Sarah Nichols

Hi everybody, thanks so much for joining us. We’re just going to wait a couple seconds and give people a chance to, to join in and then we’ll get going. Yeah.

Okay, so we’ll get started. Hi and welcome again. We’re excited to be here talking about end-to end success for webinars. I’m Sarah Nichols. I’m an engagement manager here at expert marketing advisors. Joining me today is. She’s a customer success manager at expert marketing advisors. So, hi, Emerald.

Thanks for doing this today.

Emerald Lindskog

Hi, Sarah. I’m excited to be here with you to talk all things webinar.

Sarah Nichols

Yeah. We were really excited about this topic because webinars are really an integral part of our marketing strategy that we execute on for our clients each and every month, month over month. And we know that getting started with webinars can seem daunting sometimes.

So we wanted to share some of our best tips and tricks for webinars success to make it as streamlined as possible and make you feel confident in what you’re doing. We’ve designed the slides today that we’re presenting they’re attached as well to act as a checklist for your webinar, marketing, planning, and execution.

So after this webinar, be sure to take a look at that. And it’s a great guide for how to really get started with webinars. So Emerald’s going to talk to us a little bit about why webinars.

Emerald Lindskog

Awesome. Thanks, Sarah. So I think we’re, you know, we’re all here today to learn a little bit about webinars and to talk all things webinars, which means you probably know how much of an impact webinars can have on your business.

But we wanted to share a few facts and figures, and that emphasize why you need to make webinars an integral part of your marketing strategy. So 60% of marketers use webinars as part of their content marketing program. As well as 54% of business to business professionals watch webinars every week.

And I think, you know, this figure actually increased in 2021. I think with a lot of folks being at home webinars are definitely becoming more of commonplace for people to attend every week. So that’s great. 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say webinars are the best way to generate high quality leads.

And I think this is one of the ones I find to be almost the most impactful, which is that it really helps establish you and your company as thought leaders, you know, you’re putting together ideas in your field and, you know, presenting on them, which automatically makes people look to you for advice. And for current trends in your area.

It enables you to engage and interact with your target audience. And this helps you know, people who maybe visit your website and just see a headshot with team members on your site. You know, having a webinar and video and conversations to interact with Q and a, this really allows people to put a face to your business.

And so we highlighted some of the tools here. I mean, you know, there’s a variety of webinar platforms. I think it’s really up to you and your company to decide which platform works best for your goals and for your budget. We’ve found that bright talk really is the best for lead generation, but zoom webinars is definitely an excellent option.

Price-wise and if you’re just getting started with webinar,

So let’s talk, planning and marketing. As Sarah mentioned, you know, these next several slides are designed as sort of a checklist for you to download these and take this with you. Put them into a spreadsheet, you know, add things on that are applicable to you and your company. So some of the key metrics that we like to do for planning a webinar.

You know, make sure you’re securing your webinar speaker a minimum of four to six weeks in advance of your target date. So great options for people to have on your webinars, our partners, customers, or internal team members, you know, like Sarah and I are doing today. You definitely want to hold the planning session a few weeks before we, this will help you decide, you know, what’s the structure of the webinar.

What’s the content who’s going to be designing this. And then you want to make sure you’re writing a webinar title and abstract. This is something you’ll use for it’ll help you craft your registration page. It’ll help you craft social media content. It’s really going to be something where the audience knows.

Okay, what is this webinar about and why should I attend? And then you obviously definitely want to build a registration page. So that’ll be different depending on what platform you’re using. And then I think one of the most important things that often goes overlooked because. You know, everyone has busy schedules these days.

And especially if you have two, three or four people involved in your webinar, it can be difficult to coincide schedules, but, you know, hosting a dry run the week of the webinars. Very important. You definitely want to. All the platforms have practice sessions. And so, you know, you’ll email folks, how will they get into the webinar?

The day of this helps people enter the space the way they will on the webinar, the day of the actual live event. And it’ll help them feel comfortable about how to access it, how to screen share things like that.

Sarah Nichols

And to kind of piggyback on that with conducting a dry run. One of the major benefits of doing a dry run is.

Comfort with the platform that you’re working within. So bright talk, there’s a specific way to log in. So people and people need to have a bright top account. So making sure that they have that all set up and then with zoom, making sure that everybody feels comfortable with the link to join. It just puts people’s mind at ease, going into a webinar that you don’t have to worry about the tech side of it on the day of you just have to worry about what you’re presenting.

Emerald Lindskog

Absolutely. So here are a few. Pieces that we suggest you do when marketing your webinar. These are not all of the things that you can do. You should definitely be experimenting with which, what works best for your target audience. But these are some of these items that we do for ourselves and for our clients.

One of them is that we tend to write a blog every month. With the topic coinciding with whatever your webinar topic is. So this is something we usually release a few weeks before the webinar and continue to post that on social. We also try to find curated content articles that are focused around the similar topic as our webinar topic to To have on social media, it kind of just helps our audience understand, you know, we have like a theme of the month.

Basically it gets people excited about the topic and understands what we’re going to be talking about in our webinar. You want to create one to two social media cards to use for promotion. You know, it’s really great. If you can get headshots from the folks that are involved, you know, it really puts a face behind what people are going to be talking to you want to get your team involved.

