 Hello and welcome to today's webinar, the anatomy of a webinar. Today is all about uncovering the back-to-basics processes from starting a webinar and we're going to cover 15 tips. Now, we've got a lot to get through today, so I've invited Michael Bunker along. How are you? Very good, Sarah. Thanks for having me. Great to have you here. Like I said, we've got a lot to get through. And really, like I said, it's around going back to basics. Webinars are so commonplace now. We're joining them. We're running them. They're just everywhere. Sometimes in the midst of it, we have to actually take a step back and remember the fundamentals to actually make them work. So before we get started, I'm going to go through some housekeeping to make sure that you guys can interact and engage with us. I've got a trusty iPad here so I can take your questions. So please feel free to click on the blue raise hand icon to ask me a private question. I've also enabled a chat feature as well. So this is something that we don't usually do. And the reason for this is to show you through all the features and also open up public chat amongst yourselves. So any sort of questions and comments, I can also type back to you as well. And the blue drop-down arrow is actually a resource folder. And we'll be referring to that resource folder throughout today's event so you can download some handy e-books and blogs and guides. So let's get started. First of all, I want to uncover tip number one. This is when you're supposed to do a drum roll. Thank you. Okay, so number one in the Elements of Success for a Webinar is thinking about your content. Now, Michael, I don't know about you, but I get asked constantly, I want to run a webinar, but I don't know what to talk about. It's common, isn't it? Well, it's a common question we probably get here. And I think what it's important to realise is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your content. But you do need to think about adapting your content to the online environment. So something that may be written may not be able to be adaptable to the online webinar world. But what I would definitely recommend is to take a look at the existing content that you have. So, Michael, this could range from a few different things, couldn't it? Yeah, so you've got your blogs, you've got interviews, you've got articles on your website, a bunch of things that could be even white papers, especially. So looking at any piece of written content and how that's going to translate into a webinar. Well, last week we actually uncovered the State of Webinar Marketing Report, which is an annual report. We run into how marketers plan and organise their webinars. And you can download a copy from the resource folder. And we got online to discuss that report because sometimes research papers are quite heavy. Yes. And they're full of data, and they're full of numbers, and they're full of stats. So we got in and we actually uncovered what the research meant and then provided tips on how people can actually enhance their webinars. So that's also another idea. The other thing that I also want to talk about in regards to content, and this sort of goes into form a little bit, is around the rise of this online TV show as well. So when you are running webinars, you don't necessarily have to really stick to the 30, 45 or one hour format. No. Where it is exactly like we are doing today. But think about running a regular TV show where you get online and you discuss something maybe a little controversial, or maybe it's something targeted to the sector that you work in and make it a little bit more conversational and fun. Absolutely. And also inviting customers on to share their stories is great. Well, yeah. Because everyone is inundated with a bunch of written pieces of mediums. So if you can give something that's enjoyable, thought provoking, kind of tantalising a little bit, like that makes it more memorable. I agree. So there we go. There's some tips for content. So out of all that, my number one tip would be to really look at what you have and think about how you can translate that to webinars. Now the second step in the webinar process is looking at your web pages and where people go to register for your content. So Michael, we need to think about this for when people register, but also when they go back to these pages for on-demand. Absolutely. So you want to look at the path of your pages as a way of your customer user experience. So what's the participant experience that you're looking like? So from registration for the live event all the way through to the on-demand, you're going to be changing these pages up a little bit. And you've got to think about the different things with logos and branding, the information about the event, firstly being talking about the event as it's coming up, so future state, and then taking those pages afterwards and changing it to a past date once it's already happened. So the work isn't done just because you've done the first registration page for the live event. You do want to make sure that you book in this and actually tie up that language. You also want to make sure when you are creating this material that everything is above the fold. So at that first glance, what's the most important piece of information you want to be showing? It's really that snappy one-liner and the topic title, but also the registration fields. You don't want people looking for this information. Speaker images and bios, they are great. I don't like putting too much into this. You can see some people that have bios that are like a page long. Yeah. Link off to people's LinkedIn. If they want to connect with them, they're going to do it. You don't have to put everything on the page. People with marketing comms, emails and everything, there's something like a four or three second glance rate for most things. So you want to design your pages around that. The sponsor logos I think is amazing. And as we talked about internet TV shows and everything and looking at your webinar program, these can be sponsored. So where are you placing these logos? How much exposure are you giving? Making sure they're clickable to go back off to that other kind of sponsor site. Yeah. These are all really important things. And then confirmation pages and text. So when you do look at your registration for the live event, what's going to happen for those different stages, and then beyond that, after the on-demand, what are the other pages that are going to happen? Yeah. And we'll go into the workflow shortly. But I think as well as this, and you mentioned above the fold, which is something I really get, you only have a certain amount of time to capture someone's attention when they come to your page to register. So I definitely recommend having a brief summary about the event, and then some bullet points as to what people will actually walk away with