Webinars have long become an effective channel for promoting a variety of goods and services. However, along with successful webinars, there are many online seminars, the results of which are far from expected. In this article we will look at the 7 most common mistakes of leading webinars and find the most acceptable ways to solve them.
Many companies start actively promoting a webinar just a week before the event. But as ON24 research shows, your audience size can increase by 36% if you start a marketing campaign earlier than a week before the webinar.
Solution: start the promotion 2-3 weeks before the webinar. A longer period of time will allow you to be more flexible - you can monitor the effectiveness of different promotion channels, disable the less effective and engage new ones.
Users come to the webinar to get answers to their questions and find new ideas. If you immediately begin to advertise or sell, you will not be able to earn the trust of the audience. No one wants to waste time listening to ads.
If you give potential customers new ways to solve their problems, you will prove yourself to be an expert, which ultimately will allow you to more effectively present your product or service.
Solution: start the promotion 2-3 weeks before the webinar. A longer period of time will allow you to be more flexible - you can monitor the effectiveness of different promotion channels, disable the less effective and engage new ones.
Do not read slides during the performance - a popular and banal advice to the leading webinars. Despite this, from time to time, you can meet speakers who practically verbatim repeat the contents of the presentation. This annoys the audience — they might watch a presentation instead of attending a webinar.
Solution: : use slides only as an additional material to your presentation. They will help you attract the attention of the audience, make accents, emphasize your statements, but in no way replace your presentation.
Poor sound quality nullifies the effectiveness of any webinar. If participants are hard of hearing, they will simply leave the webinar. If you give potential customers new ways to solve their problems, you will prove yourself to be an expert, which ultimately will allow you to more effectively present your product or service.
Solution: Before starting the webinar, make sure that you eliminate all the distractions that may be heard by your audience - turn off the phone and intercom, turn off Skype and other unnecessary computer programs.
Use special care when choosing a headset. No matter how interesting your webinar is, it will fail if users hear you poorly. Most computers and laptops have built-in microphones and speakers, but as a rule they provide poor sound quality and cause an echo effect.
To conduct a webinar, you can use a conventional headset with a plug or a USB headset. In most cases, a USB headset is ideal for a webinar. Due to the built-in sound card, it gives a cleaner sound and effectively fights against extraneous noise
If your host hosts several presenters who are in the same room, you can use the speakerphone. This is a special equipment consisting of a microphone and speaker. The speakerphone allows you to transmit sound at a distance of 3 meters. At the same time, it eliminates acoustic echo and extraneous noise.
Now that you know what equipment is needed to conduct a webinar, it is worth considering how to attract more users to the webinar.
Solution: respect the time of the audience. If you announced a 60-minute webinar, then let your presentation take no more than 45 minutes, and spend 15 minutes answering the listeners' questions.
Come into the webinar room 5-10 minutes before the webinar. This time will be enough to connect all the necessary equipment for the webinar and start broadcasting on time.
Originally published May 2, 2019