Webinars have become one of the best tools when it comes to generating leads, educating customers and finding prospects. So they are a great tool for small business owners to incorporate in their marketing strategy.

But what makes a successful webinar? For webinar audiences, success is defined by the value of the content and the quality of the experience. For webinar producers, success might be defined by the number of attendees, their level of engagement, length of attendance and the quality of the leads.

Let’s look at four of the most common webinar mistakes.

Mistake #1: Leaving your audience out of the conversation

Forrester recently noted that interactive content can help marketers generate, prioritise, and deliver high-quality leads. Yet the majority of marketers are not taking advantage of these capabilities. Webinars offer a significant opportunity for marketers to directly interact with their audience, gain customers insights and direct feedback. We need to start thinking about webinars as a platform for marketers to engage their customers at scale.

Solution:

• Make your webinar a two-way conversation via a live Q&A
• Use polling to let presenters directly engage with viewers
• Add social media tools for viewers to share directly from your console
• Include a group chat function in your webinars
• Add group collaboration and idea generation for audiences to vote, rank and comment to  the conversation flowing throughout the presentation

Val on how to manage your small biz social media

Mistake #2: Selling, not helping

No one wants to be pitched at. Audiences come to your webinars to get answers to pressing problems and to consider new ideas. If you are leading them into a sales pitch, you are missing a valuable opportunity to establish credibility and earn trust.

You know the trick: attract an audience with the promise of addressing a specific business problem, but then give that problem only surface-level treatment before jumping into a product pitch. This backfires every time with attendees dropping off fast, and deleting future promotional emails.

Solution:

• Centre the conversation around customer pain points
• Keep the webinar focused on what you promised
• Deep-dive into the business problem and save your product pitch for right at the end

Mistake #3 Not having an on-demand strategy

Nearly one in three webinar registrants are attend webinars on demand. There are two trends driving the increase in on-demand viewing:

1. Mobility is changing the way people absorb webinar content
2. The increasingly global nature of business means international audiences are viewing your webinar content

Solution:

• Get the most out of your on-demand content with fully interactive webinars that feel as though they’re live, including polls, Q&A, and social sharing
• Videos, PDFs and podcasts are also interactive, so you can obtain more information about viewers than just who clicked
• Be sure to also personalise and recommend specific content to targeted buyer personas for more effective micro-campaigns

Did you know Aussie’s spend an average of 12.5 hours on Facebook per week?

Mistake #4: Not measuring engagement

Many businesses fall into the bad habit of taking all leads from a webinar and dumping them into a CRM system, then handing them over to the sales department without any pre-qualification. This means that your sales team will have to work their way through a lot of dead ends, while hot leads may be cooling off in the pile.

The average viewing time of a webinar is over 50 minutes, while the average engagement with an email is only eight seconds, meaning webinars provide an incredible opportunity to gain invaluable data around how your customers are engaging with your brand like no other platform.

Solution:

• Engage with webinar platforms that allow you to collect real data. That way, you can pre-qualify your leads before sending them to the sales team.

This article was originally published in 2017 and has been updated for 2022.

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