Episode 93:Webinar Quickstart Guide
Why run a webinar? What outcomes should you look for? What tool(s) should you use? How do you prepare? How do you prepare your content/presentation? What’s the format to follow (20/30/10 -- 20 on presentation, 30 on questions, 10 on pitch)? What do you do with the webinar video after the webinar?
Summary
Nick and Kai walk through using webinars as a broadcasting tool for consultants: when to start, how to structure them, and how to turn attendees into one-on-one sales conversations. They cover tool choice (Crowdcast), CTA strategy, wiring attendance data back to your email provider, and what to do when attendance starts dropping.
Highlights
- Nick’s setup is minimal: announce on the mailing list, post an agenda, present, take Q&A, done. The goal, per Nick, is raising awareness of what you do, not closing a sale on the call.
- Start webinars after your mailing list exists, not before. Kai puts the entry threshold at 50 subscribers. Nick says if 10–15 people show up to the first one, that audience size is enough to justify continuing.
- Kai prefers no-pitch webinars. The CTA is ‘email me with questions about this topic’ rather than ‘buy this thing now.’ The webinar warms people up; the sale comes later after a nurturing sequence.
- Nick recommends connecting Crowdcast to your email provider via Zapier, tagging attendees by specific webinar date and topic, not just ‘attended a webinar,’ so you can queue a targeted post-event drip sequence.
- Kai’s recommended format: 20 minutes of presentation covering the problem and a solution, then 30 minutes of Q&A. The Q&A is also customer research. Attendees surface questions and phrasings you wouldn’t have anticipated.
- Both Nick and Kai note that webinar Q&As expose unexpected terminology and framing from the audience, which feeds better marketing copy and future service design.
- If attendance drops over time, rotate topics and survey past attendees on what they want next. If it still drops after that, Kai recommends pulling back cadence from fortnightly to monthly or every six weeks.
Read the transcript
So you’ve started running webinars recently for your list, for your audience. Tell me a bit about your, I think you call them webcasts. Tell me a bit about your approach to webcasts.
I just call it a monthly show, actually. It’s similar. Yeah, but like, or a workshop. I don’t know. It’s, and I basically announce it on my mailing list ahead of time. I use a tool called Crowdcast. I believe it’s a At Crowdcast. io, something like that, one of the Indian Ocean companies. And basically, I started up a Crowdcast account. Pasted the link that’s an invitation, come up with an agenda for people that would be helpful and useful, and end it with a QA. That’s it’s Very, very minimum viable webinar here. And it’s not what you would normally think with a webinar where it ends with like a hard sell to one of my products. I might talk about my methodology and some of my services, but the precept behind it for me at least and for consultants I think in general is to raise awareness of and your profile of who you are and what you do, right? It’s another form of the broadcasting network you should be doing. Podcasting and running a mailing list and all those other things. This happens to be on video. It might involve a screencast. It might involve It might involve taking questions from the audience. But yeah.
No, and I think it also nicely fills the hole that running local events That not running local events might leave in your business if you primarily are based remotely or don’t have a lot of potential leads locally. Writing webinars can be a great evergreen offering. Hey, I’m hosting a thing on the thing I do. Come attend, ask questions. You’ll learn about my process and methodology. It’s very similar to getting 10, 20, 30 prospects in your office, doing a presentation for them, answering questions, and then seeing where that naturally leads to.
Yeah. And I mean, if you live in a small town, this is a very natural thing for you to do. If you live in a big city, but you don’t want to go to like secure a conference room or worry about people attending or herd cats around speakers or something like that, then this is also a really good way for you to just sit in your house secretly not wearing pants and give a webcast. And honestly, it’s something that you I don’t even consider necessarily mutually exclusive from that, right? It’s like It’s something where you can do it in conjunction with hosting a local meetup, which if you haven’t thought about starting a local meetup, like we can talk about that some other episode. I live in a big city. I have no local meetup, but I occasionally run a show, right? And that works out really well for my lifestyle because I live five and a half miles from downtown and I’m real lazy about going there. And that’s like the only place where people ever think to do that. So yeah, I don’t know. It’s tactically, I think, pretty sensible because it’s another arrow in your proverbial quiver of broadcasting.
