Don’t Make These 3 Webinar Mistakes | Strategic Audience Map

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do webinars. These tips help ensure you get it right.

As people conduct more and more business and shopping online, webinars are becoming commonplace, as they allow you to reach workers and buyers no matter where they are in the world. But although they’re relatively easy to put together and run, you’ll need to avoid some of the most common webinar mistakes to get good results.

1. Not accounting for burnout

Even the nicest people can be a little egocentric. What often happens in webinars is the speaker focuses just on themself and their own event. They forget that everybody’s doing webinars and that workers can be attending several throughout the day. They don’t pay attention to the fact that the attendees have already been sitting in their chairs in front of a screen all day or that they might not even have details about what the webinar is about.

Therefore, you have to make everything more interesting in order to make your webinar stand out, whether it’s the email invite, the speaker you bring in or other elements.

As an example, in my company, we’re bringing in an author and former Navy SEAL. The plan is for him to give his insights about overcoming transition periods of hardship, such as what we’ve all experienced amid the pandemic. People signing up for the webinar have been responding positively just because it’s something different. Instead of yet another product pitch that everybody’s throwing out, having a SEAL is something novel that we can use to start relationships and ensure that the webinar is effective and performs as the lead-generation platform we need it to be.

As you’re trying to think of fun ways to make the webinar more engaging, make sure you think through the flow of things. If you plan a wine tasting and the wine doesn’t get delivered to the people attending the webinar, for example, that’s a real bummer and your attendees will likely be disappointed. You want to make sure your plan is reliable or that you’ve got a great pivot to turn to. Don’t forget to follow up, too. If you work with an author, for instance, maybe arrange for everybody to get a copy of their book after your event.

2. Letting cameras go dark

People struggle not to multitask, largely because they’re under so much pressure to do, do, do all the time. When you host a webinar, try to predict how people are going to multitask. They’re going to cheat and turn their camera off so that they can be doing other things as you speak. That’s disappointing and challenging as a speaker, because then it’s impossible to get visual feedback from their faces to see if you’re keeping them engaged. Consider using a raffle for people who keep their camera on the whole time or find other prizes and games that are going to appeal to the audience you have.

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