The Definitive Guide to Running a High Converting Webinar
How to Run a High Converting Webinar
Selling is hard work. You have to establish a certain degree of trust with your audience, and it takes a lot of time and effort. The COVID-19 pandemic has made building trust and rapport with customers even tougher due to the limited opportunities for face-to-face interaction.
But there are ways to get around the limitations and to build your business, thanks to video conferencing and webinars. Today, I will show you how to run a high converting webinar that consistently generates sales for your business.
How to Create a Webinar Funnel
For the purposes of this article, let’s assume two things. First, you already have a product or service that you’d like to promote. Second, you’ve decided to use a webinar to promote the offer. Now, producing a high converting webinar goes beyond appearing in front of a camera and speaking into a microphone. A lot of work goes into actually getting people to watch it.
Don’t worry though. I’ll break it all down for you. Below is a typical marketing funnel that starts with some kind of ad that funnels people to a webinar.
This is the bare bones of a marketing funnel you could use to sell anything from a $27 product through to a $3,000 information product. I’ve used an ad as the entry point for a funnel in this example, because paid advertising is the easiest way to scale your lead generation, assuming you have nailed your ROI. However, you could just as easily generate qualified leads through email outreach, through LinkedIn, your website or by email.
For the rest of this article, I will break down how the sales funnel works through analyzing the following elements:
- How to create a Facebook or Youtube ad
- How to design your webinar registration page
- Creating the webinar itself
- The final sales page
It’s a lot of data to digest. While the theory is great, you’ll get most value by acting on it. Let’s start at the beginning.
Use social media ads to get qualified leads
There has never been a better moment to be a marketer. The internet offers you access to a global market. Companies like Facebook and Google give you access to hundreds of millions of people. And you can laser-target these people by their interests.
It makes a lot of sense to advertise on those platforms. However, you have to get a lot of things right to generate those leads, like targeting your audience, which we won’t be discussing here.
Anyway, let’s say you’re already done with target audience analysis. What now?
Let’s say you decided to use paid YouTube ads as the first step in your funnel. You don’t need a hefty video production budget to come up with compelling ads. All you need is a good story, a good unique value proposition, and a healthy dose of humor. For example, internet marketing giant Market Hero’s ads are… well, underwhelming.
They almost seem like they were made at home. Yet, the ads are sending visitors to a webinar where a percentage of visitors will purchase a $3,000 course.
If the homespun aesthetics and early 2000s throwback graphics remind you of something from Breaking Bad, it’s because the advertiser made an effort to create videos that are relatable to customers. They avoid slick Hollywood video marketing, even though they have the budget for this.
Other advertisers selling high-end courses like Sabri Subi at King Kong Agency, or Dan Wardrope at Flexxable use Youtube ads to generate leads for their courses.
While the video ads they create are different, they tend to follow a specific narrative pattern:
Here’s the pattern:
- Hook: Here’s where the ad gets your attention. Usually lasts ten seconds or less.
- Offer introduction: You explain the offer and address common doubts about the product.
- CTA 1: You ask your viewer to click on the link
- Benefits: You enumerate more of the benefits the customer can get if they take your offer
- CTA 2: Another reminder for the viewer to click on the link.
Your ad has to be interesting enough for the viewer not to click on “Skip Ad” or block ads altogether and to click on the link. Sabri Subi takes this to the extreme by using an interrupt to hook videos. He starts his ad by asking the question, “do you f$ck your customers?”
It certainly grabs your attention when you click to watch a video.
Ads on Facebook take a slightly different approach. Yet they generally follow a proven formula. Here is an example from Sam Ovens, who runs Consulting.com.
There are a couple of elements about the ad that I want to highlight:
- Image: it looks like the kind of header image you’d see on a Forbes article
- Headline: it’s precise and provides a hook for the rest of the copy
- Long form copy: it’s long form copy, which is generally more effective than short form
- Social proof: add social proof to show why people should listen
- Share advice: provide an unexpected insight
- End with a CTA: you should have a clear CTA to get people to click
- Reactions: the more reactions the more people pay attention
Writing engaging copy for Facebook ads takes a lot of practice. Rather than searching the internet for insights from content marketers, I suggest you digitally stalk people who have spent millions on Facebook ads. Jack Paxton, who is an Aussie, is a notable example.
How to Design Your Registration Page
Once a person enters your funnel, they’ll end up on what is called a squeeze page. Most squeeze pages don’t look any different from other landing pages. In fact, you can easily make one using any of the best landing page builders.
Here’s what the registration page for your high converting webinar should have:
- An attention-grabbing headline that describes the result
- First call to action (CTA)
- A couple of bullet points that list the benefits of attending the webinar
- Second CTA
- Social proof regarding the credentials of the presenter
- Final CTA
Does this structure look familiar to you? If it does, it’s because it has all the fundamental elements of a sales email, right down to the multiple CTAs. The design keeps things simple, as well. Use plain black text on a white background with CTA buttons in an eye-catching color.
After registration, people are directed to a thank you page. The page design can be pretty simple — share when the webinar will be held, and what’s going to be covered.