One thing I’ve always wondered internally, and I’m curious for your perspective on this, is where does adding webinars to your marketing mix or your broadcasting mix as a consultant Optimally fit as you advance as a consultant. Somebody who just quit their day job probably isn’t going to get the biggest bang from the buck from running webinars. But where sort of along that progression between, hey, I just started and okay, so I’ve been a consultant for a decade now. Does it fit in? I guess the question to you would be, why did you decide to start them now? Why not earlier? Or why not wait?
I should have done it sooner. My recommendation to other consultants listening to this is: do it early, but not first. The thing you should do first to be abundantly unambiguous about this is start a mailing list. You should be starting a mailing list, keeping it warm, and providing value to people through your mailing list. Once you get a decent enough audience on the mailing list, I think either running a podcast or a webinar is a pretty sensible next step.
And I’d quantify that for anybody listening who’s saying, ooh, mailing list, I need to get started. Ah, what’s a decent audience size? If you get 50 people on your mailing list, you could start advertising events or advertising things to them or reaching out to them for one on one calls. You don’t need to be thinking about growing an audience as an independent consultant. Oh, I need to hit a thousand, two thousand people. If you have fifty people on a list and they’re in your target market, Those are 50 high-quality prospects. That could, in a sense, be the answer to my question: what’s a signal that you should start doing this? If you have 5,100 or more on a list, see if people are interested in attending a webcast or a monthly show.
Test it, start a trial with Crowdcast. They have one-month trial periods, and invite some people. And if you can get 10 to 15 people to show up for your first webinar, congratulations. You have a decent enough audience size to justify it in some capacity. I think that is that’s the yardstick that I would use. And honestly, if you have 50 extremely interested niche people, that’s not unreasonable to get a 20 to 25 percent conversion rate to a webinar. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Absolutely agreed. What? You run webinars, right? I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus for the last couple of months because Burning Man, but they’re in my playbook and we’ll be restarting. within the next month.
Yeah. So you do um fortnightly, monthly?
I do fortnightly. That’s combined with private webinars for my coaching students or private communities that I run. But the public-facing ones are fortnightly.
Let’s talk about call to action on it. What do you try and do during the webinar and how do you end it?
So, I’m a big fan of no pitch webinars. And so, explaining the terminology behind this quickly: a pitch webinar would be one where you end with a call to action of like, buy my book, click the link right below this video. And a no-pitch would be one where you don’t end with a, hey, you should buy this thing, or hey, this is a sales presentation for this other thing. I personally like no pitch webinars better. because they feel a little easier to get started with, especially if you’re a consultant who’s just getting started with webinars, having a call to action That’s promoting a product or a service that nobody buys. You could feel discouraged. Instead, the outcomes I typically focus on are not the outcomes, the call to actions I typically focus on. Are centered around. If you have questions about this topic, reach out to me. If you’re looking for advice on this topic, reach out to me. I’m using the webinars as a high-intensity touch point with these prospects or these people who are on my mailing list. To build a stronger relationship, stimulate conversations, and open the door. So, if I know 30 people attended this webinar, okay, great. They all now have heard a verbal invitation from me. See me on video saying, email me any questions you have on this topic. Which means the few that do email, well, they’re now higher quality prospects. They are further down that marketing funnel towards working with me. I personally like call to actions that focus around get in touch with me, or here’s a free resource, or other things that aren’t, hey, go buy this thing right now. In my mind, that occurs later after a little more nurturing.
Yeah, so I think there’s there’s something operationally to be talking about here, which is you should be connecting your webinar software, in this case Crowdcast. to your email marketing software, be it Drip or MailChimp or ConvertKit or whatever, use Zapier to do that so that you can track specific webinar attendance. It’s not they attended a webinar at any point, although they can get that tag also. It’s that they attended the October 10th, 2017 webinar, right? And it was about this and this topic. And that way, if you’re a particularly savvy marketer, you already have a few day email course that might ladder into a product more sensibly queued up to drip out to them after the webinar has finished. it might be a good way to also keep people accountable and continue educating past the time that the webinars happened.
