The Ultimate Guide to Launching A Profitable Webinar

How To Sell Your Products and Services With Webinars

Want to build a long-lasting pipeline and predictable, consistent lead flow and cash flow?

Here are 16 tips on webinar strategy, planning, marketing, hosting, and presenting to help you to succeed.

Why Webinars?

In our decades of working with speakers, coaches, health professionals, real estate and property professionals and people from many industries here are 3 questions we hear the most.

What is a Webinar?

A webinar is an interactive online training or event that anyone with an internet connection and webinar software such as Zoom or Gotowebinar can view over the web.

You can be the presenter, or you can be joined by another presenter (s) who speak about a topic for a set length of time.  The duration varies from 45 mins to 1 hour (plus extra time for the Q and A). Webinars usually include a video of the presenter talking, slideshows, or other visual elements.  If you are the host/presenter, it's helpful to have someone to run the chat and technology for you.

The presentation is typically followed by a Q&A session, during which time the audience can ask questions or the questions can be added to the chat or send by email in advance.

How To Launch a Webinar

Begin with the overall strategy.  Start by defining your customer Avatar.

Five questions to guide you are:

• Who do you want to attract to the webinar?
• What 3 main challenges/problems are they facing?
• What are their goals?
• What social media do they use? 
• What's their age, gender, marital and financial status?

Knowing who your attendees are will ensure that you plan for a high-value and high converting webinar.

Hosting a webinar by yourself is possible, but much easier if you get help from experts in this field. 

Running a webinar involves planning, promotion, running the webinar itself, and post-event follow up to increase sales.

It's essential to have someone who understands the software if you decide to go it alone. This person will need to know how to troubleshoot issues and moderate interactions with attendees so you can focus on the presentation.

Your webinar will generate much more interest and have more people attending if you choose a topic that your target market wants to learn about. Here are some places to find topics that your potential clients are interested in:

• Online forums like Quora and Reddit: Search for discussions related to your field. Look at which questions come up regularly and attract lots of comments.
• Survey your customers and prospects: Often the best way to get answers is simply to ask directly. Create a survey to send to your email list and social media followers.
• Other people's content: Take a look at the videos, podcasts episodes, blog posts and other content created by people in your industry, including your competitors. When you see a topic being covered again and again, it's a good bet that's because it's of interest to your market. But that isn't as certain as direct customer feedback would be, so don't rely on this indicator alone. Look for confirmation from one or more of the other points in this list.
• Your customer service and sales staff: Speak to your team members who are on the front line, dealing with clients every day. They can tell you which questions your clients ask most often and that's a great indication of what your market is most interested in.
• Google Trends: This is a handy resource for seeing how popular search terms are on Google, to help confirm whether there is enough interest in a topic to justify doing a webinar on it. If there isn't much interest in your planned topic, the "Related topics" and "Related queries" might provide another idea you can explore instead.
• Comments and emails: Scan through the comments and replies that people leave for you and look for recurring questions and themes. Twitter replies, comments on your Facebook posts, Instagram posts and YouTube videos, the comments section of your blog and even your main company email inbox - check all the ways that your market communicates with you. The information can be a bit sparse, but when you combine all the sources you can get enough of it to see trends in what people are saying.

Once you have your topic, start writing the content. It's easier to write the content first before the headline in my experience.  Write 20 possible headlines down before selecting one.

You have just a few seconds to get your prospects attention, so your headline needs to tell them what outcomes they'll get from listening to your presentation.

Let's say my topic is how to be effective at selling on webinars; my headline might be: How to Launch Webinars to Sell Your Products and Services.

Create a landing page for your webinar.

Use this page to drive registrations and provide critical information, including:

• The topic. You need a compelling headline and subhead.
• Date, time and counter
• "The Why" setting the frame.
• What attendees will learn (from 3 -5 key points)
• Who is this for?
• Speaker bio to show credibility

When it comes to webinars, you need to be consistent and to align the style, fonts and colours with your brand's visual tone.  Keeping the colours, visuals and tone of the message consistent is essential for a cohesive experience for your client. This may seem insignificant, but it can impact people at the subconscious level.

Aim to spend 40 minutes on value-added content, and delve deeply into one or two key points.

You will only have time to offer a top-level look at whatever solution you have to solve your clients' main challenges.

Although you're not giving them everything, for the content you do teach, make it top quality.

Throughout your presentation, you need to tell compelling case stories about your customers and the success they've had in working with you.  This will provide social proof.

One thing you can do is seed them throughout the content – use a few after you tell your story near the beginning and a few before your offer.

You can use the case study to overcome objections and help your audience experience results in advance through the power of story.

When you've completed the teaching content, you're ready to transition into the offer. Do this using a transition statement to smooth the way into the offer or sale. 

This s where most speakers trip up. Their tone changes and they become a bit nervous if they are uncomfortable about sales.  If you can relate, think of it as adding value in your mind instead of a sale.

Here's an example:

I hope that you've enjoyed listening to how to launch a profitable webinar. I've covered about 50% of what you need to know. Typically in a live event, we would spend a day teaching this, or we would consult to our clients for their first few webinars, but we don't have unlimited time today.

This moves the audience into a place where they're ready to hear about how they can work with you further. Then you move into the offer.

It needs to be an invitation. If you've added a lot of value up until now, this is simply an extension of that. Here's an example.

If you would like to continue your education with me, I would like to invite you to book a free call with myself or one of my team to explore if our service is a match for you and vice versa.

You've heard me talk about the Kickstart Webinar Blueprint, and now  I want to talk to you now about my online program. It's a proven webinar launch system, and I'm going to share with you the steps it takes to do this.

