Tim Minton
So last week, we talked about getting and keeping the audience attention. It was a great session, we had hundreds of registrations. And during that webinar, you mentioned that you can actually anticipate what a b2b webinar audience would think and feel during the presentation. So do you remember saying this?
Dean Waye
I do remember saying that? Yes, it’s a bold claim. Yeah. Okay.
Tim Minton
So right now, we have the title slide for the webinar up, you and I are on screen. So I’m curious, what does the audience think when they come into a session and they see this title slide,
Dean Waye
pretty much every standard slide has its own, kind of like covert and an overt message to it. And you can anticipate what an audience is going to be, we’re not going to go through every one of the slides. But I think we’re just going to talk about this one. But the, what you’re saying or what the audience thinks when they’re in the session, and they see it, because a lot of corporate employees, they think like, okay, I’m in the right place at the right time, because a lot of them are double booked. I know when I was in corporate double booked or even triple booked. And they want to check out the first few minutes of your webinar, you know, the courtesy attention period, we talked about last side if they should stay, and the very first thing they should feel is relief that they clicked into the right session. So you want them to know that they’re in the right place at the right time.
Which means your title slide needs to, you know, obviously have the title and the same title as the all the registration pages and emails and LinkedIn posts and stuff. And it should have the date, and sometimes even the time of the event, and maybe the company logo.
Tim Minton
Okay, it seems too simple to mess up, essentially.
Dean Waye
You think so? Right? Companies mess it up all the time. But if you know that you want the audience to feel relief that they’re in the right place at the right time, then it is hard to mess up your title slide.
Tim Minton
Okay, good. So I think we did it right. But something else you said last week was that people essentially waste the audience’s attention and webinars with presentation by putting up an agenda. But you also said that for interview style webinars, no one uses agendas, and it’s actually a missed opportunity. So since this is an interview style, webinar, maximum is gonna put up an agenda. So he’s backstage here with us going in for loop this week. And he’s loaded all of the eight topics we’re gonna talk about into the topic feature here in studio.
Dean Waye
Nice. I like that. So let’s see, it’s not up yet. Yeah, I’m in the right place. That’s the first one. So maximum, if we go to the next one, which is Wow, how are they going to?
Tim Minton
It is.
Dean Waye
Okay. So one point about agendas is they should be interesting, you’re always focused on the audience’s attention. And nothing kills audience attention faster than throwing a boring list, right at people. So either write each bullet, like it’s a headline for something you want people to be curious about, or write it like a narrative or an internal monologue, then it’s not a list. It’s a flow that pulls the reader through to the end. And then, so after the title slide, what you got the thing they should think next is Wow, how are they going to resolve that? And what’s happening here is this thought comes right after the title slide. Right when, where they know they’re in the right webinar.
And the last week, we talked about how instead of opening with an agenda or housekeeping stuff, we open with a gap, right? And a gap is there’s a reality. And we break that reality, like X was true for a long time, but a change has happened. And now x isn’t true anymore. You open your webinar by showing x then showing that X was never true, or is it true anymore? Or is still true, but not for you people watching this presentation. And at the end of your opening people wonder like, wow, how are they going to resolve that. And that’s how you show them during that critical courtesy attention phase right at the beginning, that you’re worth the time investment, attention, investment, emotional investment to stick around, because they want to know how you’re going to resolve this break into their reality.
Tim Minton
Got it. And then after that is when people should introduce themselves and show why they’re the expert. Right? So I guess is the point where the audience tells themselves, okay, this person knows what they’re talking about. They have a solution that’s maybe worked for other people. So now it’s safe, that I can go vouch to my company that this is an OK, company, essentially, bring it back to them.
Dean Waye
Right? You’re showing them that you’re someone who’s comfortable with the material, and they’re good to like, settle in for it.
Tim Minton
Got it. Okay, so I have a question about how to do that, though. Because for most webinars, someone welcomes the audience. That’s like the very first thing that happens. Are you saying that people shouldn’t introduce themselves?
