A Look at the 3 Most Common Webinar Fails and How to Fix Them
Hosting a webinar is a difficult task — there’s a lot to prepare and plan, not to mention everything there is to juggle during the actual event. With all of the different moving parts, there’s a chance mistakes will happen. But how can you professionally deal with a webinar fail?
Know that you can overcome a webinar fail. Sure, there may be mistakes during the live presentation or a technical fail that’s out of your hands. But, there’s also instances when a webinar is doomed from the start. There may be times when very few people register, or when none of your attendees follow your calls-to-action. Let’s talk about common webinar fails and how you can fix them.
The Problem: One way to fail right from the beginning is by choosing the wrong webinar topic. For a majority of people, the topic alone is the reason they choose to attend (or to not attend) a webinar. This is why it’s so important to do your research, see what questions people are asking, so you can choose a topic that interests your target audience.
The Fix: Choose a topic that’s important to your target audience, not necessarily one that’s important to you. Show your attendees how to solve a problem they’re having. Business is based on trust and relationships, and by offering genuine solutions, you’re going to win over customers.
The Problem: Unfortunately, many webinar hosts end up using their presentation time to just sell a product. Webinar attendees are savvy and they know when they’re being sold to. If you presented the webinar as informational, when it’s really just one giant sales pitch, the result is going to be bad.
The Fix: Selling is of course, a goal of hosting a webinar. But make selling, getting leads, and new customers your long-term goal. Your short-term goal should be to provide value to your webinar attendees. You can better cater to your audience if you segment your webinars to match your email list segments.
The Problem: One really popular way to get more attendees at a webinar is to partner with another brand that has a big following. While that works sometimes, many times the partnership doesn’t align in terms of target audiences. In these cases, the webinar messaging falls flat and no one is interesting in completing a call-to-action.
The Fix: If you’re going to partner with a brand, do the research. Make sure you go with a brand that your target audience will find value in, and their audience will find value in you, too. If you really want to increase your audience numbers at webinars, keep putting out quality webinars! A large majority of webinar attendees say they will keep registering to webinars put out by the same brand as long as they enjoy the content.
The takeaway here is to really take the time to put in the research and plan for your webinar. You know what they say, if you don’t plan, you plan to fail.
