webinars?
To answer that, let’s look at what webinars have to offer. They help us understand the changes in the world around us. They help us understand experts’ and achiever’s thought processes and learn from them. In these times of uncertainty, they’re also helping us upskill ourselves and interact with others. To that extent, webinars have largely played a positive role and have been especially helpful during these times.
However, the same convenience that has led to an increased quantity of webinars has also led to a deterioration of its quality. We are drowning in poorly conducted mediocre webinars today. There are just too many of them. Good webinars are rare and are becoming increasingly difficult to find. The problem is compounded by the fact that all these webinars have become just a lead generation mechanism for a company’s product or service. 10 mins into a webinar, and the product advertisement kicks in.
I have attended tens if not hundreds of webinars over the last year or so. Most of them were mediocre at best. Some were above average, and very few of them really stood out in terms of what they had to offer. It was these few that made me attend more in hopes of finding something similar. However, more often than not, I was disappointed.
So I took a stab at analyzing what good webinars did that the mediocre ones did not and what made them so valuable. It turns out that there are indeed some clear distinctions in the intent, approach, and execution of these webinars. I will try and summarize them below.
Intent & Focus
Great webinars are created with an intent to help the listeners. It is an investment in a company’s target audience. They aren’t a display of the company’s wares. Lead generation is not the primary goal of these webinars. It is an after-effect.
Most mediocre webinars, on the other hand, are self-serving. Companies design them to let the Audience know about their products and services to generate interest and leads right away. Some are nothing more than exaggerated product demos.
Great webinars focus on solving problems or adding value. They talk about their products as one of the vehicles to navigate these problems. Mediocre ones, on the other hand, focus on their products and use problems and value addition as one of the use cases for their products. If you are planning on conducting a webinar, focus on the Audience. Serve the Audience, and you’ll have a much better shot at success — more on this in the next point.
Structure
Great webinars define a very crisp agenda. They are either solving a specific challenge (Get more responses to your cold email outreach) or sharing knowledge and information (Impact and long term implications of Covid on Fashion Industry). They dive straight into the topic and share ideas, suggestions, and frameworks to navigate through these problems.
Their product or service comes later in the discussion as a tool that fits in that framework. Some companies go to the extent of saying that the Audience can try their tool out or even their competitors if they’re interested in solving the problem just highlighted. They don’t downplay the competition. Rather, they provide that as an alternative.
While this seems counterintuitive, it is quite powerful. When someone does that, you (the listener) are disarmed psychologically and develop a sense of trust. If you are in the buying arena, the chances are that you’ll consider their product and take special interest. These companies generate leads by not obsessing about them.
Mediocre webinars, on the other hand, don’t have a crisp agenda. Their agenda is defined by whatever suits their products better (How ___ helps you get better marketing results). They may start with the problem but then shift the discussion quickly towards ‘Our product helps you by doing ____.’ ‘Our product is the best in the class when it comes to _____.’ They drift away from the problem to their product very quickly. They double down on it by haunting you with demo requests after the webinar is over, even if you’ve attended for just 10 mins and left.
To all the Marketers & Salespeople out there: No one cares about your product. People care about their problems. Solve that, and they might be interested in learning more about your product.
Flow
Great webinars have a very simplistic fluid flow. They feel like natural conversations rather than rote script recitals. That kind of fluidity comes only with practice. If you are a speaker, you can’t go to a webinar unprepared. Even if you’re an expert at the subject, you need to brush up your talk before getting in front of the webcam.
This also shows respect for the Audience’s time. Test out the equipment, Internet connection. Do dry runs, seek feedback. Do whatever it takes for you to give your 100%. Glitches can still happen, and that’s okay. But not coming prepared in the first place is not.
Engagement
Great webinars are engaging, but not so much that they hijack the topic at hand. Tools like Zoom and others have some cool features like polls, question boards, etc. where the speakers can connect with the audience in real-time and make the content more relevant.
Great webinars utilize these tools. They answer audience queries and conduct polls & address the results to better connect with the listeners. However, they never let these become a distraction and stay focused on the main topic. Even if they divert, they turn around quickly.
Mediocre webinars, on the other hand, either do not engage at all or, in some cases, engage way too much. They do not engage because they don’t prepare for conversations for various reasons (time constraints, queries management, technical glitches, fear of diverting from the agenda). Some, on the other hand, engage too much and let the agenda slip by. They answer too many questions or conduct way too many polls or both.
The best ones find the right balance when it comes to engagement.
Final Word: ROI of Webinars?
So what should be the success criteria for webinars?
- Increasing brand recall?
- Establishing the company as a thought leader?
- Lead Generation and New Business Opportunities?
I guess it has to be a mixture of all of these, and all of them should lead to business growth in the long run. The long-run is the key here. Like any other content marketing strategy, the webinar portfolio builds over time and will need to reach a critical mass before yielding any results. And that takes time, consistency, patience, and a very focused audience-centric approach.
Yes, some of them will yield immediate results, but to judge a webinar based on that parameter alone is stupid. When you start delivering customer-focused webinars regularly, you’ll establish yourself as an authority in your space. Your customers will start trusting you and eventually come to you to help them solve their problems.
Consistency is the key. Webinars cannot be a standalone one time ‘COVID’ activity.
