Webinars: Automated, Live or Hybrid?
Webinars: Automated, Live or Hybrid?
I have good news and bad news regarding webinars…
The good news? A focused, well-presented webinar can BOTH build trust and close sales, in one fell swoop.
The bad news? Webinars are hard to get right, especially if you plan to automate the delivery.
Webinars: Automated, Live, or Hybrid?
My experience with automated webinars is that they CAN work, although conversion rates tend to be lower than a live webinar.
Doing a live webinar is like putting on a theatre production. Or perhaps more like pantomime, where you get live feedback from the audience. It’s a lot of work to put on, run and promote.
An automated webinar is like airing a movie at your local cinema. Your show may run four times a day over a four-week period until it disappears. It’s a lot of work upfront, but after that, it runs without much further attention.
Why bother with the automated webinar? Why not just put a video on a web page behind an email opt-in?
The webinar format encourages your attendees to pay attention. Like at the cinema, attendees can’t pause the movie for a while to answer the phone or respond to an email.
I’ve seen automated webinars work well for my clients. If you need somebody to watch a 45-minute presentation before they’ll buy, I’d consider it. But the trap is to automate too early.
It’s best to run your webinar to a live audience first, then automate it for scale later on.
Get feedback from a live audience. Prove the concept. Hone your proposition and pitch. Prove you can attract attendees and generate sales.
Once your webinar is successful, automation allows you to leverage it to a wider audience, and perhaps run the webinar in time zones that would be inconvenient to run live.
A third option many webinar platforms have developed is the ‘hybrid’ format. In a hybrid webinar, the main webinar presentation is pre-recorded, but the webinar chat is manned. It doesn’t have to be you manning the chat, it could be a member of your sales team responding as you.
With a hybrid webinar you can also ‘top and tail’ the main presentation, where you present live at the start and the end, but the main presentation in the middle is pre-recorded. If you’re running a webinar three times a day for four weeks, that will save your voice and guarantee a consistent delivery!
That way you can verbally answer any questions from the chat. If you have 100+ attendees on a webinar, why not jump on at the end to answer a few questions? Even a 5% webinar close rate would make that worth your while.
We’ll talk more about webinar tools next time.