So. If you’re partnering with someone on the webinar you know, provide them with the image, provide them with suggested social copy. We want to get, you know, your partner, your teammates, internal folks, all excited to help you promote. And then we want to start promoting on social two weeks prior with posts at least once a week, especially maybe two days before the morning of your weapon.

And then dedicated email promotion. So, you know, there’s a lot of facts and figures out there. Definitely all of it really points to that. Really folks don’t really sign up for webinars more than a week before. So, you know, we here at EMA, what we do is one week before the webinar, as well as two days prior, we send a dedicated email promotion.

You know, it really just seems like people want to wait until the week of even sometimes the day of just so that they understand their schedule.

Sarah Nichols

Yeah. A lot of people will ask why not promote it, you know, three weeks prior, a month prior. And what we’ve really seen is just that people don’t don’t know what’s going to be on their plate a month down the road or three weeks down the road to commit to a webinar time.

So we see the biggest boost in registrations a week out. And then two days prior, as Emerald said,

So I’m going to talk through execution of the webinar day of what, what should you be doing for successful webinar? So we always recommend that all of the panelists on we’re participating in the webinar arrive at least 15 minutes early at grit gives a great opportunity to test your audio make sure that your camera’s working answer any last minute questions that people have.

Well, we’ll ask, you know, just want to check in one more time on the structure. What questions are you going to be asking me? It’s always best to sleep about 15 minutes, at least 10 minutes prior to make sure that everybody’s comfortable and it’s all working properly. We always make sure to have multiple people who are involved, have access to this slide.

You know, everybody’s experienced tech issues before where zoom suddenly cuts out or they can’t share their screen. Like they don’t have the correct permissions on their computer. So making sure that multiple people who are involved habits, somebody can jump in and take over as needed. Always include an administrator on the webinar.

We typically act as the administrator, but providing any technical support every now and then you’ll see somebody who they shared a link with a friend, and they ended up joining in as a panelist instead of as an attendee. And you, as the administrator can make sure to move people over to where they need to be.

The administrator also is a great person for the time check. Making sure that we’re staying, if we’re having a 30 minute webinar, that we really stick to the 30 minute webinar by warning people We’re at 20 minutes, 10 minutes to go and then ensuring all the panelists, see questions in the Q and a or comments.

If you have a really highly engaged audience, those questions will be flooding in and an administrator can kind of pull the most pertinent questions out and feed those over to the panelists to answer we recommend having your webinars last around 30 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, that would be 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for Q and a.

When we look at the stats for when people drop off on a webinar, it’s usually around that 30 minute mark people start to trail off. Attention spans. Aren’t always that long people are busy, keeping it short and concise is always better. And then we have a little task list for post event. What do you do once the event’s actually over?

How can you use that asset that you now have a great place to start is just having the webinar replay on your website with the transcripts and a PDF of the slides. If applicable the transcript helps you with the SEO component on your website and then the webinar replay. Obviously people who missed it or are finding you after the webinar can, why.

We always send a followup email to all of those who registered for the event. So part of our promotional emails is that we’ll say, you know, can’t make it on that day register and we’ll send you a follow-up email. That’s where this comes into play. So including the webinar, replay, video, anybody they who you’d want them to reach out to and contact if they had questions and then also using the webinar replay on social media and as part of your monthly newsletter.

So, and social. We typically recommend posting the replay either day after or the following week Tuesdays and Wednesdays typically perform the best, but putting that replay out there for people to continue to sign up for lead capture. And then also as part of your newsletter. As Emerald mentioned with a blog post that’s related to the webinar, are we typically recommend that newsletters are kind of like thematic and represent all the marketing activities that happen during the month.

And so this webinar replay is a great thing to kind of slot into that newsletter and it can also be used as sales collateral. So we will pass on the webinar replay link to the sales folks in the organization. Then they can use that as a tool for their own outreach. In terms of metrics that we measure, if you’re using bright, Tupac as your webinar platform, we do like to look at channel subscribers, right?

Talk does have channel subscribers is a component. We look at registrations, how many people registered versus how many people actually attended a strong attendance rate is around 30%. Kind of peak pandemic. We were seeing attendance rates as high as 50 and 55%. I think people were just home. They were on their computer.

They’re like, I’m going to take some time for a webinar. As things have kind of continued on, we’ve seen those rates drop back down to the typical 30 to 33% attendance rate. We also look at the no shows and then we track live versus recorded views. So I think Emerald anything that I missed, I think we kinda blew through the topic a little bit, but I hope that we gave some key tips and tricks.

Emerald Lindskog

I think this is a great place for folks to get started or to check out maybe some pieces they’re missing in their webinar strategy. So again, you know, I think if people are interested please make sure that they’re downloading the presentation and for any You know, for additional B2B marketing tips and tricks and best practices, you know, please, I invite people to follow us on LinkedIn, where we post original content and blog posts and curated articles, as well as subscribing to our bright talk channel.

Sarah Nichols

And as Emerald said, thanks so much for joining us today. I know everybody has a really busy schedule, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at contact at expert marketing, advisors.com. And thanks so much for joining us today.