How To Run Successful Webinars

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. Today I am joined by Eshita Durve. Eshita, welcome to the pod. 

Eshita Durve: Thanks for having me on the podcast, James.

James Lawrence: So today we are going to discuss webinars. I guess the how, the why, the value. We run lots of webinars ourselves. Lots and lots and lots of our clients run webinars. You are our Head of Marketing. You've overseen, I think we're talking before the pod, 80 to 100 webinars that you've been involved in over the years. I guess, initially, why should businesses consider running webinars? 

Eshita Durve: I believe webinars are one of the most underrated prospecting tools or channels that we have. And most people lean towards paid channels, bottom of funnel channels, they lean towards SEO, and all of those are fantastic. But webinars is one of those ways where you can reach a wider audience pretty quickly in a cost effective manner. It's repeatable and it doesn't involve the pain associated with physical events. So webinars are really a good channel that most marketers should consider for their top of funnel marketing. 

James Lawrence: And probably not to say that you shouldn't be running physical events, but often you may or may not run them. Just depends on who you're targeting and the best way to market to those people. But if you're not running webinars, then definitely, potentially consider running them side by side with your physical events. What are the types of businesses that you feel generally lend themselves better to webinars as a part of a marketing mix?

Eshita Durve: If you're selling physical products, specifically things like toys or clothes or, I don't know, water bottles or things like that, a webinar is probably not the right avenue for you. The B2B SaaS space is a fantastic product space to take webinars to the market. Any professional service that doesn't involve physical interaction, like not hairdressers or masseuses, but any other professional services, HR, for example, ourselves. If you are selling a marketing service or a coaching business, webinars provide a great platform for those types of businesses. Those are the two ones that come to mind the most. And then financial services also could use webinar as a platform. It's just that sometimes you have to be so careful with the content that they're putting out. It's so censored that it would be tricky in that space.

James Lawrence: It feels expertise and information, kind of where you've got deep information, you've got an area of subject matter, expertise seems to be the ones that work best. So B2B lawyers, accountants, financial planners, SaaS, as you said, I think the two that jump out for me in the B2C space are probably educational institutions. I think I've seen webinars being really well used, whether it's universities or other types of education colleges, I think not for profit webinars can work really well where you're kind of updating or sharing information on a theme or a topic or a cause. I guess obviously, if you're an accountant in the B2C space or a lawyer, then I could see how it could work. But I think generally, if we're talking about FMCG or goods or whatever, it might be kind off in the B2C space. Probably if you're a marketer in that area, you're probably continuing to listen to this podcast more for your general knowledge than for anything applied. But yeah, okay, I think we're in agreement on that. Now, moving on to the how of running a webinar, what would you say is the starting point?

Eshita Durve: I think like everything else, it should start with an outcome focus. You need to sit down with your team or by yourself and just ponder over why you actually want to run the webinar. Is it to educate an existing audience within your database about a new product that you have launched? Is it about generating new contacts to add to your database? Is it about lead generation so you can get more inquiries about your B2B business or your product or services? So once you define that particular outcome, that will then pour into everything else. In most cases webinars. I would like to promote webinars as a top of funnel promotional activity. So in that context, my outcome is not necessarily to get 100% attendance and engagement on webinars. My outcome there from a goal standpoint would be I want to generate X number of contacts from this webinar, from this campaign and activity. Of those X number of contacts, some percent would then over time become leads and opportunities and deals and that's how I view it. And you may have some business stats on the back end that you can use to predict those numbers or set those goals. So this is how I would approach a webinar. It all starts with outcome focus. Yeah, it's great.

James Lawrence: It's such a simple concept, but so true. I think until you understand or agree on what's the purpose, why are we doing this? I think it's very difficult to then decide upon content and theme and topic and all the technical correct kind of promotion. 

Eshita Durve: Don't jump on the bandwagon - everyone's doing it so I should too. 

James Lawrence: And that's right. I think generally we see businesses using webinars really effectively as that kind of top of the funnel contact generation type area. But definitely if you're a software product, demonstrations, updates to existing clients, customers, certainly super valid reasons to run a webinar in terms of topic and theme, the actual direction of content, maybe good to discuss your feelings and perspective on that. 

