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How To Create The Perfect Webinar

Creating the perfect webinar means you need to be deliberate about tweaking a few key areas and in today’s episode I’ll share how we’re doing it right now for our software company.

Big Ideas

Just Get Going [2:00]

Too often we put things off thinking,”We’ll do it when everything’s perfect, when all the stars align, when I’ve got this done, or I’ve got that done.” No, no, no. You have to get going because that’s when the real magic happens. And that’s exactly what we did. We had the idea and discussion about hosting a webinar for our software Searchie.io on Monday, and by Wednesday, we had everything set up and promoted. Would it have been better if we had more time to promote? For sure. Would it have been better if we had more time to dial the presentation in? For sure. But the most important bit was that we got going.

So, we delivered it on Wednesday and welcomed over 100 plus new people into the service. But the point that I want to make is that now that it’s done, what happens? This is where the perfection process begins to take place and where the real work begins. This is when you take a webinar and start deconstructing it. And there are three things that I want you to focus on.

What Are Your Conversion Points? [3:08]

The first thing you need to look at is your conversion points. If you want to dial in your webinar and make it the absolute most perfect webinar, then you’ve got to look at your conversion points. You need to look at your webinar registration numbers, where are you getting people registered for the webinar? And if you aren’t, then you’re going to have to look at whether the conversion on the page is working. Are people landing on the webinar registration page but not signing up? Then there’s a miss, a disconnect with your messaging.

Maybe there’s not enough urgency for people to show up live, so you’re going to have to fix your messaging after people have registered. Or what if people show up, but don’t purchase? Then you have to look at your offer. Until you do your first webinar, you don’t have any baseline data to be able to understand where in that whole process things are going well or not going well. Oftentimes people will do a webinar one time and say, “It didn’t work. I’m canceling that.” No, no, no. What about that didn’t work? You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater because it’s not always that the webinar didn’t work. It’s usually a breakdown in that process.

Always Tweak Your Messaging [5:18]

The second thing is you need to look at your messaging. I wish I could just give you a magic wand that you could wave and have the perfect messaging the first time out of the gate. But when it comes to messaging, it takes time. You saying the same thing over and over again, or tweaking it, dialing it in and listening to what people are saying, listening to where there’s a disconnect, looking at the questions and the comments that are coming through.

You also got to create more contrast in your messaging. For example, Searchie replaces so many existing services like Vimeo, Wistia, or Rev, and so on. It also replaces a lot of VAs. We’ve had many of our customers say Searchie is like a very cheap VA because it automates so many activities that a VA would normally do. Searchie also helps save a lot of sales because a lot of lost sales, refunds or cancellations for memberships and subscriptions come from customers asking questions and not getting answers fast enough. And so, Searchie allows them to instantly get answers. When we implemented Searchie, it cut our support down by over 90% because customers were able to get the answers that they were looking for faster and easier.

We didn’t contrast any of these savings that the entrepreneur or the content creator are going to experience when using Searchie. And so that was one of the tweaks we made in our messaging. You should be obsessed about tweaking your messaging. What’s one word, one tweak, one phrase, one description, one analogy that is going to help people understand what it is that you’re sharing easier and faster?

Look to Improve Your Offer [8:56]

Number three is the offer. There’s always room to improve the offer. Now, you have the core offer. For us the core offer of Searchie is the capabilities that it creates for you, the content creator, in terms of the experience for your audience in the way in which you deliver the content. But one thing we realized we could do to strengthen the offer is include more bonuses. As I mentioned, we had the idea of the webinar on Monday, so we didn’t really have time to craft high-quality bonuses by Wednesday, but we didn’t let that stop us. We thought, what can we create from a bonus standpoint that can strengthen this offer? And we had all kinds of answers. But the key thing is, when you come up with additional bonuses, one of the things I always recommend is that you extend those bonuses to your existing customers. So, those early buyers aren’t “punished” for buying early. In fact, they are rewarded along with all of the new buyers coming in and getting those bonuses.

Don’t Give Up and Keep Learning [10:22]

When it comes to creating the perfect webinar, you have to realize you’re never going to have a perfect webinar the first time you do it, but you have to keep doing it so that you can continue to refine it. One of my early mentors said to me as it related to developing a presentation to deliver from stage, “Stu, it’s easier to find a new audience than it is to develop a new presentation.” Because when you develop a presentation and you share it one time, you learn. And then when you share it again, you learn again, and that presentation gets better and better every single time you deliver it. That’s why I want to say, don’t give up on a presentation if it didn’t work the first time around. Because it’s not that the whole presentation doesn’t work, it’s that you need to break it down.

Memorable Quote

There’s always room to improve the offer.” – Stu McLaren

Resources

Searchie.io

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