Completely agreed. And I think that’s much more of an advanced level move, but what you’ve outlined is pitch perfect. Passing that information back to your email marketing provider. Hey, they attended this webinar or attended a webinar on this topic or are interested in webinars in general. Having some post-webinar email sequence predefined that says, hey, you know, we talked about thingamadoodle. Here’s some more information. Here’s an article. Here’s a podcast episode. And by the way, I have a book on that thing. If you want, you could buy it here. Here’s why it’s valuable. Here’s why it would help you. You’ve already naturally segmented people who are most interested in a service or a product or a call with you by them attending the webinar. So it makes sense to aim your marketing specifically at those people. If I was a consultant just starting out with webinars today and had a small list, let’s say under 200 people or under 100 people, I’d focus on Webinars that are answering questions that I’m commonly asked end with a call to action of get in touch if you have questions about doing this or solving a similar problem in your business. And then have a two or three part email sequence afterwards that adds more social proof, sends a link to the recording or interview, and then ends with a call to action of: hey, do you want to get on the call for or on the phone for a 30-minute strategy call to discuss? Topic at hand. Just so you’ve built a lot of trust, you’ve built a lot of engagement with the person who attended the webinar. You’re nurturing them after the fact. And you move them towards the outcome you really want, which is a one-on-one call of a prospect who’s saying, I have a lot of questions about this topic. You are an expert in this area. Can you help me figure out what I should do next?
Yeah, that’s a good way to strategize how to continue that relationship. And it’s a little bit high touch. but it’s also potentially highly valuable for use. So in the past, I want to bring this back into the like ecosystem of what it is that we do and figure out why that’s important. This is a very good way to continue sniffing out expensive problems in your target market. Because if you’ve provided value to them in a webinar and they’ve signed up for a strategy call, they’re not only interested in potentially wallet out with what you do. which is great, but there’s also a knock-on effect of you being able to kind of use it as customer research. So if I got on a strategy call like that, I would spend a least three-fifths, maybe even two-thirds or three-fourths of the time, asking questions. And then and only then trying to prescribe solutions and tie those into specific answers to those questions. So you’re going to be taking notes and then offering strategy towards the end of it. But those kinds of questions, like, man, they’re so helpful for For your business.
Completely agreed. And it’s the people who attend a small private event like a webinar could often be that are the best to get on a call with. Already signaling that they are interested in more information about this or have questions. If your webinar format is a mix of QA, and we’ll get to webinar format in a minute or two. But yeah, those are the most valuable people to be reaching out to. And it is high touch. But if you’re selling consulting services, make sure the webinar is synergistic. With your higher value consulting offerings. You don’t want to have a webinar that ladders into, here’s my $50 audit of your thing. That’s not going to be very fun to do a high-touch sales process on. But if it’s here’s a webinar that ladders into my $1,500 thing, You might spend, say, five to 10 hours nurturing and closing a person. But if you close like two people off of that, that’s a pretty dang good ROI for posting a webinar and then getting two clients out of it. So Make sure you’re focused on a higher value offering that aligns with what your audience is able to afford and the problem your audience is experiencing and the topic of the webinar overall.
Yeah. That’s the kind of thing you want to make sure that the webinar ladders from the weird thing is the webinar is free, right? So you can have people who don’t understand about what it is you do, but the webinar should actually be thinking forward to the third or fourth sale. Especially if it’s an unless you’re selling something at the end of the webinar, in which case it should be the first sale. But other than that, you should be thinking about maybe putting them in on a consulting engagement or something like that, because you have to think of a webinar like you’re spraying out a Ah, one-on-one prospective client call to twenty or more people. I think that’s the best way to frame it.
It’s a good way to frame it. And I think that naturally leads into, like, well, if it’s a one-on-one call, but spread out to 20 people, how do you make the content applicable to a larger audience? The format that I’ve seen work the best that I’ve tested and personally enjoy the most, and I think is most valuable for freelancers or consultants or independent business owners. Is a mixture of presentation and QA. Say 20 minutes on presentation. Let’s talk about the big picture problem. Let’s talk about the specific problem as it applies to this target market. Let’s talk about a couple possible solutions, and this is my recommended solution. Let’s take some questions overall, and the questions could be specific to what you discussed in the presentation portion. They could be more broadly applicable to the topic of the presentation overall. But I think by splitting like 20 minutes on presentation, 30 on QA. You make sure you’re learning from your audience. You’re making sure they’re getting their questions answered, but you’re also giving that free delivery of information. Well, here’s 20 minutes on this thing that’s affecting you. And so they learn a lot from it as well. It’s not just a strict QA webinar, but you have the presentation into the QA.
