Mastering the Art of Webinars: A Step-by-Step Guide to Successful Online Launches

Your Dream Business

In this episode, I’m diving into the world of webinars and breaking down why they’re such a game-changer for launching and marketing online businesses. I’m busting some common myths and sharing super helpful strategies for crafting killer sales webinars. We’ll cover everything from pre-launch content, to the live session format, and the sales follow-up, giving you a solid roadmap for success. Plus, I’ll chat about the unexpected perks of live webinars—like building personal connections and showcasing your expertise on the spot—that will allow you to really enjoy your online launch. If you’re looking for practical tips on how to engage potential customers and boost your webinar turnout, regardless of list size, this is for you! KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

1. Webinars as a powerful marketing tool: Generating leads, building relationships, and driving sales for online businesses.
2. Compelling webinars require careful planning: From choosing a topic to delivering a captivating presentation, there are several key steps to make sure your webinar is a success.
3. Live webinars offer unique benefits: The differences between live webinars and pre-recorded content are plentiful, with benefits such as real-time interaction with your audience, building community connections and demonstrating expertise.

If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful. LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Ep 368 Connect with Teresa on Website, The Club, Sign up to Teresa's email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter

Transcript

Have webinars had their day? Do they even still work? And maybe you've tried it and thought this didn't work for you. I'm here to dispel the myths around webinars and explain why they are still very effective and why they are a powerful thing to use in your business. In this episode, I share some common mistakes that people make and what to do instead. And I also share with you my launch framework and I break down. What a successful webinar includes. So if you have something to sell online, then webinars could be your secret weapon to your next biggest ever launch. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. I am your host, Teresa Heath Wareing, and today I get to geek out on a subject that I love. Lots of things I talk about, I geek out on, but this is a subject that seems to be coming up an awful lot recently and not always for necessarily the right reasons. So we're talking about webinars and the reason I say it comes up a lot and not for the right reasons is because I hear a lot of talk that webinars don't work. They're no longer effective. [00:02:00] People know what webinars are all about and therefore don't want to come to them. And I am here to challenge and dispel all of those thoughts and ideas. Let's kick off by actually talking about what is a webinar because, again, I see lots of things in my business and the people I help. Lots of people think a webinar is a training. Now, I'm not going to say you're wrong because it is, but it's so much more than that. The whole point of a webinar is that someone can come along and learn something from you. But a sales webinar to help convert someone into buying something is a very different structure to how you would normally do a training. So let's take a, if I was speaking somewhere, the Presentation that I would put together for that would be very different to the presentation I put together for a sales webinar. The same as if I was just [00:03:00] teaching in someone else's community, I would probably start off with, this is who I am, just in case you don't know me, because it'd be a new cold audience. And then I would go straight into the content and I would walk them through the content with detail. And that would be kind of it. And I think this is some of the mistakes that people are making when it comes to webinars, that they are thinking it's just a training with an offer at the end. And that's not the case. I'm going to talk you briefly, very briefly through the structure of a webinar later on in this episode, but I just wanted to kind of get that point of what is a webinar and how is it different to Just doing a training. There is a distinct difference. So if you've done webinars and you think they don't work, I want you to ask yourself, is it because you trained and then said, buy my stuff? I don't think you said it that way, but you know what I mean? If you then just did some training and then did an offer at the end, that might be why it's not working. Why do they work and why [00:04:00] are they still working? One of the main benefits of a webinar is that you get to showcase you and what you do. Most people listening to this will be personal brands or lots of you will be personal brands and you will be selling yourself as the service. So selling your brain, selling your thoughts, selling your ideas. And therefore it's really important for your audience to know, like, and trust you If they get to see you and see how you teach, see what you're like, see what your humor's like, see what they resonate with, then they will have a much better idea of whether they want to work with you. And a webinar is a great place to showcase that. Because you are delivering some element of training and you are doing a presentation, They are getting to see firsthand what you're like. And if someone comes to one of my presentations and one of my webinars and thinks this woman's an idiot, then cool, they're not for me. However, if they come to it and think, actually, I resonate with her, I like the [00:05:00] way she talks about things, I think she's credible, authentic, whatever the words are, then great because they are getting to see the real me on a webinar. That's the first one. It's really good at showcasing who you are and what you do because you get to demonstrate that in real time. The next thing that's