Webinars have become one of today’s most important and productive tools for lead generation, pipeline acceleration and the education of customers and partners. But simply giving a webinar isn’t enough. Given the large amount of competition, companies must deliver great webinars that really stand out. So you have to be very careful to not make any errors when creating and hosting one. Today, we are going to share with you eight of the biggest common webinar mistakes and how you can avoid them, so you can rest assured yours goes as smoothly as possible.
These are the 8 most common webinar mistakes
1. Scheduling your webinar at the wrong time
To get started, a common mistake is to schedule the webinar at the wrong time, and hence, don’t attract sufficient attendees. How can you avoid this? Easy, schedule your webinar on the day studies have shown there is more attendance: Thursday or Wednesday.
And what about the time? According to a Big Marker study, you can have a good audience by scheduling your webinar at 11 am, 1 pm or even at 2 pm.
2. Not respecting your audience’s time
Not respecting your audience’s time can lead to annoying your attendees and diminishing your credibility. The simplest and most effective way to avoid this one is to start and end your webinar on time. This means if you include a Q&A at the end, be sure to start it at the scheduled time. After all, your attendees have carved out a chunk of their day to listen to your webinar, and if that includes the perk of a Q&A, then include it inside the designated duration of your entire webinar.
3. Not making your webinar interactive
Having a live chat is essential, nobody likes one-way webinars. Leverage your webinar platform’s chat feature, which will allow your attendees to see each other’s responses and engage in a live dialogue. You can create even more engagement by asking your audience questions.
On the other hand, be sure to inform your attendees there’s a chance to ask questions if they stay until the end.
4. Not customizing your webinar
A lot of people tend to think that a simple videoconference and some PowerPoint slides are enough to make an exceptional webinar, and that’s a mistake. If you don’t have a presentation that engages your attendees, it can make them abandon your webinar early. To remedy this mistake, make sure yours is visually appealing.Watchity allows you to customize your live video connecting cameras and smartphones, sharing your screen or webcam, adding lower-thirds, overlays, brand logos and pre-recorded videos. This way, you can create great-looking webinars and other virtual activities with an amazing brand image that makes you have a more professional look and stand out from the rest.
5. Not promoting your webinar enough
Another mistake is not promoting your webinar enough, which leads to less than desirable registration and attendee results.
If you’re curious about how early you should start promoting your webinar, you can start as early as four weeks before your webinar date. It’s worth noting, though, that 69% of your registrations are probably going to take place one week before your webinar, and 33% will happen the day of your scheduled presentation.
Some proven ways to promote your webinar are:
- Include an “add to calendar” tool
- Send reminders
- Create an engaging landing page
- Highlight your webinar on your homepage
- Announce it on social media
- Write a blog post about the webinar
6. Making your webinar too “salesly”
Do you want to listen to a sales pitch in your free time? I’d guess the answer is “no”. Your audience feels the same way. Being too salesy during your webinar can, and most likely will, lead to the opposite of what you’re going for and diminish your sales.
You can avoid this mistake by focusing on providing educational, valuable information.
That’s not to say you can’t sell in your webinar, however. It just means you should focus on providing valuable solutions to your audience first. Your content will resonate better among your attendees, and the sales will follow.
7. Forgetting that every presentation should tell a story
While numbers and statistics or pie charts and graphs are useful and necessary, it’s not what people are going to remember. What they take away is a story. Stories have an arc and include anecdotes that trigger emotion. Unfortunately, many webinars meander aimlessly from speaker to speaker and topic to topic. They leave it to the listener or viewer to provide the connective sinew that holds the story together.
Instead, set up the story that you are going to tell from the outset. One technique is to begin by establishing an audacious goal for the webinar. For example, “In today’s session we are going to take you on a journey that will forever change the way you look at customer service!” This is critical because it will immediately grab the attention of your audience and establish a goal that’s worth tagging along for.
8. Letting the ending fall flat
The ending is one of the most universally overlooked parts of any webinar. The final 5-10 minutes are wasted in an inevitably anticlimactic “That’s all, folks.”
Instead, you should know before you even start exactly how you will end the webinar, and you should always tie it back to the way you started. Tell the audience how you have achieved the goal you set forth at the outset and leave them with a way to remember the core message.
If you want to know more about creating webinars with Watchity or the most common webinar mistakes and how to avoid them, send us a message or request a demo.