and what those key sort of learning objectives are. Because then it's just easier to read and you can't have paragraphs and paragraphs of information. And I completely agree with the whole link-off as well. Seeing someone's bio that goes for more than one paragraph is just a waste of space. To be honest, I know people are really precious and proud about their bios. But linking off to their LinkedIn page provides so much more value for a speaker. Yes. One thing I would also recommend when it comes to your web pages is to definitely look at your conversion rates. So with your provider or your marketing asset builder, whichever one you're using, you should be able to look at your conversion rates. So the conversion rate is how many people land on the site versus register. And then you'll be able to see, so if you see 100 people land on your site, but only two people register, you've got a 2% conversion rate. See what I did there? She was the easiest maths. But then if you do see it's quite low, you can go back and tweak that content and then you can actually start to A-B test what's actually working and maybe your subject line, maybe the actual summary, and maybe your presenters. It's just about working with that page and making it work for you. Yeah. But definitely never put your registration details at the very bottom of the page. No. Those fields need to be front and center above the fold. Yeah. So once we've got our content sorted and we know exactly what we want to present and we've got our web page up, we now need to talk about step number three, which is promotional messaging. So essentially it's marketing and there's so many different ways that you can market a webinar, but these are the top four that I think every company has access to and they're quick wins as well. So invitation emails and once again, I know this can be a little bit old school, but every single year we run benchmark reports and studies into how people plan their webinars and email is still number one when it comes to marketing and getting most clicks and conversion rates for your webinars. So you can put your registration page and also your web page into your email, but it needs to really be specific. And what I mean by that is you could have a newsletter with 20 other pieces of content that links off to your event. You need an actual email which only advertises your webinar in the subject line and that subject line needs to have a call to action. So register now, upcoming webinar, that sort of thing. What do you want people to do and then have it specifically about the actual webinar itself? Social media is also great as well and start to actually maybe branch out by using it in a different way. And what I mean by that is putting a post on LinkedIn is great, but maybe you can actually get someone in your company or maybe your presenter to publish an article on LinkedIn and maybe talk about three or four things that they're going to uncover in the webinar, entice people to actually register and put a link in that actual article as well. And the other thing that works to treat is also promo videos. So just get an iPhone, get someone on camera for about 20 seconds with a message on why people should attend and then post that on LinkedIn or Facebook. Just at FYI though with that, make sure that your camera is switched to landscape. So when you post it, it comes up, it doesn't come up with black bars on the side. It's a great way as well for the presenters to promote themselves. By getting presenters to use their own phones and say, hey, these are my three things that I'm going to be doing. They're going on their social media networks. It's going on your one as well. It's all about getting your presenters to promote themselves as much about the topic. Exactly. And they want to be seen as thought leaders as well. And with everything happening now and the amount of webinars that are happening, a lot of presenters don't have time. So make this easy for them. And that's what I would recommend. Whereas it's giving them the meta description to put on their social pages, encouraging them to create the video after hours and then send it to you and you do it for them. There's a certain, there's so many ways that you can actually make it work. But definitely get people around you to help market your webinar. It's not a silo thing. It's not just up to the marketing team. Get your internal teams, your sales teams, email signatures. They're great real estate and they're very underrated. They are. They are. I love those. And it is. Again, it's about the company acting as one team. It's not marketing, working on their own. Email signatures are great, but also the company's on LinkedIn pages, everything, just creating the posts for your staff. As soon as they have to do it, they're not going to do it. But if you say cut and paste here, everything's really done. It will make it nice and easy so you'll get a better hit rate for people actually doing that in the business. I love your last point the most though, which is other webinars. Yeah. Yeah. And that's very underutilized. Underutilized. A lot of the webinar platforms today, I think we've got the green plus symbol. No, we don't. We don't. Okay. Well, one of the icons that you can have is an upcoming events. So if you're a webinar as part of a series, you can advertise that in your live event. But as soon as you're also doing the follow-up email like we'll be doing today, you can include at the bottom of that upcoming webinar and link off to the next event as well. All of your webinars should always be designed connected together. Yeah, absolutely. And it is a lot, especially when you are starting out a series to make sure that you actually have everything planned in advance. But all you need is one just to link back to each other. Yeah. And even if you don't have all the necessary information in there, you've got a captive audience that are watching your webinar there and them and you want them to register. Or even just do the most simple thing is go to upcoming events page on your website. It doesn't have to be the exact next one, but that landing page on your website where you have everything, that's the easiest way. This one, this one I want to leave over to you because sponsorship and I hear you talk to customers all the time and you get incredibly passionate around sponsorship and the fact that so many companies aren't really maximizing revenue opportunities. No, not at all. It's webinars, are they? They are. And I think it's quite funny because a lot of businesses would kill for your audiences. So if you have a niche audience where you're doing learning and development, professional development and you're doing that for medical, a lot of people want to be in front of those doctors. So why not partner with someone that's going to get great exposure? It's going to make sure that you're doing a