really good about webinars is there's a real in person connection. Now, when you are doing, if you're doing an evergreen funnel, if you're doing something, the hat is basically people are opting in and going through it themselves. There's no real in person connection. Now, yes, there's lots of things that we can do to try and make that connection as authentic as possible. But at the end of the day, it's pre recorded, it's done. And so I'm talking about live webinars in particular, having you there deliver the live training in all your real life, authentic glory. means that they can connect better with you. But also the thing that I love most is that I can connect better with my audience. The people who come to the [00:06:00] webinar can ask questions. They can let me know whether they resonate with the content that I'm delivering. They can bring new insights to me that maybe I didn't have before. And having that sort of back and forth now. There's one caveat or one thing I want to talk about here. In the past, most webinars have been delivered through a webinar style platform. Let me try and explain myself. You would go to a webinar and you would see the person, the person wouldn't see you, and you wouldn't see the other attendees. You would be having a conversation in the chat or you would be commenting in the chat and that would be the only kind of back and forth. But obviously the speaker, the person doing the webinar can see the chat. I have done my last few webinars as Zoom meetings so that I can see people's faces. I personally love this and I also like, not that actually this happens a lot On a webinar, but I also like people to unmute themselves if they have a question, and I will allow someone to unmute themselves so that they [00:07:00] can ask me a question. 'cause then evidently I have about three questions back to ask them as a minimum. I'm really liking doing webinars this way. I'm really liking seeing people having it as more of a Zoom meeting. However, traditionally it's not done that way. It is done as. You see me as the presenter, but I don't see you. There's no real right and wrong with this. I don't know. Actually, I don't have any hard or fast rules or hard and fast stats that say one is better than the other. I just really like seeing people's faces. And some people will come on and not want to show their face and leave their screen off and that is absolutely fine, but for those who do then. Awesome. I love it. The next reason webinars are really good and they work is a really, it's a fairly low barrier to entry. And what I mean by that is setup, cost, tech, funnel, it's fairly low effort compared to other things. Now, I'm not going to say it's no effort because that is not true. If you want to do a [00:08:00] really good webinar, then there is absolutely effort to put in and work to put in. However, Compared to maybe doing a challenge, compared to doing calls, compared to other things, actually doing a webinar is fairly low barrier. So you don't have to have a whole lot of, like I said, fancy tech or anything like that. The fact that I just said that I've been doing my last few in Zoom meetings means you literally just need a Zoom meeting. And then the last one is it works really well as a launch mechanism. The whole idea of, and I'm going to talk about this when I go through the funnel a little bit, the whole idea of a webinar is to launch something to sell and getting people excited and into the The launch or coming to the webinar is a really good method to then launch your thing that you're selling. It also is a really good indicator that someone is interested in your product, because if you've [00:09:00] targeted your webinar right, if you've planned the right webinar with the right title and the right content, the webinar should be the prerequisite to going into your paid product. So let me give you an example. One of the webinars I've done in the past is a webinar that talks about list building. And I think the title was something along the lines of the five steps you need to build your email list fast or something like that. And basically I was taking them through the main five steps that you need to cover to To launch and build an email list. And then the course I was selling on the back of that was the course that went into detail and showed them how to do all of the five steps. So the webinar was introducing the fact of, do they even want to build an email list and are they interested in knowing the steps it takes. If they're signing up to that webinar, then Obviously they want to build their email list. So it's a perfect prerequisite to then introducing a course that's going to [00:10:00] help them do the same thing. You could do a webinar that talks about engagement and list building and your course could be around how to use chatbots. So again, that's a perfect prerequisite. Someone who's signing up to a webinar to find out about list building and engagement on social media would be the right person who potentially could buy a course on using chatbots for those reasons. Also, it could be a webinar for, I've had people do webinars for nutrition, for sleep, and some of them could be that they introduce a concept of how to help your child sleep, and then the paid thing is they get to work with them one to one, or they get to work with them on a, a kind of Group basis or something like that. So, like I said, it should be the prerequisite to the thing. It should be naturally people signing up to the webinars should be the perfect fit for your actual product that [00:11:00] you're selling. So are they still working? Are webinars still working? Now, I've been around a long time in this game, and. I have watched webinars come into the world and first discovered them and was like, wow, what is this wizardry? And I have seen them be brilliant and then not be so brilliant. And now we're leveling off. When the pandemic hit, webinars were a real thing. Everyone, the webinar signup rate was higher. The show up rate