New Report Shows How Best To Pitch a Webinar [Infographic]

— February 22, 2017

Why do you see more webinars opportunities in your email every day?

What would you put in your first webinar?

Could you use webinars to pitch to your leads?

A free webinar is always a pitch, so take the time to design it like one. Build, test and adjust timings, content segment lengths and language you use.

The Perfect Webinar

The number of webinars is increasing. The new report by ClickMeeting, a leading webinar platform, that analyzed over 550,000 webinars. Over half of attendees engage in different ways and engagement is the first step to conversion.

Anyone watching a webinar is making a massive commitment of time. The amount of useful information in most webinars could be compressed onto one screen that takes 30 seconds or less to read, yet the host expects you to sit there for an hour or more.

So the perfect webinar is only 30 seconds? No, the perfect webinar is chock-full of structured, useful and actionable information. So full that attendees want more so when you offer a paid opportunity, they snatch at it.

Your pitch needs to be presented as an opportunity to work with you instead of you selling something they can quite happily do without.

How to Improve Your Webinar Pitching Technique

Your webinar pitch needs to be as convincing as your real-world pitch. Would you listen to a one hour pitch from someone at a conference?

No, and neither would anyone else, yet most sixty minute webinars are elaborately padded and wrapped selling pitches. The presenter spends thirty minutes boasting about what he’s done and who he knows. He then describes some secret sauce recipe for success for ten minutes, before launching into a twenty-minute pitch.

Yes, a twenty-minute pitch.

Most five minute pitches are too long, even when the presenter and audience are in the same room.

Change the Timings

Your webinar must be focused around your leads’ requirements. The Clickmeeting report tells us that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are the best days to hold your webinar, and between 10 am and 2 pm is the best time.

You want your attendees to love you, to think you are the best thing to happen to them since they got their first kiss.

Ditch the ‘30 boasting – 10 useful info – 20 selling pitch’ webinar format.

Every audience member is busy and will resent every wasted minute they spend attending your webinar. Resentful attendees don’t buy.

Experiment with a short ten-minute introduction, forty minutes of useful info and a ten-minute buying opportunity webinar format – ’10 intro – 40 useful info – 10 buying opportunity’.

This kind of timing shows respect for your attendees’ time.

If you have less than forty minutes of content, then make your webinar thirty minutes. The infographic tells us that the average length is 54 minutes, but you need to take the webinar tool and make it work for you. Shorter and more intensive webinars may work better for your audience. Test, measure and adjust your webinar timings to achieve maximum conversions.

Ditch the Intro

‘Big I Am’ pitches don’t work in real-life networking situations, so why would a ten minute ‘I Am’ intro work for a webinar?

Start with a question instead. You don’t want oral answers, but you do want each attendee to answer it in their head. Your question should be a restatement of the problem. What problem? The one that every attendee is hoping your webinar will solve for him or her.

If your webinar is about stopping roses wilting in the heat, then your question could be, “Do your roses fall over like wet cardboard tubes in the summer heat?”

Even better than a single question would be to ask three questions. Three is the magic number. This structure is called a tricolon and is very powerful when you want to make an impact.

“Do your roses fall over like wet cardboard tubes in the summer heat? Do they look like something the cat rejected? Do your rose stems collapse on the ground like an exhausted dog?”

Another example of the tricolon is shown below.

If you are trying to help attendees increase email conversions, your question could be, “Do you ever wonder what happens to all the unread emails you send? Do they still exist on a web server somewhere? Will archaeologists in one hundred years’ time wonder about the strange arrangements of 0’s and 1’s on a computer hard disk that were once your emails?

Give More Info

You need to plan on conveying much more in depth knowledge to your webinar attendees if you are allowing forty minutes for the information section.

You might have forty minutes worth of knowledge, but talking and presenting slides for that length of time will have attendees leaving like kids coming out of school. You need to structure it in 5-10 minute segments with questions and other audience-engaging activities every few minutes.

Buying Opportunity

Selling doesn’t work anymore. As soon as most people hear you start your selling pitch, they hit their mouse buttons and are gone.

You cannot sell anything to someone who is less than entirely convinced it will solve their problem. Use the forty minute info section to convince people of your expertise, knowledge and reputation. The final ten minutes is where you offer attendees a chance to work with you. Let the decision be theirs. Let them buy into your offer.

You can make the offer more attractive by limiting its availability to the first ten to sign up. Put anyone else onto a waiting list.

At the end of your webinar, you should ask for feedback, which will help you to improve your next presentation. The average participant in the Clickmeeting 2016 webinar survey gave a score of 4.58 out of a maximum 5.0 for their webinar, so those who stay to the end award a high score.

Your Great Webinar Pitch

A webinar gives you an excellent opportunity to discuss a painful problem with your leads. It’s up to you what you make of it. One reason webinars have such a high conversion factor is that attendees have invested so much time watching them. If you follow the ideas here, you will make more profit from each webinar, and even those who don’t buy will be happy to attend your next offering.

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