Last updated on June 15th, 2024
Taylor Wells of Create Successful Webinars gives tips on creating and running successful webinars to achieve your business goals.
GUEST: Taylor Wells Create Successful Webinars | Linkedin
HOSTS: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden of VidAction.tv and VidTarget.io | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube
– Gwen Miller LinkedIn | Twitter
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Taylor Wells:
Ultimately webinars really have to solve a problem. If you don’t, you’re ultimately going to a reputation for being too salesy and you’re going to lose genuine people and kind of what we stress at Creates Successful Webinars is building relationships with people.
Dane Golden:
My name is Dane Golden from VidAction.tv, where we help you up your game on YouTube for business and transform your viewers into loyal customers where we help you get a higher return on your YouTube ad spin with targeted YouTube ads. Along with my co-host, it’s Gwen Miller. Hello Gwen.
Gwen Miller:
Hey Dane. Let’s chat some video marketing.
Dane Golden:
Okay. And Gwen, what is your profession? What do you do?
Gwen Miller:
Well, I work with creatives and brands to use data to craft the best possible videos for their unique, one of a kind audiences.
Dane Golden:
You do. And you’re one of my gurus who, before having you on the podcast, that I sought after your insights at conferences and elsewhere, and I’m just loving having you as the co-host.
Gwen Miller:
Well, I pretty much stalked you to be my friend. So it’s only fair that I give back.
Dane Golden:
It was, I think it was mutual, yeah. And for you, the listener, you should know that as always you can follow along on your podcast app and we have a link to the transcript and a whole bunch of other information because we really feel this is more than just an audio podcast that you… We go the extra mile and just give you a full, manually written transcript so you know what the person said. And today we have a special guest it’s Taylor Wells from Create Successful Webinars. Hello Taylor.
Taylor Wells:
Hey Dane. Hey Gwen. So happy to be here, excited to chat today.
Dane Golden:
All right, Taylor. So the reason I wanted to have you on is because, I will confess to you and the listeners, that I’ve never hosted a webinar before even though I’ve been a marketer for a long time, but I know I need to do this for at least one of our products and very soon, frankly. So I’m looking to you to give us some total free advice here. That’s my ulterior motive in getting you on.
Taylor Wells:
Happy to.
Dane Golden:
I am, I’ll admit that I’m the worst webinar participant ever. I often sign up and don’t show up. I multitask or stop watching and just listen. And then there’s a lot of things I hate about webinars like if somebody says, “I’m going to give you all these tips,” and then they just talk about either how awesome they are or they’re just seem like they’re getting me to wait for something. I don’t even know what that method is. And then I’m also a bad customer because I often don’t buy whatever it is they’re pitching. So I’m hoping you can convince us either there’s a better way of doing this or that I’m totally wrong or something along that line. How does that sound?
Taylor Wells:
Happy to. Yeah, I think there’s a lot there and definitely happy to answer the questions. When it comes to webinars, they are popular to the extent that enough people are doing them. That I think people have been exposed them enough that as I think maybe you’re hinting at, correct me if I’m wrong, but what you’re hinting at is that just being sold to ultimately, and instead of a webinar or some sort of event where you learn something and you grew from it, you just felt like the event was pitching you a service, and webinars have to play just like with all marketing, they have to play in that territory. And it’s a fine balance between helping somebody, but also leading them along a path to further help them or to ultimately solve their solution.
But ultimately webinars really have to solve a problem, and I’m sure we’ll talk a lot about this today throughout the rest of our podcast, but really ultimately you have to solve a problem. If you don’t, you’re ultimately going to get a reputation for being too salesy and you’re going to lose genuine people and kind of what we stress at Create Successful Webinars is building relationships with people. And webinars, what I’ve personally found, has been able to build relationships, start relationships with people all around the world ultimately, the potential to. But you also have to be very careful with ultimately how much value to pitching of your service and kind of what you hinted at, engaging people. Actually having to show up, right? I can’t tell you, I probably only showed up to at least 50% of the podcast I’ve ever registered, if that, right? And, yeah.
Dane Golden:
Now don’t spoil all the beans yet because we’ve got a lot of written questions that we want to get to.
Taylor Wells:
Yes sir.
