A webinar can be an effective way to market products, services, and online courses because it can:
- Provide a content-rich, high-value experience.
- Give a participant an experience of “ahead of time” results before committing to a purchase.
- A webinar allows participants to get a sense of a teacher for personality-driven brands. This works especially well if the webinar includes some on-camera teaching.
- Give the presenter a chance to balance emotion and logic.
Below are some of the most common questions we receive about structuring a webinar that converts.
What should my webinar be about?
A webinar’s topic should be a logical first step towards the promised benefit of the offer. The focus should make sense in what you will present as “the next step,” which is to purchase your course or product.
If you sell gardening courses and you want to launch a course on growing beautiful roses, your webinar should be about an aspect of growing roses that a lot of people struggle with rather than a webinar about daylilies.
What should the title of my webinar be?
Once you have a topic, you’ll need a title. You’ll get the best traction if the promise of the webinar is clear and positioned as a series of steps or pieces of information.
Examples:
- 3 Simple Steps that Can…
- 3 Little-Known Discoveries…
- The Single Best Method to…
- 3 Morning Practices for…
- 5 Secrets to…
How much content should I give?
Notice in the title starts above how many include the number three. Three is often an ideal number of major points to both promise and deliver because:
- 1-2-3 feels “do-able” to the subconscious mind.
- Make each 1-2-3 bit of information a micro-slice of the full breadth of the content you could provide. Less is MORE! This tactic provides just enough but not too much information (like an appetizer before a full meal).
- It can be effectively taught in an hour or less in most cases.
How long should my webinar be?
This might sound flippant, but the answer is, “as long as it needs to be.” There is no magic runtime frame that makes a webinar more successful. Generally speaking (very generally), if your webinar is shorter than 20 minutes, it will be challenging to provide enough content for a prospective buyer to feel confident in you and the offer, and longer than 60 minutes can increase the dropoff rate.
Also, remember that people have busy lives and short attention spans. And that is more true for some audiences, working parents for example, than others. So tailor your runtime to hold their interest and fit into their real lives.
What should I teach?
“The why and the what but not the how.” This bit of wisdom came from an Ali Brown presentation more than a decade ago, and it can create a solid framework for exactly what information you share for each step, discovery, or secret you’ve promised to provide.
When done well, it creates a pull-through, a carrot, if you will, for why the prospect should purchase your product or course as that is where the how is found. Done poorly, it can come off as a bait-n-switch and leave your prospect feeling resentful and short-changed rather than leaning into taking the next step with you.
Another solid tactic for what the content should include is to, provide the means for ahead-of-time results.
Ahead-of-time results are the antidote for the bait-n-switch and essentially is a process by which, for one of your teaching points, you give the prospect an experience of success within the framework of the webinar. Another way to think about this is to give them an experience of, “I can do this!”
Should I share my story?
Years ago, conventional marketing wisdom said that to build rapport and credibility, you have to share your story with your audience. This is based on the idea that much direct-response marketing is built upon the heroes journey, and sharing your story about how you did or became “the thing” that your audience wants, would endear them to you as the provider of the “how” that they are seeking.
Sharing your story of overcoming challenges to be/do/have the promised benefit of your offer can work when done well. It can also backfire and come off as a boring, self-serving waste of your prospect’s time. So if you do share about yourself, keep it brief and get quickly to providing the information they came to get.
Anything else I should know?
Yes, one of the most important is to get the feels going. A person chooses to buy when they feel; you want them to feel the pain and the possibility. This isn’t fear-based selling. It’s simply acknowledging how human beings, even those who’ve done their work, work. A webinar’s advantage is that you have sufficient time to create an emotional experience for your audience.
And finally, “begin with the end in mind,” which is to say, make SURE you seed your offer within the first few minutes of opening your webinar. This can be as simple as saying in your introduction, “… and make sure you stay with me all the way to the end because I’ve got a special offer for you today…”