cost-neutral exercise or a profitable webinar series. But you're able to give sponsors a lot that they wouldn't get from physical events. And so we're going to talk about the things which is like the easy ones that physical events have like pull-up banners or handouts. With your webinars, you have some unique opportunities of having branding on the landing pages, the email marketing, the webinar player page itself. Each of these things can be dynamic and clickable. But then some of the stuff we're seeing with our virtual conferences or like our half-day events is using things like in the break having sponsored demos. So while people are saying go and have it to your coffee at the time but if you want to stay online, hear from our sponsor. They do a live demonstration online. They do Q&A. They fill that dead air that's never being used before. And then we can provide that video as an individual asset afterwards that they can use. Having your sponsors actually be the facilitator like you are today. So you're taking care of this. They can do the opening and closing. I'm taking care of everything. You are taking care of everything. We just ask. We just make sure that everyone's in there. I don't multitask in webinars. I'm just taking care of it all. I leave it to the professional. Yep, go. But with your sponsor, you can get them exposure on the website. Welcome, everyone. I'm Michael Bunker from Red Back Connect. I'm sponsoring this session. I'm really excited to be working with Sarah Jury. It's about to say her maiden name just then and how to stop myself. But the other things, yeah. So the webinar player, videos of intros, exits, having them moderate, there's so many different things. There can even be call to actions for not just the logo but the resource folder where we have a bunch of documents. And today you can put links back to the sponsor sites, especially ones that they create saying, hey, if you click on the link and you give us your details, you go in the draw for something a way of actually enticing people to sign up to newsletters. There's just so much. And I'll talk about this all day. And that's why I'm going to stop you there because we're only up to step number four. But if you head on over to the resource folder, which is the light blue dropdown, we've actually got a blog which contains 21 tips for online sponsorship and how to make the most and make money from your virtual event. So take a look at that blog for some more information. Okay, we're a quarter. No, one third. One third. We're there. So let's talk about registration now. So we spoke about the web page where people actually go to register, but the important thing around registration is making it easily, easy, sorry, and keeping it seamless. So there's sort of three steps when it comes to a registration process. And there could be more or less depending on what you're doing, but fundamentally, you've got fields where you capture the data and then you decide where that data flows onto. You've got a confirmation once people register and then you've got an auto responder email. So let's just quickly go into the necessities when it comes to these three steps. So first of all, you want to keep fields to a minimum. So as a default, you should be asking first name, last name, email, but you really need to think about the other because if you have someone, if you go to a page and they're asking you 20 questions, including what do you want to eat for breakfast? You're not going to register. You want to make this quick and you want to make it easy, but you also want to capture the necessary fields. One of the things I always ask is first name, last name, email, organization, and then I ask a question about something that I can use in the webinar such as what are you hoping to learn or what do you want us to focus on in the webinar because that is then useful information for your presenters so you can tailor the content and that's what we ask for today's webinar as well. So hopefully we're responding to those questions and that's a great way to get pre-questions. Anything else? So if you say, you know, I want to find out five different things about people. Don't worry about capturing that in this process. Capture that in polls inside the webinar, which is something we'll go through a little bit later. So you register. You've got all the necessary information that you need to. Once people register, what comes up? So you have a few options. You can have pop-up messages. Either way, there has to be a message confirming what the next steps are, whether it's, thank you for registering. Please keep a look out for their confirmation email, whether it's then the confirmation link actually redirects to your website with a thank you email, a thank you message, so then you can actually, you know, drive people to your website. But either way, start thinking about what that confirmation page is going to look like. And then you've got an auto-responder email. So once people register, they have to get an email straight away. And we have organizations in the past who have said, you know what, just take all the registrations, then we'll send people a reminder beforehand. You definitely need to send people an auto-responder because it's just how the world works. And that's what we come to expect when we register. And if I register for something and I don't receive anything, I start to freak out. I think that the event's not happening. So always have something. Ensure there's a link to join. Ensure there's a little bit more information about the event as well to prompt people to actually attend. And then always have an add to calendar icon as well. Nothing. I don't really attend anything unless it's in my calendar. No, do I. And also in the market right now, whether it's being completely saturated with webinars, you need to make sure people know because you need to make sure people are reminded. Yeah, excellent. So there you go. Step number five, a three-step, not pretty easy registration process, really. But you can start to make it your own and evolve as your webinar program evolves. Okay, let's talk about the platform. Nice. Well, looking at webinar platforms, you've got a couple of different options. And so what we're doing today is we've got the video on slide side by side, which is absolutely great when you're looking at doing a thought leadership presentation or you have slide context, slide content that adds to the presentation. So we're not just relying on Sarah and myself just speaking throughout this. We've got some slide that has those little tip bits and everything for you to go to the resource folder. But what you want to look at is what the content that you're designing and what's going to be the best format for it. So audio versus video. Like do people need to be on video camera? Right now you've got so many people that are doing remote webinars and