Dane Golden:
So go ahead Gwen.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah, look, I just want to back up super quickly, Taylor. I know this is kind of… Look, if anyone is in business for any amount of time in the last five years, we’ve all attended a webinar, some of us even hosted a webinar. But sometimes I think we throw these words around without really defining them. What qualifies as a webinar as opposed to say a workshop or general live stream or a live course? What is the difference between all these things and what is the main goal for a business to want to do a webinar at all?
Taylor Wells:
That’s a fantastic question, Gwen. And it’s honestly, I think it’s a constantly evolving category of marketing. All of those categories you mentioned, webinar, workshop, live stream event or GoLive course. There’s a lot of crossover. And I would say to define, my personal definition of webinar would be similar to… would basically be a long form event where you are spending an hour plus with somebody, teaching them about how to solve a specific problem. And in turn, position yourself as the expert and the opportunity to work with somebody further.
The other events, so a lot of times serve other purposes and, or are a paid event. A webinar is usually free and it’s free content, free information and it gives the opportunity for the speaker to obviously position their brand or their company. The other events usually are paid. So a workshop is usually paid, live stream events. And a lot of times those have the connotation of doing an actual, a follow-up activities and or activities throughout the event. A webinar is more of just a purely informational. You’re absorbing information from a speaker around a specific topic.
Dane Golden:
And to follow, the main goal of a business in doing a webinar should be what?
Taylor Wells:
Yeah. It ultimately, it does so many different things and it’s a pretty powerful tool. It gives you the ability to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. It Gives you the ability to push and or help people along through a sales funnel. If you are a marketing to a certain audience, you have the ability for another touch point and to educate them. You have the ability to ultimately get new clients out of it. But I’ve also seen it used for recruiting, awareness around a specific cause, fundraising. There’s all sorts of different attributes of using a long form event. And I would say podcasts and webinars are the most similar in that regard when it comes to marketing tool. And I see a lot of crossover between those two industries.
Dane Golden:
So let’s look at it from the potential customer’s point of view. What do you think is the key motivation that’s going to get a potential customer to join the webinar? And actually I’m going to step back one step here. Is it always a potential customer? A webinar is never something you hold for a current customer, is it, or is it?
Taylor Wells:
Great question-
Dane Golden:
Or is that something else? Is that a workshop?
Taylor Wells:
No, I think it’s a great question and I see webinars being used for current client base as well for numerous reasons, general education. You can bring in experts in your industry to educate your clients. Vendors are happy to come speak to your customers about their service, and that’s kind of a little side note. Getting your vendors to help fund these events because they can host them because it’s an event and they’ll give you marketing dollars. I’m sure that something else we’ll be able to talk about later on.
Dane Golden:
Okay.
Taylor Wells:
But ultimately, yeah, the key motivators for customers are to gain knowledge around a problem they’re experiencing and how to ultimately solve it, and they’re expecting a more in-depth analysis of the problem, right? 45 minutes, an hour event. They’re really going to actually expect the answer to the problem, so… And they’re not expecting you to implement it for them, but they are expecting, “Hey, we want to educate the person,” or, “Hey, what’s the root problem of this?” And then how can we… What are some outcomes I can achieve by going through your process or solutions to the problem?
Dane Golden:
And, let me finish Gwen, if you don’t mind. How do you get them to stick around though? For instance, I as a customer often am invited to participate and I sit in and then I leave. So why am I leaving and why do people leave? And how do you get them to stay?
Taylor Wells:
Great question. Yeah, it’s a challenge to engage people for that long and there’ll be people that drop off and I’ve thankfully had, due to my content, due to the guest or what I’ve done, had very high 90, sometimes 95% attendance and people watching and attending the whole event. And the key things I’ve looked for are first, having a pack full event of knowledge. You can’t, I think in these types of events, you really, you can’t expect having a couple of paragraphs worth of information and then just chat the rest of the way through. You really need to take the time to get information around your industry, around the problem and go through it, and spend 30 to 45 minutes talking about and going through all the different aspects of it. There’s also other strategies, something I’ve actually been doing in our conversation is I numerous times, I’ve referenced that, “Hey, hopefully we talk about this thing later on in the conversation.”
