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9/29/23

6 Most Common Webinar Mistakes You Must Avoid

By:

Rachel Meyrowitz

A successful webinar requires more than an interesting topic and an engaging presenter. Certain common mistakes can mean the difference between acquiring new leads and loyal consumers or falling flat with your audience.

Once you know what not to do, you’ll be better equipped to maximize the value your events provide attendees. We’ve broken down the six most common webinar mistakes and how to avoid them so you’ll have the knowledge you need to craft quality content, develop a strategic structure that flows well, and ensure optimal delivery.

1. Poor Technical Setup and Glitches

Some things are out of your control. But with a live webinar, you can’t afford to have your Internet go out or experience audio or video problems. While these issues are easy to fix in automated or on-demand webinars by editing content (just one of the differences between live and pre-recorded webinars), it’s better to prevent technical issues in the first place.

Bad Internet Connection

Bad Internet slows down your webinar and causes buffering. That breaks the flow of the presentation, which quickly becomes annoying both for you and your audience.

How To Avoid It:

Host your webinars as close to your Internet router as possible. If your live webinar will take place in a new location, do a test run of the Internet connection. This ensures your webinar will go off without a glitch, freeze, or connectivity issue that could prove disastrous.

Low Video and Audio Quality

Poor video and audio quality make your webinar hard to understand and enjoy. In tandem, they can give your presentation an amateur and unprofessional vibe.

How To Avoid It:

A top-notch webinar platform like Demio, known for its video and audio quality, can easily fix many of your presentation issues. Whatever solution you choose, always check your audio and video equipment prior to recording or going live, and make adjustments as needed for crisp sound and video quality.

Technical Glitches

Technical glitches hinder your delivery and can cause slides and inserted features to freeze or screens to go black. Microphones with feedback echo and unconnected monitors fail to share content on-screen.

How To Avoid It:

A run-through of your webinar before going live ensures all technical components work as they should. If using a new webinar platform, test out all technical features you’ll need so you’re less likely to run into surprises in real time — and you’ll know what to do if something does go wrong.

Wrong Support

Whether it’s a webinar platform with limited tools or marketing tactics that fail to draw a crowd, the wrong supportive elements will produce a webinar that’s stiff, boring, and poorly structured.

How To Avoid It:

Do your research and play around with your existing tool kit so you know how to apply them correctly. From basic audience interactive tools to more advanced engagement features, the right selection will make your webinars memorable — and have attendees eager to come back for more. Livestorm and other such options offer a suite of tools that can take your webinars to the next level, so explore the market and choose one that meets your needs.

2. Lengthy and Unstructured Content

The goal of your events is to grow your webinar funnel and build a lasting digital presence. If your webinars are jumbled and unstructured or drag on without an enticing call to action (CTA), you won’t see the results you hoped for.

Too Much Information in the Presentation

You obviously don’t want to come across as too salesy, but being too informative while never getting to the point of your presentation is dangerous as well. Too much information overwhelms your audience and takes away from your main message.

How To Avoid It:

While the majority of your webinar presentation should cover your main topic, reserve a small percentage of time for a CTA. Better yet, sprinkle in featured actions throughout the session to break up your main content.

Insufficient Visuals

Your audience needs visuals to stay interested in a webinar and to help them retain the information they’ve learned. Too few visual aids and interactive elements will make your webinar flat and monotonous.

How To Avoid It:

Put your webinar platform to good use by producing eye-catching slides, fun factoids, and other featured actions to showcase key points of your webinar without taking away from the presentation’s core. Rely less on your presenter and chat features to get your message across.

Not Pausing for Questions

It’s understandable you want few lulls in your webinar to prevent dead air and keep the web script moving smoothly. However, failing to pause periodically to ensure your audience is caught up is a grave mistake.

How To Avoid It:

Stop briefly before a change in subject to give attendees a moment to send in their questions. Doing so builds a healthy rapport with your attendees and ensures everyone is up to speed and understands what you discussed. To keep the event moving, consider saving audience questions for a Q&A session at the end.

A Lack of Storytelling

Your audience wants your webinar to be relatable, so if you don’t bring in a few human elements, your broader explanations will fall flat, and your event attendance will wane in turn. If your webinars repeatedly miss the mark with your audience, your delivery and lack of storytelling could be to blame. Successful storytelling engages audience members by increasing dopamine in their brains and making them more focused on what you have to say.

How To Avoid It:

Speak to your audience casually, as if you’re conversing with a friend. Throw in some anecdotes and storytelling elements that are relevant to what you’re covering. In doing so, you’ll earn greater trust from your audience as you show you understand them on a personal level. As a bonus, they’ll be more likely to retain what you’ve said.

3. Lack of Audience Engagement

If you only speak to your audience and don’t interact with them, it’s more difficult to get your point across in your webinars. Whether you’re considering webinars or some other virtual event to boost your brand awareness, audience engagement is key to achieving your goals.

Overlooking the Audience’s Interest

A webinar that neglects your audience’s pain points won’t meet their needs. That lack of relevance will turn off registrants and can lead to a loss of potential leads.

How To Avoid It:

Research your demographic and what they desire from your brand, product, or service prior to crafting a script for your webinar. When live, invite attendees to share the stage so you gather valuable input that further expands your knowledge of their interests.

