Webinar Tips

Because 50% or more or your webinar attendees typically won’t join until a few minutes after your promoted start time, many companies wait for 1 to 2 minutes before beginning the webinar.

The downside of this approach is that for those attendees who show up very early or on time, they might feel annoyed and a small percentage might get distracted and end up moving onto another activity. So, in addition to having hold music, posting updates in the attendee chat – make sure you include that delayed start time information on your title or “waiting to start slide.”

Also consider promoting some of your content and resources that are applicable to the webinar topic, such as your blog, upcoming webinars, email newsletter, research reports, white papers and helpful calculators. Because in most webinar platforms the links won’t be clickable, use main website section URLs or a URL shortener when possible.

Whether attendees actually use the time to visit your website or not, at least you’ve planted the seed about available content and resources, and occupied 15-20 seconds of the wait time.

Asking poll questions during a webinar is a great way for companies to increase attendee engagement, but more importantly collect insights from attendees that can be used both during and after the webinar. Consider these three types of poll questions:

Demographic/Psychographic/Firmagraphic: A strong opening poll question can uncover things like which department they might work in, do they use a certain type of product, how much experience they have, or other questions that uncover the mix of attendees.

Challenges: Poll questions that get at understanding current and key challenges provide great insights for the webinar presenters to use in tweaking their talk track in upcoming sections and slides.

But the second, and perhaps more important use of these poll question answers, is providing the responses to your inside sales team to use as conversation starters when they follow-up. Understanding the top challenges of each individual prospect (or existing customer) provides sellers and customer success managers information to focus on when they follow up.

Call-to-Action (CTA): The goal of an individual webinar can be wide ranging from just increasing brand awareness or positioning your company as a thought leader, or attempting to cross-sell existing customers, or drive leads for a new product or service. Regardless of the goal, you likely have some type of call-to-action. It might be to request a demo, receive a free audit or checkup, to receive your latest white paper, or have a sales person call to discuss your solution.

These CTA poll questions may not generate a lot of “hand raisers” but they are valuable to help your inside sales or customer success team know who to follow up with first and who is actually interested in your solution or offer. It conveys actual interest from the attendee and helps prioritize follow-up among the potentially hundreds of webinar attendees.

For more insights on poll questions, check out our blog post: Webinar Poll Questions: 3 Key Types to Use

If you know that potentially half or more of attendees might show up late for your webinar, what can you do to increase both the percentage of attendees versus registrants, but also to get more attendees to arrive on time? Following are a few tips:

• Send email reminders the day before and one or two the day of the webinar. Depending on the time of day the webinar starts and where most of your registrants are located, you will want to send one about an hour before the webinar starts and perhaps about 4 hours before the webinar start time.
• If possible don’t just use the default reminder message from your webinar platform, but customize it with any new information updates on key information or assets such as white papers, tip sheets or other things of value that will be provided to attendees of the webinar. Also if your webinar includes a well-known expert you might want to remind registrants of the opportunity that they will only be able to ask the expert questions during the live webinar.
• Include add to calendar functionality in your initial registration conference confirmation email.

• If you have the capabilities, also consider testing an optional SMS reminder (get permission during registration) sent to registrants perhaps 15 minutes before webinar start time.
• Use your social media channels to promote that the webinar starts in 4 and 1 hours (as an example). While these social promotions are generally designed to drive new registrations, for people engaged with your brand these social posts can serve as additional reminders to existing registrants.

1. Start writing titles early in the webinar planning process. It will help bring clarity to the speakers and topic description.
2. Focus the title on the benefits of attending.
3. Don’t worry about title length, but rather clarity and enough information to create interest and resonate with your audience.
4. Use action words.
5. When it makes sense, use numbers in the title. Such as “7 Tips,” “9 Mistakes,” “5 Rules …”
6. Use intrigue when it makes sense to motivate readers to want to discover the answers and solutions to their problems and challenges. Using “FOMO” – the fear of missing out – can work especially well to create buzz around your webinar title and topic on social media.
7. Make sure the title resonates directly with your target audience – so they immediately go “aha, that’s a topic I’m interested in.”
8. Be careful using buzzwords and acronyms, unless the are widely known and used by your core target audience. On the other hand, using certain acronyms, for example, might filter out people who if they don’t know the meaning, may not be in your target market.
9. When appropriate, tie the title to current events, issues, and trends.
10. Find a unique angle that helps your webinar “pop” and stand out from the competition. For example, there may be some new regulations coming into effect in your industry and all of your competitors are doing webinars on what it means and how to prepare. If your competitors are all focused on negatives of the new regulations, perhaps find a positive aspect to highlight.
11. Compare the draft description to your draft titles. Are the titles and description in sync and do they support each other? If the title makes promises that the description doesn’t support, you’ll need to revise one or both of them.
12. Write a few drafts of the webinar title and share them with the speakers and co-workers in marketing or others who have either a great sense of the topic or the audience. Ask them to poke holes in the drafts and to suggest keywords or changes to make it stronger. In the end, have your content marketing or copywriters review and finalize it tapping into their copy/editing expertise.
13. If after promoting the webinar, you are not seeing a good registration conversation rate, don’t be afraid to tweak your title if you think it may not be resonating. Obviously you shouldn’t change the focus of the webinar content, but tweaking a few words to make the title stronger is fine.

Webinar titles and descriptions have different purposes. Titles should pop, grab attention, must resonate with the audience, be immediately understood, have clarity and potentially create intrigue.

Descriptions (+ bios), however, must answer 6 key questions:

1. What specifically will be covered in the webinar?
2. Why should someone attend, what problem will the webinar help them solve?
3. What will be the key takeaways?
4. Who are the speakers, what are their qualifications?
5. When is it, how long, and what is the format?
6. Are there any additional content assets or special benefits for registering and attending?