5 lessons learnt from hosting my first webinar
I hosted my first webinar…and there were lessons
I don’t like being in front of a camera. I feel to be able to tell the story, I should be the one with the power button — behind the camera.
With the migration of our daily lives — work and personal, online — I had to come to the front of the camera. This time — Zoom.
Even though I wasn’t the facilitator, for instance, I still have to introduce the facilitator and talk to the people that took their time to register and attending your webinar.
That’s not a way to respect your customers.
To cut to the chase — I’m now liking the front of the camera.
How the GRC webinar went down…
It took us about two weeks to plan and run the webinar publicity. Our targets were our customers — the Insurers in Africa.
That’s a B2B scary thing. And it doesn’t get any easier when it’s a niche-niche B2B space — Insurance (Insurtech).
This piece is part of my learning to organize the webinar. This was my first organized webinar. I learnt some lessons and think there are valuable lessons here for a first time organizer.
The blessings of a PM…
As a product marketer, your company brand is your responsibility. If you work in a startup where resources and time are essential commodities that are in short supply, then you’ve got to do whatever it takes.
Guaranteed, you’ll make mistake/mistakes along the way learning what works and what doesn’t.
You would be lucky if there are playbooks that you can just edit to fit your situation. If not, it’s now your responsibility to create the playbook — refine, reproduce and share.
Side note: your job as a PM in a B2B company is to drive lead signups, nurture users and ensure your company brand is forever in their faces and heart.
The Webinar Lessons…
- Be biasedly focused: When we decided to have this webinar, the goal was to have 50 attendees. Now, to achieve this, we need >2x of that number to register. As a strategy, I targeted the Insurance companies and people that work in Insurance. Few days to the event, the number we had wasn’t going to give us our 50 attendees. My next action was to target everyone I think would be interested in GRC e,g someone in Cybersecurity etc. The result was not an interesting one — we had many people interested in GRC but are not our guys from Insurance.
- Do what you have to: Biting my tongue with my teeth, I would have to contradict myself a little, but with a reason — to get my targeted number of attendees. On the last day of the webinar, we had 140 interested attendees while 47 attended. Out of this 47, more than 40% were from Insurance. To achieve this, what helped was the one-on-one invitation. I personally invited all of my LinkedIn contacts that work with an Insurance company or own one. I sent them a personalized invite. And the response was warming. We were 3 numbers away from hitting our target.
- Don’t forget your link(s): I forgot mine! If there’s one thing I messed up with was the registration link I sent out. You would probably be wondering ‘how can this be?’. Well, it happened. I created the webinar form using Google form, and at the time it was shared, I enabled a restriction that only allows anyone with my company’s email access. After one week, there were zero registered attendees. You could imagine the disaster and ringworm rumbling my stomach at this discovery. I started from the top again.
- Don’t stress your attendees: Imagine this -🡪 the event was created on Eventbrite, Google form was set up for registration, another event was created on LinkedIn and nobody had the Zoom link. This wasn’t just a worrisome user journey but a wrong one. Maybe this was why we had a high number of churn. The proper thing would have been to create the event Zoom link at the onset that can be available at the point and touchpoint of registration. Also, why create more than one registration touchpoint (Eventbrite, LinkedIn etc.) for the same event when creating it using either e.g LinkedIn would have sufficed?
- Send out that survey: I know the attendees would have to fill up a survey to help me understand the event's value and what/how to optimize subsequent ones. The mistake? I waited after two days after the event to send them the survey. Less than 5% responded. The optimal thing would have been to send out the survey during the webinar — probably 10 minutes to the end of the session, and ensure you take a minute or two to educate the attendees why the survey and prompt them to fill it.
Conclusion…
There’s no one way to do these things as there’s hardly just one way that leads to any particular market. But, you want to avoid pitfalls to get the best result and experience from an event — webinar, meeting, conference, etc.
After all, you’ve invested resources — time, money, to put the event together. Why won’t you put in more effort with attention to yield the goal?
PS: If you are an Insurance company and don’t yet have an effective Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) structure in place and want to understand it, watch the GRC webinar video.
PSS: You can follow Curacel on LinkedIn to get an update on our webinars and events coming up.
About Curacel.
PSSS: I work with the product team at Curacel. My LinkedIn.
