There are really just three things. Obviously you need a computer. You need a computer to connect to the internet. You need a microphone to speak with. Possibly a PowerPoint presentation, if you’re going to run a slideshow. Then a camera if you want to go on camera live yourself. The camera’s not an ultimate necessity.You don’t really need a lot to get started with webinars. It’s a nice, easy platform to use.
CS: I guess that the convenience of a webinar versus traveling and other expenses that would be incurred if somebody had to attend an event is probably another very welcome situation for using them.
FG: It works from both levels. Not only as a presenter or as an attendee, you’re not locked into a location. There’s also the cost benefit. If you put on a live seminar in the local hotel or motel, whatever it might be, or conference center, there’s an expense to that. You have to hire the room, you’ve got to hire the audio system, you’ve to hire the projector. There’s
more expense that impacts on your return investment.
You also can’t really trial a live presentation. You’ve either got to decide you’re going with it and put it on, whereas you can test a webinar by only inviting a few people. You can test your presentation, you can hone it, you can get it right and then you can open it up to the world and invite your original target audience.
There are lots of benefits. Attendees, it’s the same. As long as they have a computer and internet access, they can attend. Both parties can benefit. You can be on holidays and still run your business. You can be traveling anywhere and still run your business. It is one of the benefits of webinars as well. Very handy tool.
CS: What about as far as presentation, do you have any pointers for someone that’s planning or thinking about doing a webinar? What’s the best amount of content or should they have PowerPoint or should they just put notes down and an outline? What kind of pointers could you give people?
FG: I definitely encourage people to put up a presentation. We break down the webinars into basically four sections. The first one is the introduction, where you tell people what you’re actually going to do. You then have the content section itself where you actually present your content. The second to the last section is the Q&A, so you give people the opportunity to ask questions based on what you’ve presented. Lastly, is your call to action at the end, where you’ve already worked out what you want your attendees to do, whether that’s to just contact you by phone, email, or you’ve actually got a product that you’re promoting at the time at the end of the webinar.
They’re really the four sections. With regards to presentation, that can be one slide displayed on the screen, and you could just talk. You don’t need a presentation to get started, but I’d certainly encourage one. I suppose, the recommendation is that for every minute you speak on a webinar, you should probably change the slide. Again, that gets back down to that engagement and the boredom and keeping people involved in a webinar.
It’s a good starting point. Every minute, if you’re talking for 20 minutes, then I’d probably have 20 slides. If you talk over an hour, have 60 slides. It’s test and measure with any advertising. It’s why your audience and every audience is different, it’s what your audience will react to. A good starting point is at least one slide so you’ve got something showing on the screen.
CS: Okay. How would a business or anybody go about finding people to attend? Are there places you can list your webinar that are free? Besides sending out emails to a contact list, what do you suggest?
FG: If people are doing online marketing now, they’ll have to be members of various groups. If they’re not on Facebook, they should be. Depending on the industry they’re in for example, if their target audience is predominantly females, then they’re probably better off promoting on Pinterest and Snapchat, places like that, because people look at it.
Right now, Facebook is probably the place to be. I’d join as many groups in your industry that you can possibly join. You could post and invite people to webinars. You don’t want to do that day one, obviously. You need to get involved in the conversations before you actually try it with anything, before you try to sell. You need to give some assistance to the members of the groups and get involved in the conversations and then subtly invite people to your webinars.
You’ve also have Facebook ads where you can pay money to get people to your webinars. It’s relatively inexpensive if you do it right; also your own client base. One of the things I’d encourage new entrants into the webinar arena to do is to obviously invite their current client base, but then encourage those people to bring one person. If you do that, then you can double the attendance of your webinar with one easy click, basically. That’s one of the tricks that we try and encourage our clients to do is to get their immediate client base to attend a webinar, but also ask them to invite one new person. That’s a good starting place.