So people that are listening right now will continue to listen to us talk because we’ve kind of talked about possible areas of interest that they might be interested in. So I think getting people excited around the information, but ultimately it has to be the content you’re providing because there’s so much content available. People tune out and ultimately, I always just try to put myself in the consumer’s position, right? When do I tune out on things and why do I tune out on them? It’s because I’m not learning, I’m not growing. And so taking the time to actually educate people on a problem and yeah. Obviously getting help from other people and stuff like that is also a great way to get help there.
Gwen Miller:
Yeah. So I think for me, one of the biggest blockers to actually starting up and doing a webinar is I don’t even know where to start on the webinar platforms. What should I look for when deciding on a platform to use to host my webinar?
Taylor Wells:
Well, that’s a great question, and there’s a lot of platforms out there. Before I answer that, I want to see if by the end of this discussion we can get a webinar booked on your guys’ calendar because I bet I can help you guys do that. And then number two, I can show you the steps to launch an event. And honestly, Zoom has been the best platform I’ve found for doing webinars. I use their Zoom webinar feature and it’s affordable. You can host a landing page, you can do the email follow up, you can get a recording easily. You can go live on Facebook or YouTube or other platforms. It really has everything you need.
There’s a lot of platforms out there that are honestly borderline manipulative, if not lying. Where ultimately they help you set up an automated webinar, which I’m all about. I’m all about on-demand webinars, but then they give you marketing tactics to make people feel like it’s a live webinar and a marketer or somebody in that industry can smell that from a mile away. And ultimately it’s lying or deceptive from my standpoint. So I use Zoom. It’s super straight forward to set up and it gives you a lot of the tools to be able to host everything or get the recording and do all that fun stuff.
Dane Golden:
So how often should someone have a webinar? We talk about really what’s a definition and that type of thing. There’s one guy I know, Steve Dotto, who’s a top educator of tech. He has a Webinar Wednesday where he just, every Wednesday, there’s just another tech topic he covers in depth. So what’s the right amount?
Taylor Wells:
Great question Dane. Yeah, it varies based upon your industry, but I would say, generally, I would say, yeah, once a week is awesome. That is a lot of content. It might be challenging for a lot of… I’ve personally never done that level. Usually once or twice a month, I would say at most. If you’re a larger company or a larger organization, you can have specific webinars for different industries and or client bases or topics depending on the service, but once or twice a month. And one way to think about it is, especially in a relationship driven industry, the more complex the industry. The bigger the fish, the harder the catch. The longer the sales cycle, the longer marketing usually takes for you to get a client.
So ultimately doing it once a month. And what I’ve found is you can actually… it usually takes a couple webinars for a client to then want to book a meeting with you and take the next step. Especially in the more complex the industry. If you’re selling to a product or something a lot cheaper, or maybe you’re a SAS company where it’s a lower value, lower cost item, then maybe not. It may not take three webinars for them to convert. But I found sometimes it takes a little bit longer because they want to get to know you, right? They want to see a couple instances of them providing value, of you providing value and you solving the problem and building that trust. An then I found they reached out to book a meeting and move forward after that.
Gwen Miller:
So I want to key off kind of the value part of that. Look, I think we’ve all been promoted webinars that turn out to be pretty much fluff and just marketing the product and no value. But then again, I think we’re also suspicious. How do you set up your promotion to really call out like, “Hey, no, this is actually going to give you solid value,” and kind of cut through that kind of veil of expectation of people being like, “Oh, this is not going to have value for me.” How do you properly promote your webinar as something that’s going to, “Now, this is going to give you the goods?”
Taylor Wells:
Great question, Gwen. Yeah. I would say the biggest thing is really understanding your customer’s problems and how you’re solving those problem and working your way, yeah, working your way backwards from that direction. And one big piece is, ultimately what I tell people and what I provide in our coaching is, really finding four to six problems that your customer is experiencing around one specific topic or one general topic. And then creating your content around that and creating four, six solutions. How can you create four, six outcomes? That how will your customer be different afterwards?
