Improving your Webinar ROI – Part 1

The more return on investment you get from your webinar program, the more webinars you will do and by proxy, the better my business does! So I need to start by advising everyone that this blog post is 100% self-serving! That being said, I have to believe you would not be running a webinar program if you did not believe there was an ROI – as allusive as that concept might seem to you at this point.

Last week I laid out the simple webinar ROI equation. If you’re not one of those webinar producers who eagerly sits by your computer, waiting for your edition of the Better Webinars blog to come through your inbox and somehow missed the post, it is highly technical, but unfortunately, required reading for this week’s installment (which I assure you is much more exciting).

Check out How to Measure Webinar ROI

Now that you have eaten all your vegetables, it is time for the dessert as we explore how to increase your Webinar ROI.

Reducing the Cost Equation

There are only two ways to increase ROI: reduce your costs & increase your revenue. You can negotiate as much as you like with your webinar platform vendor, get the best price imaginable, and likely only reduce your overall program costs by a small percentage. The real costs of your program is found in the time invested to make it a success. The time required to plan, execute, and measure your webinar results.

Step 1: Look for automation at every step of the process

You need to ask yourself, how many manual interventions you have in your process and do what you can to minimize them through automation. This heavy lifting is the job of your Webinar Platform or overall marketing technology stack. So what can be automated?

• All logistical emails including confirmation emails, reminder emails (you should send 2!) and follow up emails (“Sorry we missed you” and “Thanks for coming out”)
• Recording, archiving and hosting your webinar can and should be automated to ensure that you can quickly and easily put the webinar recording to use
• Integration of webinar data with your Marketing Automation System or CRM can automate the measurement of the webinar success by ensuring that both attendee and campaign data flows directly into the systems that generally measure the revenue impact of any marketing program you run

The addition of these automation steps can reduce the overall time investment of a single webinar by 8-10 hours.

I know what you’re saying, “But Matt, the webinar is Joe’s job and if we cut that work out, Joe won’t have anything to do!”

Or “Matt, I know you are just saying we need all those automated features because your platform does all that!”

Let’s not worry about poor Joe the Webinar Guy’s job…We have a lot of other work for him to be doing which will have a far greater impact on the cost equation!

As for me pimping my platform in this blog? Of course I am. But that does not make what I’m saying any less true!

Step 2: Template as much of the process as humanly possible

As much as saving 8-10 hours of Joe’s life is valuable, what is more costly to your organization is the time investment from those responsible for creating content. Generally speaking, the people you assign to be moderators and speakers are expensive resources and you need to balance the needs of a killer webinar against the time they can actually invest in the process. Creating a template for speakers and moderators to follow shaves a tremendous amount of time in answering questions when the process starts. We recommend creating a one page brief which covers off:

1. The goal of the webinar (including targets market etc.)
2. All logistical dates and times (briefing call, dry run, live event, etc.)
3. Deadlines for content (if they are creating the slides or providing talking points)
4. An example of a past webinar recording for their review

We have found in certain organizational structures (like our Legal Customers) where the speakers are weighing the time investment of preparing for a webinar with their billable hourly rate efficiency really equates to money quickly.

The Webinar Survival Guide Provides a number of templates that can help you with this process.

We have found the “Interview Format” is an easy way to make the process more efficient. You can check out our blueprint here.

Next Week, we will dig in on how to Increase the Profit Equation.