How to Run Your High Converting Webinar
A high converting webinar is the most important part of the whole funnel. There are plenty of great webinar software platforms you can use to host your event. What I want to cover is how to run your webinar.
The first thing you need to do in a webinar is establish your credibility. Mention who you are, how you got to this point. Hosts often share their origin story. The story generally goes something like this: “I was poor and struggling. Then I had a lightbulb moment, which changed everything.”
Source: Giphy
The ‘aha’ moment will always be related to the product or service on offer.
You can then talk about how the product or service has changed the lives of others. Once that you’ve captured your audience’s attention, explain what your attendees have to gain if they stay for the entire duration of the webinar, then enumerate the benefits of your services.
Notice that we haven’t gotten around to the real topic of the webinar. This strategy is actually the opposite of what most sales bloggers tell you about providing value, then selling. And it’s fine, by the way.
The approach we just described above works because it works in two ways. First, you have established your credibility; therefore, your audience will take you seriously from this point onward. Second, you have also dropped hints that you were like them once — in need of advice from someone who has tasted success.
The value of your webinar comes from the fact that you have helped others achieve all these miraculous results before. It’s time to ask the audience, “I’ve done this before, and it was so easy, anyone can do it. Who wants to be successful too?”
Answer the Five W’s and One H
After you make the audience believe that they can be successful too, you’ve reached the part where you’ll have to discuss details. You will need to answer these questions:
- Who has benefited from the advice that you’re dispensing right now?
- What is the audience going to get if they act on your offer now?
- Where else can they get what you are offering (hint: they can only get it from you)?
- Why is this offer the ideal one for them?
- When can they start applying their knowledge?
- How do they take advantage of your offer?
You don’t need to follow the format above. As long as your presentation answers all of the questions, you’ll be fine. You have around 30 minutes or so to share whatever information you want to share, so there’s a lot of room for you to incorporate those questions.
Circling back to the previous section, if you can do a good job of convincing your audience that they can do it too, you’ve done half the work. Now, the next half awaits.
Use pattern interrupts to maintain audience engagement
A webinar can get really boring easily, especially if it lasts an hour or longer. Around 44% of attendees say they prefer 45-minute webinars, while only 10% prefer one-hour sessions.
Fifteen minutes may seem like just a short time, but when your audience has other things to do, it seems like forever. As a high converting webinar host, you will need to maintain audience engagement. Experienced webinar hosts interact with their audience to break the monotony. For example, you can ask your audience to do something if they agree with you: “Type 1 if you could do what I did.”
I can imagine the ego boost you’ll get when your live chat gets flooded with “1”s, but it does more than just boost your confidence. It actually stops people from falling asleep.
This is one example of a “pattern interrupt”.
Throughout your high converting webinar, you can use different pattern interrupts to keep your audience from nodding off. You may use jokes that make the audience go “What the f— did he say?”, ask your viewers to do random things, mix things up and make it entertaining.
End your session with some Q&A. This is where your audience can interact directly with you and get clarification about what you’ve just discussed.
While all of these seem structured, you should be careful not to make it feel too curated. You have to really be engaging, not just some talking head reading out of a Teleprompter.
Close with a call to action
The last few slides is where you’ll make the push for the sale. You can offer freebies for the first fifteen buyers or so and emphasize what the others will miss out on if they don’t buy now.
You don’t have to make the prompt negative either. You can tell them, “I made my mistakes before, so I’m offering you a shortcut to success.” It’s a powerful way to end your sales pitch on a high converting webinar.
Keep it flowing
You can’t expect everyone to click on the link at the end of the webinar. However, you shouldn’t consider them a lost cause. Perhaps they were already thinking about buying but didn’t have the time or money to do so at the moment. Maybe they closed the window by mistake or were just too busy to even attend the webinar. At some point, you’ll have to pull them back and see if they are still interested.
This is done by a drip email campaign that brings your audience to other webinars. Schedule the first email an hour after the webinar then send the final email after 24 hours. You can confirm their address with an email verification tool, then launch a drip campaign to remind your audience about what they’re missing out on and when they can get the same great deal again.
At this point, one sales cycle has ended and another one is set to begin. It’s time to analyze what went well and what can be improved on, then deliver a better webinar experience for the next batch of attendees.
Wrapping it Up: High Converting Webinars.
You’ve noticed that we tried to avoid writing about webinars in very specific terms. That’s because no two products and webinars are alike. What worked for one webinar presenter may work for you. Or maybe it won’t. However, if you’ve been doing webinars the same way every day for the past few years and get the same mediocre results, maybe it’s time to change things up a bit and do it differently this time.
Studying how the experts do it is the best way to find out what you can do to increase your conversions. Hopefully you learned something today that will help your business.
About Nico Prins
Nico is an online marketer and the founder of Launch Space. He helps companies develop their digital marketing strategies and make money blogging.
He’s worked with everyone from Fortune 500 companies to startups helping them develop content marketing strategies that align with their business goals. Follow him on Twitter @nhdprins.
Content Marketing Sales Funnel
Your content marketing sales funnel is all about getting people to know, like and trust you by nurturing them with the right information at the right time.
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