Eshita Durve: I think you should lean towards giving practical information in webinars. So when I say practical and pragmatic, if I may say so, unless you're discussing macroeconomic issues, I think the webinar should be focused on how your ideal persona or audience can solve a particular problem. So the actual steps should be shared. If it's just a rundown of this is what the product is and this is how we solve your problems without going into these are the steps involved, this is how you can approach it, this is how you can apply that information, becomes a sales pitch. And that's not what you want to achieve with a webinar. You want to give content in order to generate some kind of confidence within the audience that you know what you're talking about and you are a reliable provider. 

James Lawrence: Like purpose of the webinar is the overarching. Decision to be made. We definitely see them working most effectively. When you pick a specific persona, that's kind of the second, I guess, overlay. Correct. And then the third one is practical, I guess the three P's. Right? Like actually giving away practical information. And you're right, it feels like a good webinar isn't a sales pitch, it's not a boring university lecture. It's kind of sitting somewhere in the middle of those two ends of the spectrum. 

Eshita Durve: Absolutely. So from a topic standpoint, you could go for something like how to do X, how to do Y, or case study on topic ABC, whatever that may be. So we've run Webinars for clients that sell financial services, we run Webinars for ourselves and even Webinars for industrial company that deals in mining and things like that. So the spectrum is quite broad. As long as you are talking directly to the audience, I wouldn't be too concerned about the length of the topic - should be three words or like six words and no longer than that. I don't think it's important to get into those details. As long as the topic is clear enough that it speaks to your audience, it's fine for the topic to be long or short.

James Lawrence: In terms of webinar length, what's your perspective or opinion on ideal webinar length? 

Eshita Durve: I'd say no shorter than 20 minutes. No longer than 60 minutes. If it's less than 20 minutes, it should be a phone call, or it could be a video, possibly. And beyond 60 minutes, people don't have the ability to give you their time, attention. Plus they've got other work to do, so you can't expect people to just hang around and listen to you talk about your product, which usually happens towards the end of the session anyway. So I would say typically design the webinar in a way where you're delivering 45 minutes worth of content, which includes some time for an introduction and segue, and then leave 15 minutes for a live Q&A and try and keep the Q&A live. It does add to the authenticity of the webinar. 

James Lawrence: It feels, unless you got extraordinary needs, 30 to 60 minutes, hard to mount an argument to kind of go outside of that. Right. 

Eshita Durve: And that would also help you define the topic. Right. If you can't explain the topic within 60 minutes, you probably need to break your webinar down into more sections or reduce the content that you're sharing. 

James Lawrence: Agreed. You touched on something there with live Q&A. I'm sure there's going to be listeners who have been tempted to prerecorded webinars or the presenter has been agitating that it should be pre recorded and there's no difference. Eshita, your opinion on recording webinars versus running them live?

Eshita Durve: There's a massive difference. Please run them live. I think once you run a webinar on a particular topic, the fantastic part about webinars is that it's a repeatable process. You can use the same slides, the same speaker. Prep time is minimised significantly with prerecorded webinars. The audience usually isn't that nice. They would know if it's a prerecorded session. In that case, it's better if you just promote it as a prerecorded webinar on a particular topic and you may get more traction from there. But if they are incessantly typing in questions for you to then answer and then you completely ignore that. It's a very poor user experience and not an ideal way to establish authority and authenticity. So I would steer away from that. 

James Lawrence: It's also people that work in events will tell you that there's nothing like live performance to actually get the most out of the presenter as well. It's definitely very difficult to kind of mimic a live production performance on a pre recorded webinar.