internet connection and we do cover this down the track. But is it absolutely relevant that they have to be on video? Yeah. Because most people want good clean audio over video. So, and also it's all dependent on the presenter. Are they comfortable? Do they look good presenting? Are they nervous? These things you can tweak all this sort of stuff. Where you look at studio setup, we've got the nice panel desk. But we could be doing these on couches. We could do it in a more informal setting. It really ties together with what you're trying to do. But each of the different options, they're all customizable. You can always change it up. You can have consistency. Or you can make it make them a little bit different. Like the fireside chats are great in having their own couch settings. But yeah, I think one of the things I find most interesting at the moment is that people pay, people look to video as like the be all and end all. But once you've got a bad person with a bad connection, it ruins the whole thing. And they're all fallbacks on it. You can move them over to audio. But never push for video if the end user or the presenter doesn't have a stable connection. And we've had too many people and we've seen too many organizations trying to do this and really put that pressure on it where sometimes video isn't necessary. Absolutely. So step number seven we're going to go into now is talent. So talent always comes to speakers and presenters. And every single year we do the redback report. And we've done it for, this will be our seventh year. And without fail, we ask the same question every year. And that question is, what makes a great webinar? What makes or breaks it? And as you can see here, we've included some graphs and overwhelmingly it all comes to engaging presenters. It doesn't matter about the camera skills. It doesn't matter about the content or their technical ability to present in front of a camera. It's all about how engaging, enthusiastic and passionate they are. So here are some tips to make sure that you get the best out of your presenters when it comes to webinars. First of all, ensure that there's testing and training that's being completed. So make sure that your presenters know exactly how to use the platform and they're comfortable within the platform because all platforms are actually different. They have to be across all the features and they have to actually know what works for them. So maybe they don't want chat enabled. Maybe they want chat at the end. Maybe they want open chat. Maybe they want private chat. Really make sure that you're using the platform to work your presenters. Moderation and facilitation is a great way to keep people engaged online. So having a second person present with you makes it so much easier as a presenter. As an online audience, you've got two different voices coming through and you've got much more of an engaging session coming through. And the moderator also keeps people to time. Also maybe infiltrates discussion and maybe makes it a little bit more compelling. Keeps it to point as well. Yeah, and then keeps the conversation flowing. And then also consider panels as well. So if your presenter isn't actually used to being on camera, maybe set up a panel with maybe four different people and engage them in a discussion or more of a fireside chat. And that way they'll probably be a little bit more comfortable as opposed to sitting there just staring at a screen the entire time. I agree. And I think the biggest thing when you look at passion and enthusiasm is a lot of people, they're watching your content. They're predominantly, they're just listening. So the amount of people that have two computer screens, they'll log in, they want to hear it, but they might be doing something else. So it's really the passion of the voice, the tone. All of that stuff is probably the most memorable that you can have. But speaking of the other side of contents, going to tip number eight, it's slide and resources. So when you are looking at creating content that has slides in it, what do you need to do? Right, colorful slides as we have today. Stuff that's eye-catching is absolutely amazing. But the other thing is you want to make sure that your slides are keeping people to task and really informative. So simple things, opening, closing slides, introducing a new topic, or even if you are doing a panel discussion, having the topic headings as the slides next to it so people know where they're up to in the presentation. I love the hold slides. Hold slides need to be something that is uplifting and not in a negative. So even if you do have things like technical errors or anything. So what's a hold slide for everyone? What does a hold slide mean? So a hold slide could be for the opening of a session. So we've got our hold slide that goes up right now, which is that this session was beginning at 2 o'clock. Yep. 2 p.m. Those things as well can also be used for technical errors or a presenter if you're looking at doing a remote presenter, they're having trouble with their connection. So instead of saying, we're experiencing a technical problem, please stand by. Please stand by while we improve the connection of our presenter. Simple things like that because each of these have an impacting and an emotion attached to them. So you want to make sure that you're not really scaring your audience. So hold slides, opening, closing. Consider your hold slides throughout the presentation even if you're going on a morning tea break or in a lunch break. Those hold slides can have sponsor images, everything. There's a lot of valuable real estate on a slide. The main thing though is you need to consider animations. Most platforms, unless they're a desktop sharing, will convert the slides into JPEG images, which means they flatten them. So you could have a presenter who spends hours building an amazing presentation with all the animations transitions, and then they come to you and it's like, well, we convert it into JPEG so you only see the final state. There are softwares out there or free add-ons to the PowerPoint. It's called PowerPoint Split. And what that will actually do is it will take everyone of those animations and transitions and split them onto individual slides. The amount of times I've done that manually, and I just found out that there's actually something to do that. So thank you. You're welcome. You know, I did it for one medical one where I think I had to create like 300 individual slides. Oh, wow. And after I finished, someone from the webcast team told me about this product. So I've never gone back. And yeah, various presenters make it simple. If you're the organizer, combine them all into one slide deck. Yeah. Don't chop and change and get them to click on something new. As soon as you do something that's out of the ordinary, that's where risk happens. Yeah. So resources, resources are