As an expert in your field, you know how to educate, but when it comes to selling that knowledge, you don’t feel so comfortable. A well thought out webinar campaign plan could be the answer.
This guide will walk you through the steps of creating an education-driven webinar that leads naturally into a sale so that neither you or your prospects get that feeling of “ewww!”
Introduction
Since the pandemic lockdown, webinars have exploded in popularity, both for presenters, and for attendees to get a deep understanding of how to solve their problems. Yet the majority of people who run them still struggle.
- They struggle getting people to sign up
- They struggle getting people to show up
- They struggle getting people to stay, and critically
- They struggle getting people to buy at the end
Their answer to this is to spend more money and effort on traffic, hoping that more people on the front end = more sales on the back end. Unfortunately, this is looking down the wrong end of the problem. This guide will walk you through how we create multi-million selling webinars for agencies, consultants & trainers, but we’re going to start at the end…
The Offer
The word “offer” is misunderstood, and it’s at the heart of why most webinars fail. Most offers that are made at the end of webinars aren’t offers at all, they’re just invitations or deals. An invitation is nothing more than an open door that says “we’re in business”. It gives you no good reason to come in and spend. It definitely doesn’t give you a reason to come in and by NOW. Deals are just discounts or bundles that make the price seem lower. They’re really to push people off the fence who already know about your offer. We see them a lot because we see brands who already have huge awareness using them. For businesses less well known than Coke and Apple, we need to convince people of our value before they’ll even trust us with $1. So how do we do that? We need to present our product or service like a well-wrapped present, with the thing they really want, wrapped up in layers that make it attractive, safe, and organized. Our offer contains a number of layers which we need to build up to do that.
Let’s work through each layer, starting from the centre.
The Promise
Our customer has a problem. It might be something painful like a health issue, or it might be something more positive like an unfulfilled ambition. Either way, they have a thorn in their side, and it’s something that we know how to deal with.
The Solution
Most problems have a number of ways of solving them. For example, to lose fat you can exercise more, eat less, or get surgery. To make money you could invest, start a business, negotiate for a pay rise, or rob a bank. The solution is the one that you have chosen to deliver, because you’ve had the best results with it, and can get similar results for your client. We’re not going to make any choices or changes here, but we need to be aware that there are other ways to solve our problem than the one we chose, and our prospect may well have tried some of them, or be thinking about them. Hopefully they’re not thinking about robbing a bank, but you never know.
The Method
To get your prospect from where they are now, to where they want to be, there’s going to be a set of steps for them to take. (If they can get to where they need to be in a single step, a webinar is probably overkill). This is the most critical part of your offer to nail down as it’s these steps that we’re going to spend most of the webinar talking about. The steps are your method, and they’re critical to building your client’s trust in you:
- Breaking a journey into steps shows you’ve been there before.
- Taking things a step at a time, with their own markers, gives the prospect confidence that they’re on the right path.
- Naming each of the steps is an easy way to build intellectual property (IP) and present your method as being unique.
Write down what each of these steps are and be clear on the consequences of skipping them, or doing them badly.
Confidence
Before you can sell, you need to build up your prospect’s confidence that you can fulfil your promise and get them out of their current situation to where they want to be. If you’ve done a good job presenting your Method, they’ll already see you as a capable person who has already conquered the problems that they’re facing right now. Weaving in some case studies, proof, and testimonials into teaching the Method will raise the level of confidence even higher.
Packaging
Packaging is the last step in making the offer to the client. It includes everything that you can change about the service that isn’t the service itself. For example:
- Pricing
- Payment terms and plans
- Guarantees
- Bonuses
- Premiums or “up-sells”
- Timing of delivery
- Availability restrictions, deadlines
These are usually where the elements are that will “push the prospect off the fence.” Be careful to justify any claims of scarcity, especially for digital products where the prospect knows you could sell an unlimited amount. With these layers in place, we can move on to the muscle of our campaign. The webinar presentation itself.
The Webinar Presentation
The webinar presentation is an art form in its own right but you can quickly go from a snooze-fest in Powerpoint, to a value-loaded training session with your service presented as a faster route to the promise. A good webinar presentation has 4 acts:
- Introduction
- Teaching
- Make the offer
- Q&A
INTRODUCTION
The first couple of minutes are crucial. We need to ear the right to keep this person’s attention focussed on us for an hour or more. That means we have to be clear about what they’re going to get out of that time, and why we have the credentials to teach it. We’ll also “ask permission” to make an offer at the end that will help them get the result faster, or with deeper assistance. That permission takes all the deep breaths and awkwardness out of that moment where everyone is thinking “now they’re going to sell me something”, as we all know it’s coming.
TEACHING
The teaching step takes up the bulk of the time, but probably takes the least preparation. If you did your homework on the offer, you already have a 3-5 step method that you can teach. Remember you’re teaching them what the steps are, what the outcomes are if you do them right (include some examples), and what goes wrong if you skip them. If you can teach this in 40 minutes but have nothing left for your actual service then, again, a webinar might be overkill.
MAKE THE OFFER
By now your viewers should have get some value from the presentation. They know the steps they need to take, and they can see that you’re well practiced at them. Don’t worry if some people can figure the rest out for themselves. These aren’t people who are going to value your expertise. The best clients are the ones who get the big picture but need, and can pay for, some assistance in getting through them all. This is the moment to present your offer and the packaging that surrounds it to these people.
THE CALL-TO-ACTION
Your prospect has to do something to take up the offer. Maybe they can get out a credit card right away and go to your checkout. Maybe they need to call, or book a call. Whatever that action is needs to stay on the screen for the rest of the duration of the webinar.
Q&A
A good question and answer session can help clear up any objections. It’s a good idea to have a couple of questions prepped to get the ball rolling. Most people won\t want to be the first to raise their hands. A bad session can get stuck in the weeds of people trying to get the contents of the rest of your product for free. If this happens, be courteous, tell them the content is in the course, and that it would be jumping the gun to answer it without knowing their situation. Dig to find what’s really bugging them. For example, I get asked a lot about finer details like “the perfect line to open a webinar with”. This is just a mask for general anxiety about running webinars. So I tackle it by promising that they’ll get enough reviews and practice behind closed doors that they’ll build that confidence. That’s what’s REALLY important to them.
Getting people to show up
Now we have a great offer, and a webinar presentation that teaches why it’s the right thing for your perfect prospect to be doing. All we need now is someone to watch it.
LANDING PAGE
You need somewhere for your webinar attendees to sign up. Often your webinar platform will provide a tool for this, or you can create a higher converting page using a landing page builder. What your landing page look like will depend a little on where your visitors are coming from. If you’re using a very limited ad like a banner ad or a tweet, you’ll need to provide more detail. This is a typical landing page with details of what you’ll learn and when the webinar is running:
If you are using a Facebook ad or an email to drive traffic, your visitor will have all the information they need, and you just need to take their registration and get out of the way. This is a page for the same webinar that we drove over $3million of course sales through using Facebook ads.
See how simple it is? We’d already “sold” the webinar in the ad so we just matched the designs in the ad, so the prospects didn’t need to absorb any new information, and gave the the path to sign up as simply as possible. (The registration form itself appears as a pop-up when you click the red button.)
TRAFFIC
Traffic can be a challenge for live webinars because you need to get everyone to an event at once. Start advertising too early and people who signed up will forget about you or have other pressures on their schedule. Start advertising too late and you won’t get the numbers you need. Here’s our recommendation:
- For live webinars, invite people from your email list, and your social following. You can reach them all in a short space of time.
- After the webinar, set up an “evergreen” recorded version that can be accessed at any time, and direct paid ads to it. You can also set up links from your blog posts and pages that get consistent SEO traffic.
If you don’t have an email list or social following, then record the webinar with a couple of your team listening in and go straight to the evergreen version.
REMINDER EMAILS
It’s hard to get someone to clear an hour or more in their diary to watch your presentation, so a webinar usually takes place at a set time in the future that your prospect can keep clear and give their full attention. To make sure they show up at the designated time we need some reminders. We’ll usually do a series of emails on the days leading up to the webinar, that remind them why they signed up in the first place, and what they’re going to get out of the session. This will end with some last minute reminders, maybe as little as 15 minutes ahead of the webinar starting. Then once the webinar is done, we’ll have some more emails to “mop up” people who saw our offer, but didn’t buy or schedule a call. We’ll also run some for the people who registered but didn’t show, and for people who showed up but didn’t stay long enough to see our offer.
Next Steps
By now I hope you’ve recognized that a well planned webinar can be a lot of work, but once it’s in place it can be an incredible asset to warm up cold prospects. A good webinar can make sales or generate sales conversations with ve ry little ongoing effort. The first step is to start to create each of the webinar campaign pieces, and for that we’ve pulled together a checklist covering all the steps above, that you can divide up between your team to make this happen…