Today I have a very practical podcast episode for you in which I’m going to tell you how to structure a webinar for great conversion.
There’s no ONE size fits all, ONE way to do it, ONE specific structure that works for everyone. However, I’m going to give you some really great starting points so that you can ensure your webinar does all its jobs to maximise conversion.
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
Nail Your Niche free training: tashcorbin.com/niche
Let’s dive in!
If you’ve been following me for more than 15 minutes, you probably already know that I absolutely love and adore webinars. I think they are a brilliant lead magnet, and an amazing opportunity to create a connection with your audience, maximise conversion, really work on your list growth, and get feedback on your offers, your messaging, what people’s resistance points are, and more.
I also love webinars because they’re so low cost and it’s really easy to do in startup. You don’t need a website, you don’t need a really fancy mailing list platform, and you can use low cost or free tools. When it comes to hosting a webinar, you can use the Zoom Meetings option, which in most cases is under around $20 per month.
Running a webinar is low cost and simple to do, and you don’t have to get everything sorted, pre-recorded and edited up in the background beforehand.
It allows for great connection and therefore great conversion.
These days, when I’m launching my programs and promoting my offers, a webinar still converts way better than any of my other lead magnets.
Generally, my webinars convert anywhere between 4% and 8% of the people who sign up into paying clients of what I’m offering
If the 94% of people who don’t convert on the webinar join my mailing list, chances are, they’re going to convert on the NEXT webinar or the NEXT launch.
It’s a great way for me to grow, nurture and convert my audience all in one.
Webinars are sexy and I love them so much.
When it comes to structuring a webinar, we want to ensure that it’s doing all of its jobs.
Webinars have multiple jobs in your business and in your content strategy. We want to make sure that we do all of those.
The first job is maximising reach.
In order for a webinar to maximise reach, it needs to be a topic that is juicy, tangible and practical for your audience.
In most cases, the topic of the webinar speaks to the symptom – what your audience thinks the problem is or thinks the solution is.
For example, if your audience thinks that what they need is more followers on Facebook, and you know that they do need more followers on Facebook but they also need to convert and make sure that they’re niched so that they can attract in their ideal audience, you might do a webinar on how to grow your Facebook audience. In the webinar, you’re not just delivering how to grow your Facebook audience, you’re also delivering on making sure that it converts AND that the growth is the right type of person.
When it comes to structuring your webinar, we need to bridge a gap between what people THINK is the problem and the solution, and what we KNOW is the real transformation that needs to occur for them to get the outcome that they want.
Let’s face it, people might think that they need more followers on their Facebook page, but in most cases, they want that extra following for a reason. They want more followers on their Facebook page because they think that’s going to solve their issues with the number of sales they’re making or their income level. The real transformation that they’re looking for is not simply getting more followers on their Facebook page, it’s actually something that is a lot deeper.
This leads in really nicely to the TURN process.
The TURN process is a four-step process through which we take people from curious to converted.
The TURN process stands for:
Think
Understand
Real need
Next steps
Think is the start of my webinar structure – making sure that we are on the same page about what the person thinks the problem is and what they think the solution is. I deliver on solving that problem and delivering that solution.
In the example of getting Facebook followers on your page, you would use How to get followers on your Facebook page as both the title AND the topic you will be covering in the early stages of the webinar.
Give your people what they want because if you just keep yelling at them that that’s not what they need, chances are, their eyes will glaze over and they’ll go and work with someone else.
People come to me all the time asking how to get more followers on Facebook. I’ve tried to explain to them that they don’t need more followers, what they do need is high conversion, high connection strategies. But most people will just immediately shut that down and claim that they do in fact need more followers on their Facebook page first.
Instead of telling people that they don’t need that, I explain to them how to do it, and then explain to them how to maximise the results in achieving that outcome.
Generally, I have the topic and the early parts of my webinars speaking to what my audience THINKS the problem is and THINKS the solution is, and I deliver on that.
That’s the T of the TURN process.
U stands for understand.
Understand is where I help people understand how to solve the problem that they think that they have, but also I’m planting the seed of helping them understand that it goes deeper.