amazing. You can add to your presentation just like we've done today. We've got a lot of great tips and tricks and downloadable resources. But you want to make sure they're relevant. You don't want to put something in it that doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Or also make sure if you're reusing a webinar room from a previous event, you delete the previous content. Happens more often than you think. Links. So you can link off to websites. PDFs can go in there. Video files can. And you need to be careful about this because we've had a lot of people who have like put up a downloadable link to a video where people then actually own that content. Yeah. It needs to be on a hosted link. It needs to be a hosted link, something on YouTube or a Vimeo or something where they can't grab it. You can still technically grab them if you really want to be dodgy. But we, yeah. Don't encourage that. We don't encourage it. And future webinars. So putting relevant information that's around your topic. And this is also the best place for sponsor information as well. Absolutely agree. So we're over the halfway mark. So now we're going to lift everyone's spirits as we get into number nine. And we're going to talk about polling. I thought of a great idea. When we talk about polling, I'm going to launch a poll. How exciting. I know. So Jordan, I'm going to get Jordan our technician who's going to launch a poll. I know you've been waiting for this all day, Jordan. I'm going to launch a poll just to find out a question that I'm always interested in finding out more, especially this month because this question gets such different results as to what it did a year ago. If I wanted to ask it. So the question is how many webinars have you attended this month? So we're going to open that poll now. And I just really want to see, is this your first webinar in which case? Welcome. I also, we've got people who are maybe two to four and then people five to tens. That's probably more than one a week. But easily over 10. That's the results that we have here. You asked us a year ago. It would have been one to two. Exactly. So now we've got 60% of people saying easily over 10 webinars. And I think that's a lot of us. We've got one person saying this is their first. So welcome. We hope we're doing the platform justice for you. And then we've got 28% of people actually saying five to 10. So thank you. And that's probably a lovely segue into polling as a topic. So you've just seen how polling works and here are our top tips for tip number nine. So the golden rules when it comes to polling is to poll early and poll often. So poll at the beginning to introduce people to that. And poll often throughout, but not too often. And I know that sounds really... I know you're laughing, but you need to make it relevant. So it's not just I want to poll after every fourth slide. It's a good idea to poll into different topics. So say, for example, you had a presentation that went for half an hour, half an hour, and you had three different segments in that. And they, as a segue, who would launch a poll that would be relevant? However, I wouldn't launch a poll unless I was going to respond to it. So there's nothing worse than asking for feedback and then not responding. How many webinars have you attended this month gives me a good indication of the type of people I'm talking to, whether or not I should be maybe increasing, sorry, making some of this content a little bit more simple. If this is everyone's first webinar, or maybe I also want to say to people, okay, we know that you attend a lot of webinars. Let's maybe increase what we're talking about. So the other things are to understand there's two types of polls. So you can have multiple choice or one response, which is quite self-explanatory, and you can select that. There's no open responses of a poll. That's where you use the chat box, exactly. And here are some examples, and I just want to talk about these examples quickly because I ran two webinars with these last week. And at the beginning, this webinar, it was a four-series webinar, and it was all around spiritual healing, and it was all about community and making sure that people were okay working in a COVID-19 world. So at the beginning, they asked people how they were feeling. Then they did the presentation that related to their health and their mental and spiritual health. And then at the end, they also asked them the same question. I love that. And it was so... There was obviously a drastic change, but it also made the presenters feel like they've actually achieved something. But as an audience member, it's like, wow, you are actually listening. Yeah. You are actually trying to do something, and I now know the aim of the webinar as well. I love it with that because we used to do this back in the day with some customers and some other businesses. It's rate your level of understanding of today's topic from one to five. One being very poor, five being absolutely great. And then at the end of your session, saying, okay, now coming out of the session, now rate your understanding of today's topic. What you can easily do with that information afterwards, it's a powerful marketing tool for your on-demand recording to say, hey, 80% of people who attend said they had a greater level of understanding of the topic. Yep. By attending this webinar, click here to watch the on-demand. Yep. Same thing with that exact stat. 80% of people were in a better headspace coming out of this. Using polls for one, for information that you can use to benefit your webinar is absolutely great. But also, as we talked about in the registration process, you can use polls to gather that other bits of information that you didn't want to bulk up your registration through. Yeah. So, like, would you like to be contacted after today's presentation? Yes? Great. That's an absolute lead for you then to go and contact. Or if you didn't want to ask industry in the registration, you can actually launch that. I just want to, as a presenter, I want to get an understanding of the industry that you're in. And these are all things you gather in reports as well. So, polling and then Q&A, which we spoke about. And there's a blog in the resource folder, which is nine ways to take questions in your next virtual event. We could do a whole webinar on how to take questions. But here are the main things that you need to know. So, you've got private chat, where people can actually submit questions privately. Like, we've got activated today, and that is the Blu-ray's hand icon. You're then able to go and export these transcripts afterwards. And I definitely recommend going and getting this data from your webinars, because that will allow you to create FAQs after the event, respond to people individually if you can't get through all the questions. And with some content, you'll find people just have questions that come through, like, 200 sometimes questions that come through. And you can't respond to those questions all in one event. So, think about how you use them post-event. Open chat, encouraging these open discussions in these forums, so people can actually have open discussions where they want to communicate with each other. Obviously, this depends on your content and your industry and the type of organisation and confidentiality and whether or not people can go a little bit off-tangent or they can get distracted. But it's great for when you have a community that you want to build and you're running webinars over a series of time. Another great example of an organisation that we just ran a series of five webinars for, obviously, there's so many features in the platform. But what you need to realise is, as an attendee, there's a lot happening. There's a lot of watching, there's listening, there's reading, there's comprehending, then you've activated all these features for them. So, if you are running a series of webinars, my tip would be to launch things slowly. So, first webinar, they had to ask a question. Second webinar, they incorporated open chat. They had two different ways to communicate. The third webinar, they then had polling as well. So, all of a sudden it was, wow, something new and exciting. And the next webinar, they had video chat. And what I mean by video chat is think of Q&A on ABC. Oh, Tony Jones was the previous host. And this is a way to ask your attendees to submit an MP4 video of a question beforehand and then you play that in the webinar. It's the best way of breaking down the technology barrier. Exactly, and then you're engaging people beforehand. So, you get people to register. Once you hit confirm, then you can have a pop-up saying thank you for registering. You'll shortly receive an email. Please click here or record a video and send it in of your question and we'll play it live. But you can then keep reminding people to do that in your confirmation and reminder emails as well. The benefit as well about doing pre-recorded questions is there's less technology risk. If you try to, like, you can absolutely do that video across everything, but then there's a lot of testing around that. There's a lot of things that could potentially go wrong. You want to control as much stuff as you can with live delivery. So, pre-recorded, always a safest bet. Or even asking people to submit questions via the Regio page at the beginning. It's another great way of doing it. But it's important to remember to your point that the webinars that we're talking about are one-way streams. And this is about having presenters speak verbally and finding other ways for attendees to communicate. Everything else where you've got 20 different webcams up on a screen, that's a web conference. Collaboration tool. Exactly. This is completely different. So, you need to start incorporating features like this to remove the risk of technology and making sure people can engage. So, some great tips there. But like I said, we could talk all day. So, check out that blog. Training and I'm pretty sure next one's testing. So, this is the stuff I leave to you. So, training, training, training and testing. Like, you want to make sure that you have this time correctly and you're not training too late in the piece. You want to do this roughly about a week before your actual live event. This is especially when you're looking at remote delivery. So, you're dealing with presenters, you're dealing with their technology, their restrictions at home. People aren't designed to be delivering a lot of stuff from home. And you'll get the biggest number one thing we hear. I can do this on Zoom, but it is really around, okay, are they on a wired internet connection? Are they on Wi-Fi? Do they have a USB headset? Are they just using the built-in speaker or microphone on their laptop in the webcam when was the last time it was cleaned? So, a lot of these things that you need to be looking at. But you want to get everyone that's involved in your webinar on a training session at the same time. Yeah, because I want to talk about the formats. They want to talk about the formats. You want to kill two birds with one stone. You want to get them on, you want to test, you want to make sure that everything can go like how the day is going to run. The roles and responsibilities of the moderator slash facilitator versus the presenter. If you are using these engagement tools, when are they being activated? Who's responsible for activating these? These are all stuff you want to have mapped out and in place. Panel discussions are the big one around making sure you get people together to understand the format, because you want someone to control that conversation piece. And especially you want only one person seeing the questions coming in as well. You want to make sure that everyone is able to hear all the conversation. The beautiful thing about the Q&A is that you haven't moderated, so one person's role as a moderator is to go through that and to moderate the questions that they want to discuss. Because it's really easy if you give everyone that ability to look at all the questions and be like, well, I want to talk about that now. No, your whole webinar is designed around hitting key milestones throughout it, creating some great on-demand content, but it's around controlling what you're actually delivering and your messaging. Like, these are the main things. What are you controlling? What are you personally responsible for? And if you have any technology issues at all, what's your number one backup? It's a telephone dial-in option. Always a telephone. Trust your telephone, telephone line. You want to be able to pull that into the webinar and also you want the ability to put a speaker image up so they can still see who that speaker was. And you briefly touched on testing. Please sort of go hand in hand. So we're up to number 12 now, but testing is important probably now even more so than in the past, because everyone's just online, aren't we? We are. We are. I know that even like you see the NBN ads, it's like, hey, we weren't designed for this, but we're improving the network. But even simple things where we used to talk to customers all the time, it's like, yeah, doing out of hours is great. It's really not. Not now. Not now. Because you've got everyone who's working during the day, and as soon as they go off their computer, they're going straight to Netflix, going straight to stand, they're putting stuff on. You've got everyone in the household. So your actual internet provider has probably its most congestion in early evenings. And that's a lot of the time when you're wanting to be doing testing and everything, it's making sure you're testing your presenter's laptops, computers, whatever at the same time when you're going to be delivering the live