Not Enough Valuable Information

Generalities that your audience can find on your website or other social media pages (e.g., LinkedIn) should have a minimal presence in your webinar. If your content contains little of value , you’re wasting your audience’s time, and they won’t stick around.

How To Avoid It:

Make sure your sessions contain information that your audience can only learn by attending. This could include featured actions, discounts, promos, and time-sensitive CTAs, which leads us to our next point …

Overlooking Webinar Tool Interactive Features

Your webinar platform should have interactive features you can easily employ to connect with your audience. If you sideline them, your webinars will feel like just another lecture or meeting and won’t be as exciting or rewarding. As a result, your audience will grow bored and leave early.

How To Avoid It:

Focus your webinar around how you can engage with your audience, starting with adopting a webinar platform that possesses interactive features relevant to your goals. Demio includes handouts, featured actions, polls, surveys, private and public chat, and audience spotlight (in addition to email marketing tools) to interact with your audience and make them part of your presentation.

4. Overlooking Post-Webinar Interactions

Your webinar isn’t over when the session ends. Your audience is pumped and motivated by the content they just viewed, so there’s no better time to follow up and continue the conversation. If you’re not interacting post-webinar, you’re losing valuable leads.

Neglecting Attendees

If you neglect your attendees after the event ends, you lose the interest of those who were on the fence about your brand, and it’ll cost more time and money to bring them back. Even worse is failing to follow up with attendees who were highly intrigued by your brand and not catching them when their interest was at its peak. You’ll leave your audience feeling unvalued if you disappear as soon as your webinar ends.

How To Avoid It:

Send auto-response thank you emails immediately to your attendees as soon as the webinar is over. Include a survey, poll, or other CTA to further their investment in your brand. This moves your audience in the right direction as they make their way toward their next buying decision. Email marketing is one of the most effective tactics to foster post-webinar engagement. You can also reach out to webinar attendees personally if they had questions that you were unable to get to during your presentation.

5. Inadequate Marketing and Promotion

At its core, the goal of your webinar is to increase brand awareness and promote a product or service to your end consumer. That being said, you’re not simply creating a long sales pitch, nor does it mean your webinar will sell itself. If your attendance is low or you’re filling seats but not closing sales, you need to work on a few things.

Using an Unclear CTA

A CTA should clearly tell your audience what you’d like them to do. If it’s long-winded or confusing, your audience won’t respond the way you want them to (if at all).

How To Avoid It:

Make sure your main CTA is understandable and easy to follow. It’s wise to include it at the end of your webinar as you wrap up and tie off loose ends, then highlight it again in your post-webinar interactions.

Pushing Too Hard for a Sale

As we mentioned earlier, a webinar should be neither too informative nor too salesy or revolve around sales pitches. If your presentation is packed with promotions for your brand or constant pushes to make a sale, your audience won’t stick around.

How To Avoid It:

Go over your webinar script and mark all the areas where a sales pitch occurs. If you can’t reword the content to make it less salesy, remove it. Given the choice, your webinar should be more informative than sales-heavy; you can include promos, discounts, sales pitches, and more in your later demonstrations, featured actions, and post-webinar interactions.

6. Ignoring Performance Metrics

Every click of a link or response to a CTA from your audience reveals valuable information about their intentions and the value of your webinar. So, if you don’t pay attention, you’ll miss out on the best ways to promote to the very demographic you serve.

Not Tracking Webinar Success

If you don’t know what CTA efforts convert and which interactive tools your audience responds to most, you won’t be able to craft webinars that focus on what your attendees appreciate. As a result, your events will see lower attendance rates and lead generation.

How To Avoid It:

Employ the analysis tools your webinar platform provides to determine the buyer intent of your audience members. You can track who showed up compared to how many people registered, who was engaged and for how long, and even what elements of your webinar most impressed or turned away your audience.

Learn what drives your audience and keeps their attention throughout your session to craft better content with each live webinar you host. Additionally, you can find software solutions for automated webinars that possess robust analytic performance tools as well.

Craft Impressive Webinars Today

Knowing what to avoid when creating webinars helps you produce high-quality events consistently. We’ve outlined six common mistakes to guide your efforts, but be sure to consider your events from all angles to ensure a stellar audience experience every time.

One important element is the webinar platform you use. Demio has the features and interactive tools you need to make every webinar successful. Be it live or automated events, Demio has you covered, and with an easy layout and no downloads for attendees, it’s easy for everyone to adopt. You can have your next webinar ready in minutes.

Get started for free or book a demo to learn more about how you can build better webinars than ever.

Frequently Asked Questions About Webinar Mistakes

What’s something I should avoid doing in a webinar?

You should avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information. Keep the content focused, concise, and relevant to the topic at hand.

How can technical glitches be prevented during a webinar?

Preventing technical glitches involves a combination of preparation, testing, communication and having contingency plans in place. By being proactive and ready for potential challenges, you can minimize disruptions and ensure a smooth webinar experience.

What are some effective strategies for promoting webinars?

Here are several strategies to promote your webinars successfully:

Create compelling content
Leverage email marketing
Utilize social media
Leverage partnerships and collaborations
Create landing pages on your website
Run paid advertising campaigns
Encourage referrals and sharing
Offer early bird or limited-time discounts

How can I minimize webinar challenges?

You can minimize webinar challenges through preparation, effective communication, and proactive measures to handle potential issues. Some strategies that can help with this include: