This week at Napier we’ve been analysing “The 2017 Big Book of Webinar Stats” by GoToWebinar and have decided to summarise a few little tips and tricks to help you utilise the success of Webinars and get the most out of them.
Promotions
Firstly, we want to stress to you the importance and ease of promoting them. The webinar will not just fall at your target audience’s feet; you have to help it reach them. Generating the right leads and promoting effectively is one of the biggest battles you will face. One of the simplest yet most effective ways is email! It beats any other form of communication in terms of drawing attention to your future webinar, with 45% of marketers using it over any other tool. This isn’t the only successfully used resource, company website and blogs is another tool used most frequently in terms of communicating the webinar to customers. The best thing about this is that it’s completely free and helps to draw more traffic towards your website in return, we see that as a great result.
One of the key things to remember is that 15% of registration for the webinars happens within 3-4 weeks before the webinar takes place so please get organised! Or you’ll be missing out on a significant amount of your audience. To avoid making this mistake promote efficiently and get those all-important viewers registering.
Tuesdays are reportedly the most popular day to deliver promotions, closely followed by Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. 24% of webinar registrations occur on a Tuesday so keep this in mind when choosing your set days do drive promotions. In terms of timings stick to the mornings, it’s well known that motivation drops in the afternoon and people are far less likely to check their emails, let alone register for a webinar. Focus on the hours between 8am-11am, this is when individuals are most likely to sign up to a webinar. Emails that are sent early morning are more likely to be noticed at the top of someone’s inbox.
Webinar have recommended that 4 weeks prior to the live webinar begin your promotions, this way you should hopefully see a steady flow in the weeks leading up to it, and hopefully increase as time goes on. One of the biggest things to remember here is the week leading up to the webinar is when you will gain most of your viewers, at 69% of people signing up at this stage and 33% on the actual day. So please don’t go into panic mode if by week 3 registrants are still looking low. However, we would advise a week prior to the event resend the emails to anyone who has not yet signed up. It may seem pushy but it will just help refresh their memory and give them a nudge in the right direction!
Secrets of scheduling
So when is actually the best time to upload? Thursdays is your answer, with 25% of people saying it’s their preferred day. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are also popular at 22% and 24% so either of these three days we would recommend. Although live webinars are fantastic and get everyone thinking the same way at one time, 84% of B2B customers would opt for a playback option on a webinar.
Timings? Well 11am is the simple answer to that, they attract the most registrations at this time and 2pm comes in at a close second of the next most popular. Please remember the most popular time can also cause a huge amount of competition, so don’t be afraid to think a little outside the box – try opting for earlier or later to see what works for your customers. As it has been found 8am and 3pm also generate a considerate amount of views.
It may be expected that the shorter the better will attract more viewers, well your wrong there. It has been reported that people are actually more excited by longer webinars with 60-minute webinars attracting 2.1X more registrations than 30-minute webinars, and 90-minute webinars attract 4.6X as many. A significant difference that should be taken into consideration when developing your webinar content.
How to engage
Finally, we want to discuss engagement with you, following on from what we previously suggested about longer webinars, 61 minutes is the average viewing time for a webinar as attendees have a longer attention span than you expect. They would rather in depth and lengthy content was delivered rather than fast pace and confusing content. 58% of most webinars fall in the category of 45-60 minutes long.
Webinars are the most current and unique way to drive the audience’s attention in your direction, it’s an opportunity for you to engage with your audience and make them feel included by doing a live Q&A and taking polls. Marketers are now experimenting with a more modern way to “webinar” such as live workshops and virtual conferences.
So finally how can we actually measure attendee engagement, how do we know they were actually listening and interacting at the time of the webinar. The top tips webinar has suggested to ensure engagement is imminent are:
- Turn on your webcam
- Have a co-organizer handle Q&A
- Always include polls
- Show videos and add handouts to your event
- Be personable and have fun with the audience
Getting those results
There are a final few tips suggested by webinar to help ensure you’re getting the most out of your delivery. They have analysed a variety of webinars and discovered a number of title formulas that are believed to have worked better than others. They have been placed in order of effectiveness for you.
- Lists
Best way to help deliver your experiences clearly and effectively
- How to:
Helps to demonstrate your strong understanding of a topic
- 101:
Use these when covering a new trend or topic
- Classes, training and workshop:
Offer practical content with in depth information
- New:
Suggest excitement and reveals something new
- Trends:
Use a current topic to be part of a larger conversation
We hope all these top tips and tricks will help you in producing a fantastic webinar that helps to engage and gain an increasing amount of interaction with your customers. We believe if you follow these steps you will be on the right path to be creating something successful that your audience will want to be a part of.