How Long Should Your Webinar Be?

Another question I often get asked is …”How Long Should Your Webinar presentation Be?”

Have you ever joined a webinar and felt the presenter has taken your time for granted?

I remember joining one webinar run by a well-known internet marketer. The presentation was clearly an automated webinar but was presented as if it was live, with fake audience interaction.

(I knew the webinar was automated, but perhaps this wasn’t obvious to the other attendees).

After an hour I began to fidget. Normally I’d have just left, but I was interested in what this guy had to say. So I left the webinar on in the background while I did other things.

How Long Should Your Webinar Be?

How long do you think it ran for?

90 minutes? Nope.

2 hours? Nope.

3 hours??? Nope.

3 HOURS 22 MINUTES!

So this guy is very well known and clearly does well for himself. But the liberty taken with my time that day was a joke, and borderline arrogant. Maybe he got away with it due to his ‘guru’ status, I don’t know.

It is hard work to put on a webinar and get people to show up. You have a finite amount of their attention. So how long should your webinar be?

The golden rule, in general, is under an hour. Ideally, you want to deliver 30 minutes of solid content and introduce your pitch (or your ‘next step’) around the 40-minute mark.

It’s okay for your webinar to run over if you’re running a post-webinar QnA. Feedback from live webinar participants is golden, so you never want to cut this short. But the ‘meat’ of your webinar should normally be delivered well before the hour mark.

I have seen successful webinars run longer than an hour, but normally these are billed as such in advance. The trade-off is this: you might improve your webinar conversion rate by over-delivering. But the longer your webinar runs, the greater your drop-off rate will be.

It’s better to run a long webinar as a two or three-part series. Running a webinar series over consecutive nights or weeks also encourages list engagement. If you’re running more events, people are likely going to open and read more of your emails.

I’ll be sharing more insights like this, plus a ‘look over my shoulder’ walk-through, in a course later this year. Stay tuned for details on that.

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