Marketing
Webinars That People Do Not Regret Attending
The webinar has a bad reputation because most are thinly veiled pitches. Here is how to run one worth an hour.
Teach something genuinely useful
The registrant gave you their time expecting to learn, and the fastest way to lose them is to bait them with education and switch to a pitch. A webinar people value delivers real, standalone value — something they could act on even if they never buy from you.
This feels counterintuitive to teams under pressure to sell, but the trust you build by being genuinely useful converts far better than a hard pitch ever will. Generosity is the strategy.
Respect the format's constraints
Webinars are a difficult medium: attention wanders, the audience is invisible, and a monologue quickly loses people. Design around this with a tight structure, frequent interaction, and a pace that assumes people are half-distracted. A great webinar is engineered, not improvised.
Keep it shorter than you think it should be. A focused thirty minutes that holds attention beats a rambling ninety that people abandon at the halfway mark.
The follow-up is where value converts
Most of a webinar's business impact happens afterward, in the follow-up. Send the recording, answer the questions you did not get to, and route engaged attendees to the right next step. Fail to follow up and you have entertained people to no purpose.
Track attendance and engagement in your CRM so the follow-up can be tailored: the person who stayed the whole time and asked a question is a very different lead from the one who dropped off after five minutes.