It can be very tempting to start focusing on a webinar itself: the content, the slides, the webinar presenter. But if you don’t set a clear goal for your webinar, it will probably fail. So, how do you set a good and clear goal for your webinar? The answer lies in your funnel.

The purpose of a webinar

The question you have to ask first is: “why do we want to organize this webinar?” In other words, what is the eventual goal of our effort? When Online Seminar asks her clients these questions, we regularly get general answers like:

• “We want to share information about our product.”
• “We want more customers.”

This goal setting for your webinar is clearly too vague. The result of vague goals is that you also get an unclear outcome. And as a result, you will get the impression that your webinar “did not work”.

Webinar funnel

This is important to realize. A webinar is often part of a process or series of consecutive actions that focus on a goal: increase conversions and drive more sales. This is also called a “funnel” in the marketing world.

A webinar funnel focuses on convincing potential customers and attracting them through the medium of a webinar. To make your webinar funnel is a success, website visitors provide their emails upon signing up for the webinar. You have to follow up with the confirmation email and after you have held the webinar you’ll send the recorded version to all email addresses. And these email addresses can be used to send sales promotions. Finally, some of your webinar attendees are ready to buy and you’ll have your sale or predefined conversion.

Evaluation

Suppose your goal for the webinar is having webinar participants scheduling an appointment with the sales team right after they have watched the webinar. And success is defined by the number of accounts opened or subscriptions started.

Your goal is to host a webinar for 150 participants and get 25 appointments out of it (one out of six). Eventually you predict this will result in 7 customers. That’s a 4.6% conversion rate from your webinar attendants and almost 30% conversion rate from sales leads.

The clear benefit of having a well defined funnel is that during your evaluation you clearly see which part of the funnel work well and which part has room for improvement. Was it the invitation process for the webinar, or your landing page design? maybe the used CTA’s didn’t resonate enough? The more specific you can be, the better you can evaluate your efforts in turning webinar attendees into customers. And the more successful your webinars and thus the whole campaign is.

Additional advantage: clarity for the organisation

By mapping out the entire process in this way, you also ensure that it is clear to everyone within your own organisation what is going to happen. By far the most webinars have the goal that the viewers perform a certain action, but even if you want to transfer knowledge it can’t hurt at all to check if you have succeeded in your intention.

Our advice: always make such a funnel yourself, even if it’s a scribble on the back of a beer mat. This will help you enormously to clarify what you are doing and contributes positively to the final result. But to achieve a final result you do need to organize a webinar yourself! So please do this, and with the Online Seminar Self Service option this is as easy is chips!