event. Which can be difficult though, because people are busy and especially if you're working with health professionals who aren't necessarily behind a computer every day and we have a question here. What if my presenters are unavailable to join testing? How are they testing links I can give them? Oh, certain platforms, absolutely. You can absolutely give it and they can take themselves off saying, yeah, I was able to go in. But also, there is completely, if they cannot test their system, don't have them on video. Just audio. Just audio. Have them dial in so we know that 100%, they can dial the phone number, they can still log in and push their slides and everything, but just remove any fear of the delivery not going well. And I think one thing that's important, and I'll say this, and I'm sure everyone probably thinks that although they don't like to admit it, is I would much rather have crystal clear audio quality on event than a video of someone that's going... And having poor audio as well. Like, I'm sorry. And I was thinking about this on the way to work today as I was listening to the radio and I was like, the radio is so engaging and it's been around hundreds of years. And then you've got podcasts as well. Like, why are people so video-orientated and why does everything have to be video when you can make it engaging with audio only? And I think, you know, you see the rising podcast as well and you see that all of our customers wanting to run podcasts. It's like, there's nothing wrong with audio. It's just because everyone in this time and place now is just so video, video, video, and we're used to it. We think that we have to, but if it's not going to work for you and it's not going to work for your presenters, then there's absolutely no need to do it. Well, I think we should put our money where our mouth is for our next right back business course that we host together. We should do it as an audio and slides only. You may know what I have to do my hair. You won't have to do your hair. I love it. All right, we're almost there guys. So post-event surveys. So this is where we capture all the gold, whether you want to look at it or not. So first of all, we want to find out what people thought about our event. So the questions you want to ask, want to be around presenters so you can give presenter feedback around the content. Would you suggest any future topics as well and also about the technology? Once again, I'll say what I said before, don't ask for feedback unless you're going to do something with it. So if you get really, really poor feedback on a presenter and then your next session you bring the same presenter on, you're only going to alienate your audience. One thing I will say with questions and this is just in general for any sort of feedback, I hate it when you have a rating of say one to ten. What does one to ten mean? What difference between three and four? Seven and eight. I recommend going one to five and explain what one is and explain what five is. So one might be not engaging whereas five might be highly engaging because then you're sort of you're connecting with the person completing it and that's just like my pet hate. So I thought I'd bring that up. The next one is access. So as soon as the webinar is over you want to redirect to a survey because it's fresh in someone's mind. There are a few ways of completing the survey today. So there's a yellow icon up the top. If you choose to exit before the event is over you can click on that. Red X or we're going to force redirect everyone to that page as well. What I don't really and this happens a lot with people is I say once the webinar is over in a few days I'll send them an email with a link to complete the feedback. It doesn't happen. By then I've probably opened 200 emails I've probably responded to so many different things. Judging by the poll I've probably watched another three webinars by then so I'm probably confused by what webinar yours even was. So definitely get that feedback as soon as the webinar is over and use it. Use it like you said 80% of last week's respondents said this was amazing here's why you should register for the next one. But you know if it's CPD or anything else then you really should be following up with people with certificates. I have a customer this week and I never really did it before but we use poll questions for some survey responses. But she took her whole survey and she consolidated it into five poll questions. So the first one was why did you decide during this session that she did in the first five minutes halfway through it's just like is the content living up to your expectations and she asked that twice. So then you got two different measurements in it and the last one was about rating the presenter on it which I just thought was a great way of doing it because again you're getting it fresh and less people have their pop-ups blocked or anything than that you're going to get about an 80 to 92 which is a random number percent success rate on actually having it pop up on people's screens. Which is a lot higher than surveys. We should have done that today. Yes well this is only worked on it this week with the customer so. Okay so there's some tips for feedback as we go into 14 and 15 these are just as important as all of them but this is probably my biggest one because I don't think people use on-demand videos to their ability and before I get you to go into this the state of webinar marketing survey that we the report that we launched last week as well there is just such a huge increase in the way that people are using on-demand content or semi-live content as well which means pre-recording and playing as though it is live as well so are you with me on on-demand? I'm with you I've always been on with you because I think it's that whole people are so used to running face-to-face events where that dies after you've closed the doors like you've done a face-to-face event soon as you're after that you're on to the next face-to-face event where on-demand lives for as long as you host it so it needs to have its own strategy and that's around okay if I'm archiving my recordings and I'm actually hosting these where I can track data what is my exposure like in the next in the 333 what am I getting in the first three days after the event three weeks after the event yeah so it's what is my trend in the 333 where I can see the numbers you want to be aiming past that but really some content will have a shelf life around three months because you're going to be repurposing content and be doing stuff so it's a host it for a minimum of 12 months but I say really track that number of the 333 I'm just writing that down I'm just going to do it mp4 video so you got two different areas of where your on-demands are going to go you got the hosted site where you've got that tracking that visibility who's going to see it but