7 Webinar Mistakes You Want to Avoid

A webinar may seem like it is simple enough to throw together and get great results from it. But you'd be surprised at how many mistakes people can make. When you are doing your webinars make sure that you avoid these 7 mistakes to ensure success!

1.  Not doing enough preparation - Prepare, prepare, prepare. You can never do enough preparations for a webinar. It's like studying for a big test or getting ready for a presentation in school. The more preparations you make, the smoother it will go. Make sure that you take the time to learn every little piece of the technology so that after you make your presentation you can answer any question that is thrown your way. If you know your stuff you will have an easier time selling the product to them.

2.  Not using the information collected from the webinar

Some people don't understand how valuable the information is that you attain from the attendees of your webinar. The information that you collect can be used to qualify leads. Beyond the overall interest in session you can find out if they attended or not, how long they attended, and you have their information from registration. Lastly if you have poll questions, or a Q&A portion you can use their answers to qualify leads. 

3.  Not allowing questions - I think that this one should go without saying, but not allowing questions in a webinar is a big no-no. You need to be interactive with the attendees, and answer any of their questions. Doing this will increase the value of your webinar, if it is a large webinar you may even consider having another person with you as a host exclusively answering questions.

4.  Too long - You do not want to stretch your webinar longer then it needs to be. The important thing in a webinar is getting the information out there in a timely manner. If you are stretching your ideas and repeating yourself on every single point then people are going to lose interest. Even if you think it seems like it is going to be too short, you should always take into account the importance of the Q&A at the end of the presentation. By factoring in time for the Q&A you will be engaging with your audience and that could be more helpful then some of the presentation content.

5.  Requiring too much information - Obviously, the goal of a webinar is to get information out there about some a service or product to generate possible leads. When you register for a webinar the standard requirements are your name, email address, and company name. Nobody should have any problem with that, but when they are asking for more personal information such as your address, it can deter a fair amount of people for registering for the webinar.

6.  Too much of a sales pitch - When you are putting together your content you want to make sure that you aren't too over the top with your sales pitch. If you are investing too much time in selling then they will end up not listening to you and might not come back to your future webinars. You want your webinars to be education based selling. The information that is providing in webinars should be so valuable that it will be doing the selling for you. Showing how good your products are and how to utilize all of the features they provide.

7.  Cramming information into slides - If you've ever attended a bad webinar, this is most likely one of the biggest factors that lead to its demise. There is nothing worse then trying to read a slide that is covered with information, it makes your viewers lose interest and it takes way too long to get through the slide. You should set a limit of having one big idea per slide with a maximum of three specific points to support it. Using different graphics will do a much better job of illustrating your ideas then a bunch of text would.