A webinar is its own thing. It’s a mistake to treat it like it’s some minor variation of something else.
So you shouldn’t use the same presentation you’d use in a customer meeting.
You can’t use the same slides you’d use in a speech.
And you definitely shouldn’t use the advice and rules from other types of presentations, in a webinar.
A webinar is probably the greatest sales mechanism since television. And like TV, it’s a combination of several things that came before it. Adapted, to suit its audience and make it powerful.
A webinar is a combination of a radio play, a photo album, and a direct mail sales letter. Combined to make something new and unique. And delivered over broadband.
But because we treat it like it’s every other presentation, our webinar is a mismatch for the audience. So people half-listen the audio while they check their email. They mute the sound and glance at the slides while they listen to something else. They stop paying attention altogether and drop off.
At some point got tired of this. You decided you wanted better results, and you looked for advice.
And I know what you found. Because I found it too. It wasn’t terrible. It just wasn’t good. Stuff about calling out where people were from at the beginning of the webinar. Oh, I see we have Joyce from Amsterdam, and Lewis from Cleveland.
Another one is using polls to make the webinar “interactive”.
Look, I’m going to give you some advice, right now. Those sort of things are band-aids. Because there’s no feature in the tools themselves that can make your webinar great. Just like there’s nothing about your TV that makes the show engaging. You pick a show, you put down the remote, and you don’t think about equipment again until the show is over, or until a section of the show is over and you want to skip the ads.
All the advice you get about webinars suffers from the same problem – it’s focused on you.
Your webinars won’t improve until you stop thinking about you, and start thinking about your audience.
And the problems you have with your webinars, like people not paying attention. People checking their email. People leaving. Those problems go away once you focus on the experience your audience is having.
Now I don’t mean make webinars with no purpose except entertainment. I’m not talking about entertainment at all. We’re all doing B2B webinars. We sell something. There should be a call to action, like a discovery meeting or a consultation call.
These are business audiences, after all. But they’re still an audience.
They have needs. You’re not filling those needs. Lucky for you, probably no one else is either. Not yet. But eventually someone will, and you won’t have that audience any more.
So this series will focus on how to create your best-ever webinar. It’s webinar education for overachievers. The people who want to get really good at it, first, before their competitors do.