12 Things You Didn’t Know About Webinars That Will Blow Your Mind
- Updated on: 2019-03-25
- Read original article here
Ah, yes…the webinar. That online seminar that we know so well. The slides. The monotonous speaker. The boring topics. Pretty much sums up my webinars, at least!
And yet, webinars continue to thrive. We all know the reasons why. They’re inexpensive. Easily accessible. Relatively quick. Some people love them and some don’t. But there’s no question that webinars are here to stay. In fact, 73 percent of B2B marketers and sales leaders they say that a webinar is the best way to generate high-quality leads and 57 percent of them say they will continue to create webinars in 2018.
These facts were evident in GoToWebinar’s recently released 2017 Big Book of Webinar Stats. The webinar service provider studied 351,000 online events conducted on their platform from over 16,000 of their customers. So what did they find? If your company does webinars get ready to be blown away…
1 – 61 percent of webinars are done for . They can be a great lead generation and educational tool for your customers, just so long as your customers are businesses.
2 – The best include lists (10 ways or 101 ideas), or the words “how to”, “new” or “trends.”
3 – Their average customer does about per year. Remember – these are companies that are choosing webinars as a marketing strategy over other options. But twice a month seems reasonable. My company does about four per month.
4 – When it comes to marketing, 73 percent of a webinar’s attendees ultimately come from . A website listing and some search engine optimization is helpful but let’s admit it: e-mail is far from dead.
5 – You’re going to get the most sign-ups (69 percent) the event with a third coming the actual day of the webinar. So focus your marketing on the 24-72 hours beforehand.
6 – However…15 percent of webinar registrants sign up as much as three to four weeksahead of the event, so don’t be afraid to get the word out a month early.
7 – Most people register for a webinar on a . Not sure why, but your marketing (and event day) should coordinate around that. Don’t worry if you can’t make that happen – Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays aren’t that far behind for registrants. But target your marketing between 8AM and 10AM (for the recipient) because that’s when the most people sign up.
10 – The most of a webinar is…drumroll please…60 to 90 minutes. Really? I thought shorter is sweeter but GoToWebinar found that people don’t mind longer online events. 60-minute webinars attract 2.1 times more registrations than 30-minute webinars, and 90-minute webinars attract 4.6 times as many. Over half of their webinars fall between 45 to 60 minutes.
11 – The vast majority of marketing webinars have . If you fall into this range, you’re doing fine.
12 – Actually it how many people attend your live event. 84% of B2B customers opt for replays over live webinars. So make sure you archive your webinars for future viewing.
I’d like to add a personal 13: I’ve found that more and more of our attendees like discussions rather than one person shuffling through slides. A roundtable. A group conversation. Maybe that’s related to the explosion in podcast popularity. Or maybe it’s because people like to listen when they’re on the go and don’t want to be stuck staring at a screen. Whatever, if you’re doing online events this year you should consider this change in format.
OK…mind blown. So is there any reason why we can’t make our online events successful in 2018?