It’s not just about getting followers on your Facebook page, there’s a thing that you want that to achieve for you – you want followers on your Facebook page because you think that that’s going to get you more sales.
Not all followers are created equal. If we’re going to get you more followers on your Facebook page, why don’t we get you more followers who are high quality, in your niche, ready, willing and able to take action and buy from you? Let’s engage with that audience in a way that maximises conversion. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
The U stands for understand – understand how to solve what they think the problem is, but also understand that it goes deeper.
If we want the big outcome that we think that that’s going to get us, we need to ensure that we understand all the pieces that go into creating that outcome.
The R stands for the real need or the real transformation.
The R is where you present in your webinar that if your audience wants the big outcome, it’s not just a matter of getting more followers on Facebook (because let’s face it, you can buy 1000 followers on your Facebook page for $20 through Fiverr).
If all you need is Facebook followers, then you can get those.
The thing is, they don’t just want Facebook followers for followers’ sake. They want Facebook followers because they want to make more sales, they want an audience and for that audience to be the right audience.
What we do in the R phase of the webinar – what the real transformation is – is we actually present what the combinations of things that go together to achieve that bigger goal are.
If someone wants more Facebook followers because they want to make more sales, then actually we need a combination of strategies here.
We need to:
1. Understand what your niche is really clearly.
2. Grow your Facebook audience through content that speaks to the value proposition of your work, and a message that deeply resonates with that specific audience.
3. Ensure that if we’re going to have that Facebook following turn into paying clients, we’re presenting them with an offer that is compelling.
4. Find the marketing strategies and techniques that we can use to maximise growth, new audience members, reach to existing audience and their engagement on your Facebook page.
Can you see how by bringing this combination of things together over an extended period of time, we’re not just going to achieve extra reach and extra followers on your Facebook page, we’re going to achieve more sales, more paying clients and high-quality audience?
You can see how that is the R stage of the webinar because we’re not just talking about the surface level thing that people think the problem is or the solution that they need, we’re also presenting to them a depth of understanding of what that real transformation is going to take.
Then the N of the TURN process is to present the next steps.
The next step from the webinar is for us to work together.
You present your offer on how you can go deeper with that real transformation with your audience, and how you can support them through that process.
You can see here with this webinar structure, you’re meeting your audience’s needs.
You’re not just discrediting those needs and going against what they think they need, you’re delivering on that AND you’re giving them tangible, practical strategies to solve the problem and address the solution that they’re looking for.
In the process, you’re also helping to open your audience’s eyes to the lightbulb moment or that big aha of understanding that in order to get Z, they also need X and Y.
Then you present your offer as one of the ways that they can bridge that gap.
Some people will come to your webinar and only need to get more Facebook followers. They get good conversion and engagement but they just need some practical ways to get better reach.
They leave that webinar really happy – they don’t need to buy the next step from you because they’re already sorted with the rest of that transformation.
But there is a percentage of people who come along to that webinar and realise what the bigger issue is for them and, if it’s the right fit for them, they’ll see that working with you further will help them to get where they need to go – not just with growing their Facebook page but also with making sales from it.
It’s a really beautiful process that is very value-laden, and you don’t have to hold back on the information that you’re giving away (due to fear of taking away the value of the paid offer) because the webinar presents information and the next steps is actually embedding the transformation.
It’s a beautiful bridging process that not only achieves reach through a great topic that’s speaking at the symptom level, it also increases connection and that engagement with your audience.
You’re taking them through a really beautiful process, you’re meeting them where they are, helping them with what they think they need helo with, and you’re also getting it to do its job in terms of conversion and lead generation for working with you further because for the right people, the next steps are exactly the steps that they’re looking for.
Therefore they jump in and join in, or they sign up for a sales conversation or whatever it might be.
When I present this as a structure for a webinar, I want to say to you that there is no one perfect webinar structure. There is no one perfect number of testimonials (I don’t actually use testimonials in webinars). There is no one perfect webinar title structure, one perfect sequence of things that you say and you have to ask people, and in most cases where people are teaching that one perfect structure, it’s just that they’ve found a structure that works for them and their audience so they think it’s going to apply to every person and every audience and every provider. In most cases, that’s just not true.