was higher. It was really effective because everyone was online. They had no other choice but to do stuff online. That lasted for about a year and a bit, and then it started to decline and it really dropped. The webinar show up rate on a good webinar would be around 40 to 50%. That would be a really good webinar show up rate. I've seen it drop as low as 20 percent show up rate. And that I think is the kind of downside now of having webinars come along or be around for so long and [00:12:00] also I think that's a lot to do with we did a lot online and we don't want to do as much online, but that doesn't mean they don't work. They do work. They are awesome. You've just got to bear in mind when you're promoting your webinar. When you're trying to get people on it that you are going to have to work a bit harder to get them to show up live. And you do need to give value in that webinar. Obviously you're not going to give them all of the steps. And this is one mistake I see people make is that they just give people way too much content. And therefore they're walking away with a million things to do. They don't need a call, so they don't need the membership or they don't need a one to one call with you. But you do need to give them some value so that they don't feel like they've just been sold out for an hour. Because I have been on a webinar. I was actually on a webinar that was two and a half hours long and it almost got a bit like I couldn't get off the webinar because I was like, when are you actually going to deliver some content? They literally just sold the entire time [00:13:00] and that feels horrible. So you do want to make sure that you're delivering some content. So they come away feeling like, great, I haven't wasted my hour, even if they don't buy. And that's my aim. When I do any webinar, my aim is to give people an awesome session with me so that they have things that they can actually learn and take away. Hopefully though, they actually think I want to take this further and they have the opportunity to do that. The other thing or a couple of other points I wrote down that I wanted to address while I'm talking about webinars is talking about the fact of you hate selling. And I get that. I get that this is one of the things that people really struggle with is to not come across as salesy when doing a webinar. And that's really important to me. But when I take you through the structure of a webinar, you'll see, and I'm only going to give you the headline of it, but you will see that actually the selling takes place throughout the whole thing, but it's done in plain sight. So it's not like a bait and switch where you're like, come and do this thing. And then boom, you're just selling all the [00:14:00] things, do them. The selling should be very conscious and it should almost be throughout the whole thing, but done in a way. And where the way I teach it is it's done in a way that doesn't feel like you're selling or that you're being sleazy or horrible. So if you think to yourself, I hate selling webinars, aren't going to work for me. That's not true. The way I teach webinars is that you can demonstrate value, you can demonstrate that you're good at what you do, and then you can present the offer in a way that doesn't feel horrible. So, if you think you hate selling, then webinars won't work, that's just not true. The other thing I see a lot is, what if my list is small? Well, I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't matter, because it does. I did an episode a few back ago, which was episode 368 that talked about webinar stats and launch stats. And you will know, as some of the stuff I've already said in this one, that the expected turn up rate is between 20 percent and 50 percent if it's not great or really good. And I also give you [00:15:00] examples in that episode and we'll link to it in the show notes of what you can expect from your email list to sign up to your webinar. It doesn't mean though that it's not worth doing a webinar if you've got a small list. It's still a really lovely way for you to interact with that list, for you to meet those people, for you to get on a call with them in a group setting. And actually the beauty of having a small list and having small numbers is that you can get to perfect your webinar style, you can get to practice, you can get to really give it a go before your list gets bigger. And therefore you're doing it in front of more people. One of my very first webinars I ever did, like eight, nine, 10 years ago, whenever it was, I had one person on the webinar. So if you're sat there thinking, Oh man, that would be a nightmare. Yeah, it did suck a bit, but I've done it and I had to start there so that I can have the numbers that I have now. But what was great is I got to perfect my skill. I got to really test out [00:16:00] some of the things that I liked on doing the webinar in front of a very small audience. If you're sat there thinking my list is too small, hopefully that has dispelled that myth and you are going to give it a go. What I want to use our time for the rest of this episode is two things. I want to talk you through the funnel process, just really top level to give you an idea. And then I want to talk you through the breakdown of the webinar, but I won't be going into detail because that is a lot of content, the process for launching. In an ideal world should be pre launch phase. Launch phase, live webinar, sales phase. Let me briefly take you through those phases. The pre launch phase is before you mention anything. Before you mention you're doing a webinar, before you mention you've got something to sell. And the key thing about these phases is it needs to be very intentional that you only focus on the bit that I'm talking about. If [00:17:00] you start saying, I'm going to be selling this soon, or I've got a webinar soon, or you'll start confusing the message. For me, it's really important that In the pre launch phase, I want you to create content that gets...