And that can be “formulate your topic” and that can formulate your marketing materials. And ultimately, yeah, it is super important Gwen, as you’re mentioning, to have effective marketing, because people aren’t going to show up and it’s not going to be a great event. And so it’s, yeah, it’s ultimately, it’s almost proof’s in the pudding in the sense that you… As people register and as people respond, you’ll validate that those are… you’re speaking to your audience correctly. And yeah, so I usually always start with a landing page and start with, “Hey.” Writing out a title and a description and those problems and those outcomes as a way to kind of formulate the marketing, but then also formulate the presentation.
Dane Golden:
Okay. So there’s… You talked at the top about a few different types of organizations that might have a webinar. What type of product is the right product to have? For instance, is it to promote a B2B discovery call? An online course? What’s a bad reason? Would it be a bad reason to have a webinar if REI said, “We want to show you these new hiking boots?” What’s a good and bad type of product or service to have on a webinar?
Taylor Wells:
Yeah. Interesting question. I think there’s quite a bit of room to use webinars and I think the most user, probably the online creators, course creators, things like that, they use webinars. But I see a lot of B2B kind of, as you mentioned, and professionals. I think there’s a lot of room for people that are experts in their field to be able to impart their knowledge and build and get clients. And there’s a lot of industries that I’ve worked in. Technology, financial services. I was just talking to a real estate broker earlier today that I’ve been helping in coaching. Helping them launch webinars around first time home buyers and helping him get new real estate clients.
So I think the bigger the service, the more the relationship based industry, I think is the most effective, because you’re really able to… If you’re able to spend 45 minutes to an hour with 150 decision-makers at one time, that’s pretty powerful. And so I think that is potentially more powerful than if you’re selling clothes to those 150 people. But I also see brands, large brands do long form educational webinars and educational events, but most of the time it is in kind of service-based industries. The more the relationship driven, the more I’ve seen them be effective.
Gwen Miller:
Okay. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of a promotion. Do you like social media platforms? Do you use an email list? What if I’m a brand that doesn’t have a huge organic social following? Do I use paid? What do I do here?
Taylor Wells:
Great question. Yeah, marketing is always a challenge in no matter what you’re doing. And I think what I found is all of the above, I think everything you I’ve done and do all of those forms of marketing to promote the webinar, and then also use the webinar to create those forms of marketing after the fact. I can use the webinar for social media posts. Cut it up and use it for social media posts. Use it for on demand, convert it into a blog post, all sorts of fun stuff. So there’s, yeah, there’s kind of goes both directions. Kind of some of my favorites are definitely LinkedIn using in one little tidbit. Big tidbit, actually on the LinkedIn side. LinkedIn advertising is super expensive. They’re organic seems to work pretty well, especially if you’re in a service-based industry, but what’s really cool is the events. I really like creating events on LinkedIn and promoting your webinars through the events. That’s been super effective way I’ve used to be able to get people to participate and get them to sign up.
Dane Golden:
Events. I didn’t even know that LinkedIn Events existed. That’s a new one. Thank you very much.
Taylor Wells:
Yeah. I think it’s newer and yeah, it’s an interesting way. There’s a couple of different ways to use it but it’s a great place for… because basically it comes in as a connection request. So when you invite somebody in your network, it’s a pretty prominent invite or it pops up at the top of their screen. So it’s a cool way to engage. It’s a non salesy way to engage your audience.
Dane Golden:
So just to be clear, it’s if someone is not in your network already, or if they are?
Taylor Wells:
It’s someone that is in your network. This is the people that you’re connected with. Yeah.
Dane Golden:
So you can invite them? It’s not a paid or limited thing? You just, “It’s just an organic, here’s an event.”
Taylor Wells:
Yeah. I think they do max it out. You only can send out a thousand invites per week. So depending on how large your network is.
Dane Golden:
That will be enough.
Taylor Wells:
Yeah, yeah. And you’ll get 50, usually 50 to 75 people I’ve registered. So it’s a great way, especially to connect with LinkedIn, like I’ve mentioned, and you’ve talked about, it’s a challenging platform in some ways just because it’s so expensive for advertising, but the events is a pretty cool freeway to do you utilize it.
Dane Golden:
So let’s talk about being on camera versus not being on camera versus just sharing a PowerPoint or some other desktop share. Should the presenter or presenters be on camera? In what way? How much? And does that affect whether people engage more or not?