Eshita Durve: I would also say that as someone who sits and manages the webinar while it's being run, you get live feedback even if people aren't necessarily asking you questions or chatting away in the inbox. If the audience numbers start dropping off, you know it's time for the presenter to move on from the topic. And these are minute signals that you can use to improve your content for the future. I don't know why anyone would shy away from receiving that feedback. So run the webinar as you planned. Run it in a live setting. If you have a webinar manager helping you host the session, you don't necessarily have to keep looking at the questions box or the chat box. Somebody else can manage that while you deliver the content. So there are many ways to tailor that session. But the feedback that you get from people dropping off is something that I wouldn't want to miss. And that's something you would 100% miss if it was prerecorded. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, good point. In terms of promotion, like advice on how to maximise the number of quality attendees that you get to a webinar. 

Eshita Durve: Go broad, go broad, go wide. Use the webinar as a credible reason to engage with your wide audience. And this doesn't have to be your own audience. So I think you need to step out of ‘this is my database’. ‘I have 5000 people on my database, so I need to market to those’. No, it can go beyond that. So naturally there's paid promotion. You can run prospecting ads for a particular webinar and that could be via LinkedIn or Meta channels, Facebook, Instagram or even display, if it makes sense for that particular webinar. Typically you won't receive as many registrations from there, in my experience. Or the cost per contact through those channels would be higher than what you may be willing to pay. But the other channel, which is one of the most reliable one is email marketing. Now, the email marketing, if you're marketing to another database is the best way to go. 

Eshita Durve: So ideally you would find a co branding partner or just another business which is aligned with yours but doesn't compete with your business and is happy to share their database. If they don't want to give you the names directly, then they can send an email on your behalf where you design the email and send it to them. That's a great way of generating a database from an external party without anchoring with your own. You're thinking paid promotion there like a paid partnership with industry? Yeah, it could be both ways. Industrial associations are fantastic. Publications are a good platform because they typically have large number of subscribers and that can be paid as well. And what you would spend on paying for that single EDM to go out to that external database is much more cost effective than running hundreds of paid ads for 21 days. Not to forget, the lead time for promoting a webinar should be no longer than three weeks. So if you are planning a webinar and it's four months away, if you start promoting it now, people are going to forget. They don't know what they're doing tomorrow. Nobody wants to lock in a 1 hour training session four months from now unless I don't know. You must be some kind of celebrity to get that kind of attention.  

James Lawrence: It’s a good point and I think the other benefit of partnering up with whether it's an adjacent business that has an overlapping database but you're not competing industry association publication, you also then kind of get the the brand credibility of a co branded. 

Eshita Durve: Offering to their database third party authority. 

James Lawrence: Which we love. I guess an example of that would be Rocket. We'll happily do a webinar with Mumbrella or B&T or Marketing Mag, where their publications, their audience are the same audience that we have - in-house marketers - and it's a great way of them putting the Rocket logo up there with Mumbrella or with Marketing Mag. I think that's really awesome. In terms of promotion and how to attract people.

Eshita Durve: There's one more thing that I would like to share. When it comes to promoting a webinar to your own database and you're using email as a channel, segment your database as much as you can. So what that means is don't just send one blanket email in an HTML design format saying ‘hey, we are running a webinar join on this date, click here to register and go through all of those things’. I would highly recommend that if you are inviting your own database, don't ask them to fill in a form. You've already got their details. You don't need more. Figure out a way to get a one click register. You can do that if you've got a strong enough automation tool. MailChimp can do it. HubSpot can do it. Bar Dot can do it. ActiveCampaign can do it. So based on the clicks to register, you can then just assume that they have registered for the webinar and send them the joining details.

Eshita Durve: Another thing is if they have attended a previous event or a webinar, then send that segmented audience a separate email saying hey, you've attended an event before, we'd love for you to join this one as well. If they've downloaded an ebook, send them a separate email. You're sending the same message. Your email script isn't going to differ too much, but the fact that you are segmenting that database, having a different intro copy and probably a different subject line, that's going to give you a lot more traction than a blanket email to your entire database. 

James Lawrence: That's awesome. So practical. What would you then advise in terms of reminders leading up to the event? 