Yeah, and that QA is also a really good research tool for future offerings, too. You should be coming out of the webinar, and in fact, even any of these strategy calls with Two or three things that surprised you out of it about your particular audience, like maybe you weren’t expecting a certain question or. Maybe it was phrased in a way that was different or used different terminology than what you might know. Those are all huge opportunities to better understand your target market so you can craft More resonant marketing pages and services that really meet their needs.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I completely agree. The most valuable part for me as a business owner of these webinars. Is seeing what questions were asking, what the discussion was like, reviewing the recording after the fact. We’ve talked about reusing content in a number of different places on this podcast, but What I love about webinars is I just presented on this topic so I could now use the recording with another offering or make the recording available to my mailing list or Review the transcript and figure out three or five topics I could turn into articles or emails or podcast episodes. There’s so many ways to take the content that just naturally happens on a webinar and use it in multiple different places.
Yeah. And that allows you I mean, you should always be thinking about reusable content. So there’s one thing that is probably worth keeping in mind here, which is What’s it they call evergreen webinars? What’s the term? It’s webinars where you’re not actually running the thing, it’s just playing back a video. And obviously, you can’t do QA with that sort of thing, but there’s potentially an opportunity to use that to passively sell products. I would consider that to be more of a 400-level consulting move. Completely agreed. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. In terms of tools I’d recommend, there’s so many different webinar tools out there. You use Crowdcast. I’ve used Crowdcast in the past. Currently, I use a mixture of Zoom for smaller group calls or group webinars, and Webinar GM for larger webinars. For somebody who’s just getting started today, who’s saying, What tool should I use to host these webinars? Sign up for Crowdcast. It works great out of it. Crowdcast is crazy easy. Crazy easy, ma’am. Wonderful, wonderful tool. I think you need like the middle plan to be able to export info to your list or have it automatically sync or have Zapier integration, something that’s like you can’t get by with just the base plan. If I recall correctly, it’s the $50 a month plan, which you can afford. It’s worth it as an investment. Especially, again, think about it as. If the webinar just gets the 10 most interested people in your network or on your mailing list to surface and say, oh, I’m really interested in this topic, tell me more about it. I mean, I’d spend fifty dollars to know that right now. Yeah, I super would too.
Yeah. And and that should be I mean By this point, you’ve already built up an audience who trusts you and you’re already delivering value to them. Like, again, this isn’t just. Welcome to the Nick D show. That’s a very good time to get like tumbleweed. Like, that’s not so great. Let’s talk about one last thing. What happens if you run a webinar and you keep doing it every other week and the first one gets a lot of people and then it kind of drops off? What happens if you get diminishing interest? Like, how do you sustain that momentum over time?
I often see that when it’s the same topic or same problem being presented, and the audience just reaches a saturation point where it’s like, we understand the direction you recommend on this, or we understand this is a problem. But there’s no easy next step. What I’d recommend in that situation is rotating through different topics, surveying your audience, and surveying past webinar attendees. What topics do you want to hear more about in a webinar format? Just to understand what would be more interesting for them. If you already are doing those types of things, rotating topics, surveying people, switching topics based on their responses, and you still see a drop-off in attendance. It could be that your list is just getting saturated on webinars as a broadcast mechanism. That just like I do daily emails, some people are like, love the content. Daily’s a bit too much. YOLO, see you later. It may be if you’re running an every other week webinar, your list or your audience members are saying the similar thing. Hey, webinars are great. I’m just not able to budget the time to come to one every other week. It’s an hour, yada, yada. And Changing the cadence, changing it to a monthly call or a every six-week webinar call may make more sense. For your audience. So, if you’re experiencing that as a problem, those are the potential causes and the potential solutions I’d recommend.