Taylor Wells:
Interesting question. Yeah. I get this one a lot. And from my personal standpoint, I think video on as much as possible as a general rule of thumb. I think there’s appropriate ways. Yeah. There’s definitely times to not use it, but in webinar context, I say video on, I think it’s more personable. It gives-
Dane Golden:
Video, excuse me. Video on means the camera is on the presenter?
Taylor Wells:
Correct.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Thank you.
Taylor Wells:
Yep. Yeah, video on and you can simultaneously do a presentation. That’s usually what I do is have my video on, but then I’ll have the main thing they’re looking at is the presentation. But if it’s a panelist, I’ve done panels with four or five panelists and it’s just video on and we’re… And I think ultimately, especially in any relationship-driven industry, it’s a better way to build trust with people because they can see you and grow from there and, yeah.
Gwen Miller:
Now this might seem like a little bit of an odd question, but is a webinar by definition live, can it be pre-recorded? Should it be? What are the nuances there?
Taylor Wells:
Sure. Yeah. It’s hard to tell sometimes these days depending on what platform you’re in, but generally speaking webinars or live events, and then they’ll have a replay or recording available afterwards. And I think live events are usually the most effective. People love going to a live event especially for Q and A features. And there’s just something about the kind of the sense of urgency with a live event that you get people engaged in that way. That being said, recorded webinars are fantastic and can still be a great marketing tool for follow-up and used in a lot different ways.
Dane Golden:
And you’ve got your own webinar. It’s called 30 days to launch workshop and I noticed, of course, that you called your webinar about webinars a workshop and not a webinar. So first of all, why didn’t you call it a webinar and why should someone participate in that?
Taylor Wells:
Great question and yeah, I love the question because there is differentiating the two is sometimes challenging and it’s a tomato, tomato in a lot of ways. But the reason why I call it a workshop is because it’s definitely a participant driven course workshop event where people… Yeah, there’s assignments and follow-ups and to do’s that you participate during the course and watching through the videos. And yeah, it’s essentially, yeah, if you want to learn how to use in create a webinar, basically the workshop within two hours will take you through a process for how you can launch one in 30 days.
And the goal is to give you basically all of the knowledge and all the frameworks I use to how to create a presentation. And also the eight steps. The eight things you kind of to have in place to have a successful webinars. None of it is rocket science, but it did take me awhile to kind of figure out all the nuances and how to use it well, and all different opportunities like getting vendors involved and partners and panelists. So the tutoring will take you all through that and happy to have it as a resource available to all.
Dane Golden:
Okay. But it is not live because you sign up for it and you take it. It’s more like a course would you say?
Taylor Wells:
Yeah. Yep, it’s a course. It’s basically a mini workshop course. So it’s not nine hours long. It’s two plus hours long and it goes through, it gives you all the tools to launch a webinar in 30 days and get you set up with kind of what technology you need in place, how to create a presentation, how to get panelists on, all that fun stuff.
Dane Golden:
Okay. Well, Taylor Wells, this has been very helpful learning about webinars. So how can people find out more about you and Create Successful Webinars, which is the name of your company?
Taylor Wells:
Yeah. Thanks. It’s been a blast being here and super fun chatting with you, Gwen and Dane. Yeah, our company is Create Successful Webinars. You can find us at www.createsuccessfulwebinars.com and yeah. Happy to see our website, there is plenty of information about what we do and how we help people launch successful webinars.
Dane Golden:
Excellent. Thank you, Taylor Wells. My name is Dane Golden with my co-host, she’s Gwen Miller and we want to thank you the listener for joining us today. Isn’t that right, Gwen?
Gwen Miller:
Yes. We appreciate you every single week.
Dane Golden:
Every single week. And if you appreciate us, why not just review us on Apple podcasts? You can do that right now, if you’re listening to Apple podcasts, by just clicking those three dots and it just tells you how to review us. Gwen and I do this podcast because we love helping marketers and business owners do YouTube and video marketing better. Thanks to our special guest, Taylor Wells. Thank you Taylor.
Taylor Wells:
Thanks again. Happy to be here.
Dane Golden:
Until next week here’s to helping you help your customers through video.