So let’s dig into it.
The CTA is what changes a webinar from an online info session to a truly useful event. An event with possible long-reaching business benefits for you and the people who accept it.
So the call to action is not just useful for you; it’s also useful for the audience.
Sometimes people hear that, and they disagree. How can the CTA be useful for the audience?
That question comes from them thinking the CTA is a sales pitch stuck on at the end of a webinar.
It’s not a sales pitch.
And it’s not stuck on to the end of the webinar.
Throughout the webinar, we have been laying a trail for the CTA. We gently introduce it as early as possible. It’s the logical result of the webinar’s content.
As an audience member, if you accept the webinar’s argument, you accept the CTA.
So how do we lay a trail to the CTA?
Phrasing.
The webinar’s content is the underlying argument for downloading our pdf, booking a discovery call, subscribing to our newsletter, or whatever CTA we’re aiming for. We built a good structure into the webinar. We also added the audience attention components. So the foundation is already there.
Laying the trail for the CTA means going back and adding phrasing, based on the key persuasion elements, to our script and our slides.
It requires a little bit of rethinking as we look at our own content, but not much.
For example, the slide with our picture where we introduce ourselves was a way to establish ourselves with the audience so they’d listen to us.
Now we also look at it in the context of authority. We make sure it includes something that tells the audience that you know something they might not know.
If you won any awards, maybe put those logos on the page — don’t call them out, just have them there.
And if there’s something NOT CHEESY that would let people know you a little better, do that. Maybe your family has lived in the same state for three generations. Or you have an unusually large number of siblings. Or you know a celebrity.
Something the audience would never hold against you but tells them a little about you. Because we’re also looking at the Know, Like, AND Trust process, which starts with them feeling they know you a little.
For laying a trail to your CTA, what you say and how you say it depends on your audience, but the core concepts are these:
- Social proof (other people or companies like you are already doing this)
- Reciprocity (we’re helping each other, and I went first)
- Commitment/consistency (people like us do things like this)
- Authority (I know what I’m doing)
- Scarcity (usually related to time, unless you work in an industry that deals with natural resources. Money is always a scarcity item, too)
- and Liking (people like me are pleasant/fun/interesting to people like you)
NEVER LIE TO YOUR AUDIENCE
Don’t do any of the above if you have to lie to do it. This is especially common with scarcity. People think you can manufacture scarcity. We all know there’s no expiring discount in the B2B world. We all know if we wait 6 months, you’ll still take our call and connect us with a sales rep. That false scarcity B2C stuff doesn’t work with other businesspeople.
In B2B, if something doesn’t work on you, assume it won’t work on your audience.
Scarcity, and the other elements, DO all work in B2B. But you need to think more, be more creative, and always be truthful.
So going back to our example, a discount with an expiration date isn’t going to work.
But explaining that you’re a smaller firm and can only take on X number of discovery sessions per month is true. And creates scarcity around being at the top of the list of meetings instead of waiting 2 months.
Add in the fact that 200 firms are represented in your webinar’s audience, and that’s social proof of the value of what you’re saying.
Explaining that the calls this month will also include your CTO adds scarcity AND authority. Mentioning that the CTO has a great sense of humor and people enjoy these calls with her adds liking.
You get the idea.
These sorts of concept phrases need to be sprinkled throughout your webinar’s script, beginning to end, laying a trail for the interested and the maybe-interested, to follow to the CTA.
In my group and 1-1 sessions, I’ll help you create phrasing that suits your topic and that should be reusable in your future webinars.
But try to think about what you’d say ahead of those sessions. What you’d say, in the middle of Act 2, or the end of Act 1, to help set up the idea that responding to the call to action is the logical thing to do. That NOT responding to the CTA means going against what people like us do.
Once you‘ve got that dialed in, you have a truly great B2B webinar.