Whether you decide to enrol in my program or not, I want you to pay close attention right now because this is exactly what you need to know to actually build a webinar and build a business around a webinar system, OK?

So let's get into the online training and remember, I've also got a Copywriting Guide valued at $287, which I will send you the link to shortly, so stay to the end.

In the last few minutes of the webinar remind them to go ahead, click on the link and make this happen. It could be an invitation to make a booking with one of your team or to click to purchase, or an invite to a free trial. 

Ask your assistant(moderator) to add the link to the chat.  Then invite people to tell you when they have purchased in the chat with a simple "Yes" or "I'm In".

Give your audience a compelling reason to stay on the webinar until the end.

Offer them an exclusive bonus such as free tickets to a paid event, a free online e-book or lead magnet– it needs to to be something not readily available on your site.

Let them know that you'll be sharing how they can get the bonus(s) right at the start and the end of your presentation, and they need to stay right to the end if they want them. At this to your post-webinar registration sequence as a PS.

Facebook and Instagram, which are essentially the same platform because you've run the launch ad through the same interface and same console.  So we like to use Facebook to launch new campaigns and to do testing because it's a good platform for controlling the targeting the audience as based on the data that Facebook clicks, but also sort of testing and measuring and it's a fairly responsive platform.

We can test three or four different messages in quick succession and see what see how well they resonate with the market to see what response we get, and then quickly turn off any underperformers and focus more on the ones that convert.

This is the 1^st phase where you're just figuring out your market and which messages will work best, and attract people to your webinar at a reasonable cost.

Here are a few extra platforms to consider and ones often used by the real estate industry.

Google Display Network more than Google Search will usually bring you a stream of well-qualified prospects.  Still, when you're filling a webinar, we're only looking for all our registrations in a six or seven day period, so we don't want to take registrations too far before the webinar, or the show rate will fall away.

I suggest you compress those registrations in the 6 or 7 days before the webinar starts, and Google Search doesn't work for this.

YouTube is another good platform, and then there's Twitter as well, which is not as big as Facebook, but it's one of the major social media platforms.

And so it's worth advertising on as well if your target market is going to be on there. Then we've got some specialty networks like LinkedIn, which is good for business advertising, although the cost per lead is typically higher than most other platforms.

We suggest using Zoom or Go To Webinar, which are easy to use and setup. There are other platforms available but we find these two have worked well for our webinars and our clients.

Before the day of the presentation, rehearse the webinar, as if it were the real thing with everyone who will be involved present.

Make sure all the software equipment is working correctly, the slides are all in order, and the speakers know what they're doing and in what order. 

Remember to register yourself in the webinar, and you or a team member check all the confirmation emails, paying attention to the time, day, date and title in particular.

Warning:  Remember to do this step because if you don't, it can seriously affect your webinar results if the sound, slides or some other issue arises.

This is one of the most overlooked areas of running profitable webinars. Sales can double or triple with an effective email post-webinar sequence.  We suggest a minimum of 3 emails in the follow-up.  Prepare your sales team to follow up with the people who remained on the webinar for 75% of the time…

And remember, this is the start of building a relationship with your prospect.  Some people need many touchpoints before they buy from you.

Even if the attendees are not ready to buy after the webinar, they may be after further contact and education, free offers, and a call to find out how you can be of service.

One final thing ensure your service is impressive, fast and efficient.  Wow, people with the speed of service because first impressions count.

When the webinar has run, congratulate everyone involved, including yourself. The ideal is to get together straight after the webinar with your team for a 15 minute debrief. Start by sharing feedback on what went well then focus on what could be improved for the next webinar.  Take the time to make the changes for your next webinar.

Then if you set a date for the next few webinars take the time to diarise that now. We suggest scheduling the webinars weekly, fortnightly or monthly to keep the momentum going.

When you feel that you have mastered the webinar format, offer and post-event follow up, and it's predictably converting, you're ready to move to putting your webinar on autopilot.

What Financial Results Are People Getting With Webinars?

We have many clients running webinars and their results vary widely, based on their market niche, sales offer, skill & training of their sales team and other factors.

The advertising cost per webinar registration is typically in the range $12 to $20, though in some markets and with a very strong marketing message it can be as low as $5.

For webinars aimed at a specific business audience, the registration cost can run as high as $40. With such a well-targeted B2B offer, higher sales results more than justify the higher advertising cost.

Show rates typically range from 35% up to 55%. A good webinar reminder sequence, of both emails and SMS messages, along with a content-rich engagement sequence, will maximise your show rate on the webinar.

We strongly recommend that your webinar sales offer is priced at $2,000 or higher. At the time of writing our clients have webinar sales offers ranging from $2,500 up to $45,000.

Most of our clients use a call to action on the webinar of booking a call with a member of their sales team. This approach supports high ticket sales better than asking for a direct purchase online, straight from the webinar.

The key metric we use for measuring webinar results is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). It's simply (Sales revenue from the webinar) / (Cost of advertising to fill the webinar).

We're seeing ROAS figures for our clients that range from 3 to 9, including upsells. At the low end of that range, every $100 in advertising spend creates $300 in sales revenue, while at the top end that same $100 returns $900 in sales revenue.

Want to launch your own webinar for more leads and sales?

Click here to book a 30-minute free call with Ken to discuss whether webinars are a suitable sales strategy for your business. If they are, then we can help you launch a done-for-you webinar to profitably attract more clients - and we can have you running your first webinar and making sales in as little as 17 days time.