then you can take the mp4 videos they can go on your intranet they can go on youtube but you can't track it you can't but what you could do is take 10 minutes of your webinar as an mp4 put that on youtube and then put the link saying want to watch the whole thing click here then pointing people to it you want to just be smart about it your hosting options like we were just talking about you have free versions which give you no visibility other than clicks you have full visibility and that's really when you have sponsors and everything you need to have that single sign on totally underutilized yes there's some custom development with some providers but absolutely do it make it easier for your participants to see your content so that means you go to one page and you register and then you can watch all the content as opposed to log in to individual pages centralized site and even try to go with your provider to go from your actual members section to where you're hosting it so they don't actually have to put any additional details you're reporting absolutely invaluable to see the tracking trend of what your content's doing cpd points you can get these a lot as well for on-demand views they're relaxing a lot of these legislations around this as well now youtube or vimeo great products for free hosting but you want to make sure that you're not giving them everything use it for teasers and then your website as well so those real big keynotes everything try to see what content you want to be centralizing people onto your site instead of pointing them off to an external one because at the end of the day you want your people seeing your repeat yeah absolutely great tips number 15 last one so I personally don't think you should be running webinars unless you know what your return on investment is going to be and how you're going to measure that so reporting is last but definitely I think it's the most important one in reports that we do regularly most people say their number one indicator of success is attendees on a webinar however the average rate for a webinar is around 35 to 40% so well yeah but if that's why you're running webinars you're definitely not going to see success so I definitely think you need to all of us need to use our reporting in a much more valuable way and it's not as just looking after after the event the next day oh how many people get people attended that's great it's about constantly going back to your reporting so you can actually keep tracking the on-demand content you've produced so as a default you should always be able to access your attendees your transcripts your QA transcripts feedback and also location and duration but what does this mean and how can you use this information so first of all it depends why you're running webinars is it just for awareness are you spending all this time and money and resources just actually doing it just so people know who you are are you trying to generate leads are you charging for them or are you trying to engage people in a certain way so definitely think about that first second of all you can use a lot of this feedback to create future topics as well so some of the suggestions people complete in the survey that you actually providing after your event can actually lead to future topics a lot of the time content so even my feedback for today's webinar is we could do probably five of these topics as separate webinars absolutely so I'm just giving you feedback for our own webinar series but you know think about the format of your webinars if you've got people who you can actually see what device people are joining from as well so if you see people are only joining majority of people are joining from mobile devices do video only because you can't really see slides if you're on an iPad or a mobile phone or if it is purely like content slide only with audio slide only so start to think about that are people on the road where are they joining from but then also think about your success and what the definition of success is for you I think that's probably number one for me absolutely and I think with the attendees stuff we do look at especially run series and digital TV programs and everything if you are creating a series don't measure the individual attendee for the one event measure them against the program yeah so were they a reoccurring attendee were you able to get a 40% reoccurrence rate with your attendee shows that people are coming to the next event that's much more powerful to a business and you know what sometimes you may have to export a few spreadsheets and do a bit of data but in the end in the end you've got something to go back to and you've got something to actually report on and it's quite compelling and you're then going to get the opportunity to show that you've actually met your actually this is yes this is actually what I want to get to and I know that we're one minute over and I hate webinars that go over but this is exactly what I was leaning into so I want to switch slides because my number one tip for any webinar that you're running or any webinar program that you're running is to always start with the end in mind and I think this has been my tip I'll say before I read back for 10 years now and I think this is my tip when we first launched into webinars a red bag and it hasn't changed with anything that we've spoken about today if you don't know why you're doing that and you're not working backwards you're very rarely going to come out successful or even feeling like you've had some success with webinars in general and your tip can you explain Think, Feel, Do? Yeah the Think, Feel, Do model is exactly similar to Sarah's one where you're starting with the end of mind but with looking at your participants looking at the participant journey what do you want them to think what do you want them to feel during it and what do you want them to do afterwards that do is the really important one Do is always missing too. Do is always missing because the do is around what's my call to action to convert someone if this is lead generation what do I want at the end of it if it is CPD point I need to get them to actually get to the end of the content to be eligible for their points so it's all around yes I'm creating great content but what do I want them to think how do I want them to feel and what do I want them to do Yeah, well I think that you've been amazing today I feel very uplifted and I would like everyone to complete the survey that they're going to get redirected to but in all honesty thank you so much it's been great like I said these are very high level back to basic tips that will make a huge difference please take a look at the resources and please get in touch if you have any questions because we could talk for days about this sort of stuff so we'd be more than happy to help but thank you everyone enjoy the rest of your day Thank you