We need to make sure that we craft webinars that really meet our audience where they are, help them achieve that short term goal with the information that they need, and then present what the real transformation is – that deeper piece of the puzzle – and the next logical steps to working with you.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of ways to be able to do that.
A couple of quick myth-busting side notes here:
I know that it’s very tempting to fall into the idea that you have to get people to say ‘yes’ six times, so you’re constantly asking people to give you a ‘yes’ in the comments.
This is old school neuro-linguistic programming – it’s a very masculine-oriented sales strategy.
Just ask questions that get people engaging with you, but don’t feel like you need to make people jump through the ‘yes’ loop.
I get eye-rolly whenever I go to a webinar and I have to continuously type ‘yes’ in the chatbox before they even get to the content.
Just get to the content as quickly as possible.
What I generally do when I’m asking questions on a webinar, is I ask my audience not to just give me a ‘yes’, but to tell me where they’re at, what they want to get out of the webinar, what their biggest struggle is with the topic and how it shows up for them.
What that does is it creates so much connection, because people feel seen and they feel heard.
As you continue to deliver webinars, you’ll get more practise at asking quality questions and engaging your audience, but don’t feel like you need to do the checkbox kind of structure where you’re really buying into that masculine structure of setting people up and then swooping in as the hero and saviour with your paid product.
This is a very feminine, connection and value-laden way of structuring a webinar.
Sometimes people are trying to push square pegs of masculine webinar strategies and checkboxes into the round hole of a feminine, value-laden process that we’re taking people through, and it just doesn’t fit together.
The best advice I have for you on how to structure your webinar so it works well is to PRACTICE!
Don’t feel like you need to force it.
When it comes to growing a webinar and getting your webinars working well, the best advice I have for you is to practice.
Run your webinar… then run it again… then run it again…
You are going to get better at delivering that webinar, understanding where people get stuck, answering people’s questions, juggling the chatbox and the slides and remembering what you’ve got to say, learning how to speak without a script so it doesn’t sound so stilted, as well as really mastering, nailing and scaling the webinar promotion piece, because you need to learn how to start getting that webinar appealing to colder and colder audiences as you continue to promote over and over again.
Generally, when I’m working with people in startup, we run the same webinar three months in a row.
The first time is just getting all of those firsts ticked off and running it, giving it a go and seeing how it goes.
The second time is process improvement – how to get more organic leads coming to that webinar, and how to deliver that webinar in a much more structured way where you’re feeling confident with it.
Then if it works well the first two times, we start scaling it with some Facebook ads for the third time around.
You don’t need to run a new webinar every month and come up with a fresh webinar topic every single time.
What you need to do is nail your webinar and scale your webinar to colder and colder audiences.
That is how you get a webinar to do its job effectively.
Remember, when it comes to making money and conversion and sales in your business, the money’s in the follow-up.
Don’t forget to follow-up your webinar audiences. Too many times I see people create a webinar, do all of the promo, run the webinar, get one or two leads live on the webinar, send out the recording and then people never hear from them again.
Remember to write a really nice email sequence to follow-up on that webinar.
Usually I write three emails after I’ve sent out the recording (sometimes only two) but I do create a really nice follow-up process that ensures that people have the information that they need, maximise the number of people who watch the recording, and maximise the conversion that I get from that webinar.
One thing that I do want to say about webinars, and it’s my extra special juicy freebie for you today, is that the best webinars are hyper-specific to your niche. They aren’t broad-brush webinars that could be helpful to anyone.
A really hyper niche webinar that speaks to the tangible practical issues that your audience is facing is going to maximise not only the signup rate but also the conversions.
It makes it so much easier for you to structure your webinars as well because you’re speaking to a much more refined and narrowed audience.
My free resource for you today is my Nail Your Niche training.
It is available for you anytime, all you need to do is grab it at tashcorbin.com/niche.
If you have any lightbulb moments or questions following this podcast episode, make sure you come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know that you’ve been reading episode number 249 and let’s continue the conversation over in the community.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
