Tips from the trenches: webinars

I’ve been writing a lot of webinar programs lately, because they STILL work and can be highly cost-effective for driving revenue. Here are some tips:

Leverage happy customers. This is two-fold: 1) to include in the webinar presentation itself, to tell your story to others then 2) to get testimonials for other webinars. Solicit feedback in follow-up thank you emails.

Tell a story. It’s true for any presentation, and this includes webinars. Stories take your ideas from the realm of the abstract and transform them into something real and personal. Even (especially) a product demo needs some concrete examples with which your audience and identify. Use challenges faced by your actual customers (better yet, feature that customer and let them speak in person at the webinar) and show how things have improved.

Looks matter. You don’t need to be a presentation wizard, but a few animations, colorful text or photos can make a world of difference.

Invite often—but not too early. Unless it’s a one-of-a-kind, can’t-miss, groundbreaking webinar, folks aren’t going to feel capable of planning that far ahead. I’ve seen a lot of success with webinar invites sent the day before and day of the webinar (obviously, test to see if this applies to your target customers).

Leverage content after the fact. Creating a great webinar is a lot of work, so use the content in whitepapers, testimonials, audio/Podcasts, on-demand replays, etc.