Webinar

Written content is missing two things. One is the chance to ask back. Someone who has started evaluating a tool would rather describe their own situation and ask whether it works than read a description. The other is names. An article tells you how many people read it and nothing about who they were. Both gaps matter most at exactly the point where someone is close to deciding.

An article Ravi wrote about keeping meeting notes in order reached 4,000 people a month at Pagedeck. Inquiries over the same month: two. There was no way to learn who the other 3,998 were. An offline seminar solves both problems, but it requires getting people into one room, and filling thirty seats took two weeks of work.

A webinar moves that seminar online. Attending requires a name and an email, questions can be answered while it runs, and the recording stays behind as an asset. With travel out of the picture, people gather around the topic rather than around a city. Publishing the topic in advance and taking registrations also self-selects the audience, the same way an offline event does.

Set a topic and a date, open a registration page, and gather people. Six steps.

1. Frame the topic as the attendee's problem. Put the product name in the title and only people who already care will register. Say you'll be covering how meeting notes get scattered and people who don't know the product register too. The title is doing the targeting, so it gets written before anything else.
2. Set the length and the time. Forty-five minutes works well, split into 30 minutes of presentation and 15 of questions. It runs inside working hours, so Tuesday through Thursday mornings draw the highest attendance. Run past 45 minutes and people leave mid-session; cut below 30 and there's no room left for questions.
3. Build the registration page. Use a landing page, a standalone screen built to drive one action, and hold the fields to about name, email, company and role. Past six fields, registrations drop noticeably.
4. Send three reminders: a confirmation right after registering, a note the day before, and the link ten minutes before the start. Drop any one of the three and the number of people who register and forget goes up. The ten-minute one moves attendance more than the other two.
5. Run it. Collecting questions during registration keeps the question period from going silent. Open with three of those and hands go up afterward.
6. Follow up. Send the recording and the slides to everyone who registered, including people who didn't attend — registering is already a signal of interest. More people watch the recording than attended live often enough. Tag who watched it, because that signal outlives the session.

Of those who register, 40 to 50 percent typically show up. Two hundred registrations means about 85 people in the room. Not knowing that ratio leads to misreading the result. Report registrations as attendance once and every later number becomes suspect.

Three roles run it, and the people who come already know they have the problem.

• A marketer picks the topic, gathers the audience and sends the reminders. Ravi holds that seat at Pagedeck.
• The presenter is someone who actually works on the topic — a product owner or a domain expert. If a marketer reads their words instead, the question period stalls. Answers grounded in the presenter's own experience are what make that period worth anything.
• Sales comes in afterward. Contacting only the people who asked questions performs better than contacting the whole list. The rest stay on the list for later instead of getting a call now.

The audience sits one step past the stage of finding articles through search. They know the problem exists and are choosing how to solve it. For someone who doesn't know the problem yet, 45 minutes is too large a commitment; an article or a short video fits that stage. For someone who has already decided to buy a tool, a product demo fits better than a seminar. A webinar belongs between those two. Putting one event in front of all three stages at once is what makes attendance look good and follow-up look empty.

A prospect who has left contact details is a lead, and this format is used heavily among content types because leads arrive with names attached. Something given in exchange for contact details is a lead magnet, and a webinar serves as one on its own. A lead marketing considers promising is a marketing qualified lead (MQL), and many teams put webinar attendance into that definition.

"Two hundred registered and 85 showed up. That's normal."

Establishing up front that registrations and attendance are two different numbers.

"Nine fields on the registration form is too many. Cut it to four and ask the rest later."

Collecting more information reduces the registrations themselves.

"I'll pass along only the twelve who asked questions. The rest get the recording."

Splitting the next action by the strength of the interest.

Ravi ran one 45-minute webinar on keeping meeting notes in order. Two hundred and ten registered, 92 attended, and 14 asked questions. Half of those fourteen questions were about moving existing material across. Sofia contacted only those 14 and booked meetings with six of them within two weeks. The two weeks an offline seminar spent filling seats went into the topic instead.

Compared with the article that reached 4,000 people a month and produced two inquiries, the reach is far smaller. What it produced instead was names, and a record of what people are unsure about. Ravi now uses the two formats for different jobs: articles bring in people who don't know the product, and webinars collect the names of people who already do.

The most common reading is that it's a product demo held online, since sharing a screen and talking looks the same from outside. But what registrants signed up for is 45 minutes on a problem. If 25 of a 30-minute presentation is product screens, nothing happens in the room and registrations for the next one fall. Promise one thing on the registration page and deliver another, and gathering an audience under the same name gets harder.

Reading attendance as the result is the other one, because registration and attendance counts are the first numbers reported. But 300 people in the room and nobody asking a question means the topic and the audience didn't match. What this format produces is names and questions, and the next session's topic comes out of those questions. A thin room with eight serious questions is the better outcome, and the headline numbers won't say so.