Eshita Durve: Simple things like having an add to calendar button so that they've got it in their calendar. That's a straightforward prompt. I don't go crazy with reminders. I don't think people need to be reminded a week in advance and a day in advance and an hour in advance. We just send one reminder, which is a day in advance thing. The webinar is tomorrow. Here is the link. This is so that on the day of the webinar you don't want them searching their inbox thoroughly if they haven't added something to their calendar. Within the reminder email. We also give a link that goes directly to the platform - for us it’s Zoom - that leads direct to the webinar. So then they don't have to go download a software. Go through all the pain associated with that as well. We keep it simple. And the goal is to make it as easy as it can be for the audience to come and attend the webinar. 

James Lawrence: Which leads beautifully into the next area I wanted to discuss. Eshita, how do you make sure it goes right on the day? Because I think there is that fear that there'll be a horrible technical failure. Something won't happen that should happen. What are the steps that you would advise someone to go through to increase the chances that it does run smoothly on the day of the webinar? 

Eshita Durve: I'd say start by being human. It's okay if things go wrong because you can always fix it and people are more understanding then you would like to give them credit. So preparation is key if you are running a webinar for the first time. If you haven't run it before, run practice sessions. Set up a demo. Almost always have a webinar manager. You should have one that hosts the webinar on a separate computer. And then your presenter or presenters use their own different devices. If you have multiple presenters, they shouldn't sit in the same room. That's not ideal because the sound will echo. You don't know which mic it's picking up from. All of those reasons, have them separate. Have someone from your team member sit there as an audience. That's one of the key points. Sometimes people just miss out. If you don't have a large team, then maybe ask a friend if they can hop on this is so that they can give you live feedback on whether the audio is going okay. The slides are working, all of those. And I 

James Lawrence: And I think you're probably underestimating. Like Eshita, when we do a webinar at Rocket, the dress rehearsal is a proper dress rehearsal. Nothing is left to chance. It's done at least 24 hours prior, preferably much more. The tech system has to be identical to the one that you're planning on actually running. So if you're setting up in a separate room, set up, she expects the slide deck to be presented. Whoever's doing it in the webinar, doing it in the dress rehearsal, as you said, you need to have that person who's going to host the actual webinar. Because I think the last thing you want is when you spend all this time getting the database together. People have signed up, you've got the audience ready, you've just got one small setting in Zoom or webex or whatever the platform is you haven't checked or you haven't tested, does create a huge amount of stress and tension that can kind of derail the presenter's confidence or whatever it might be. 

Eshita Durve: You have to prepare as you would for a live event. And I think I've run probably over 80 webinars, if not 100 until now. And I maintain a checklist, which includes have water for the speaker. 

James Lawrence:  You're always telling me to turn my device off prior.

Eshita Durve: Every time we run a webinar, we still go through that check. So think of yourself as a pilot taking off and what are the 20 things that you would do before you take off and then just go for it. Let's assume the worst case. Suppose you have three attendees. You want to give those three attendees a fantastic experience and more than anything, you want to record the session so that it can be used in the future. So don't consider a webinar an absolute fail. If attendees don't show up, that's okay. 

James Lawrence: And even that that's on the checklist, right? We've never not recorded a webinar accidentally, which I presume is a very common thing if you haven't because there's so many considerations and everyone's nervous and everyone wants it to go right. Having that checklist of that probably nice little segue. When we were preparing for this podcast, we actually remembered that just through COVID, we put together a really good resource on the Rocket website, which is how to run the perfect webinar. So if anyone's interested, it contains a lot of the content from today's Pod. So if you simply visit the www.rocketagency.com.au website under Resources - Free Guides, it's about the 6th one down on the right hand side, but it's actually an excellent piece. And probably half the content from today we kind of have taken from that downloadable, which probably contains a bit more detail and contains some of those more checklist type things. Let's presume we picked a great topic. We've done a really good job of promoting the webinar. It's all run smoothly on the day. What is your advice on how to get the most out of that content, out of that database, out of all of that effort to maximise the value from the webinar that's been run? 

Eshita Durve: In three words; “rinse and repeat”. So in terms of the content itself, you've now got a warm audience, so it's only practical to send them the recording. Any notes, if you have presented, say, ten ways of doing something, then probably create a one pager with your logo on it so people can print it, put it on their desk, and that is a really nice way to keep your brand top of mind. Follow it up with nurture emails. And nurture emails, again, don't have to be very fancy, they can be plain text emails. They can have two or three questions. So support your content with case studies as well. In one case, definitely send a thank you email thanking them for registering. If you don't get the attendance data correctly, the thank you email can go to everyone who registers. 

Eshita Durve: And that's one thing. When you're promoting the webinar, make sure you say that the recording will be available. Many people just register for the webinar with a view of watching it later, right? You're sending that email, you're sending the slides or you're sending the recording. Send them a case study the next time. Ask them if they have any questions. And more than anything, despite doing this kind of manual nurture, or you may have a workflow set up for these emails that go to attendees and registrations. Post the session, make sure you're looking up the inbox from which you're sending it. I think one of the biggest mistakes that marketers do is that they go on this big campaign energy of ensuring that the webinar is successful, that they forget about what's happening next. And you send all of these emails, but nobody is really checking the inbox, nobody is managing the leads or managing the questions that are coming through. All of those things will count towards you generating more leads, opportunities and sales in the future. 

James Lawrence: That's it. A good webinar is giving away great information, genuinely useful content for the audience, but it should also contain information about the business or organisation that is presenting. Introduce who you are and what value you can bring to prospective customers and clients. It should have an offer, but there should be something in there which is if you're interested in an audit or more information, there should be an ask. I think you should have earned the right for that. And it feels that a good follow up, as you said, will include the slide deck, the recording, maybe some other content around it. But you also shouldn't shy away from repeating the ask. If you are interested in that audit or appraisal or free session with one of our consultants, whatever it might be, feel free to respond to the email or book it in here or download it from there. Whatever that particular ask might be, make yourself available for questions.

Eshita Durve: Is the way I would go about with it and something that we haven't touched upon is who would present the webinar? I think that's an important one. Typically I would say it would be either your salesperson who is also in a way the face of your company, or a company director, or a genuine expert within the company. And if you have an expert within the company speaking they may not be able to host the webinar as well. In that case you have somebody else from your team host the webinar. Ask them the smart questions that need to be asked so that you can extract the information to share with your audience. So there are many ways to go about that.

James Lawrence: Often clients or even if we run webinars you might have the subject matter experts, maybe they're more technical, kind of saying I'm not a presenter, that's not really what I want to be doing. Correct. But often they are the best people to do it and you don't have to be a phenomenal presenter in the sense of fast paced and energetic and whatever. It's great if you do have those things. But generally audiences just want great content and if it's great content, answering their question idelivered by someone that knows the answer to these questions and is adding real value will always trump someone who might be a slightly better presenter but doesn't really have the substance on the actual topic.

Eshita Durve: 100% content beats everything. 

James Lawrence: I think there's lots of practical points in there. Anything else that you want to, I guess, recommend to listeners out there who are kind of thinking of running a webinar or have kind of run them in the past and they might not have been as effective as they wanted? 

Eshita Durve: I think we've covered a heap, as well just going through my notes. One thing that stands out is just when you build your landing page, make sure it's a good and strong landing page. Don't make it too long, get to the point. We've got another ebook on how to create good landing pages and Rocket can help you with that as well. And when you build that landing page, ask for a question at the registration. It's a good one. When you ask for a question at the beginning, we always craft, say, the core webinar content before we begin promoting the webinar. But you can pepper in a lot of information depending on what the audience is after. And if you've got an opportunity to ask the audience directly, why not just grab onto it?

James Lawrence: It's such a good point that you raise. It really is. The best way of actually finding out what people want to hear about is to ask them. And you're right. Like often we'll have 70% of the deck prepared, but then we'll shape the content. You might have an audience that is slightly more technical or a little bit more naive on a particular topic, and it does allow you to pitch the content at the right place. Good one, Eshita. I think that's a wrap on the pod about how to run and get the most out of a webinar. Eshita, thanks for coming back onto the pod. Every time you come on, you share lots of practical stuff. I think if I was a listener, I'd want you to come back for a fourth. 

Eshita Durve: Thank you. That's very kind.