Dean Waye
So here’s, here’s an example. Right? If you’ve ever watched any of my own sessions, of course, I’m usually like behind the scenes, you don’t know which corporate clients I’ve written for on any particular one, but in my own sessions, if I was you, we would say hi, I’m to mitten more about me in a minute. Now that XYZ is possible using AI, some things are I’m just making this up. Now that XYZ is possible using AI, some things that we all knew about ABC have changed. It looks like going forward instead of blah, blah, blah, whatever, establish the gap that you’re opening, right reality, break the reality. And then once that’s done, you move into the actual introduction for yourself. So just Hi, I’m Tim, more about me in the second, then go right into your gap.
Tim Minton
Okay, that makes sense the gap again, but the gaps? Yeah, it’s super useful. But once it’s time to introduce yourself, what should people do here again?
Dean Waye
Well, think of the opening, like introducing yourself and establishing that you’re a safe choice for this audience. And it’s like, sort of like Act One, you want to spend as little time in Act One as possible. And that means you should quickly introduce your gap, your opening to grab their attention. And then as quickly as you can, without seeming rushed, dispense with your own introduction. Your introduction is as much about attitude as anything else. Here’s what I mean.
You know, you’re the expert here, you’re the one educating the audience. So your attitude is, of course, I’m committed. And of course, I’m interested in an expert in this, whatever topic, here’s who I am, let’s get back to the main event. Think about it. From the audience’s point of view, they came to hear about your topic, they don’t want to waste 30 or 60 minutes of their life with someone who isn’t well informed, isn’t excited to be there isn’t sure of their material, and like isn’t comfortable. You assert, and I use that word very carefully, you assert that you’re the right person to listen to right now. Then you have the rest of the webinar to show that you’re the right person.
Tim Minton
Got it? And overall, should you keep this short?
Dean Waye
Yeah, as short as it can be, as long as you still provide enough detail to show the audience you’re comfortable and an expert.
Tim Minton
Okay, okay. So I’m curious if you maybe flip it and think about it the other way. What are some mistakes that you see people make during interest?
Dean Waye
People try to be funny, I mostly do b2b. So maybe in the b2c world, funny can work. But in b2b, like I promise you, whatever joke you think is funny, it’s a lot funnier in your head than it will be when you say it out loud. So it’s almost always a mistake to try to be funny. People try to overcompensate by stacking lots of titles and credentials and experience to establish their expert status. And I mean, a lot of people do it don’t hurt me. You know what I mean by don’t hurt me.
Tim Minton
No. And you know, I’m going to ask this as another Dean-ism. Yeah. What’s the don’t hurt me? Okay?
Dean Waye
You see this more in like, where a technical expert is a presenter, they don’t spend a lot of time talking to audiences. They’re not comfortable. And they’ll say something like, but now I’m not I’m, I’m John, I’m the Senior Engineer of law. I’m not management, or I’m not in sales, or I’m not in marketing, or this problem existed before I joined the company, all of those translate to please don’t hurt me. Got it. But you can’t be the expert and in control of your material and excited about your topic, and at the same time, tell the audience please don’t hurt me. Right.
A milder form of this is when you see this even more often. You open the session by apologizing for something. Sorry, we were late getting started. Sorry, it looks like some people can’t hear us. You notice we didn’t apologize when we came in, even though we were a little late on this one, right? Sorry. I’m nervous about public speaking, whatever the audience wants to relax into the event, even though it’s a b2b kind of webinar.
Technically, it’s like a work event. They want to relax into the event. And no sane person relaxes when the person at the wheel is scared. So your intro is as much about attitude as it is about credentials and experience. You gently but firmly assert who you are. And then you move on to talking to the audience about the audience. And I just spent a lot longer describing how you introduce yourself than you would ever actually spend introducing yourself. But it’s important, right? If I’m in your audience, I want to feel that my time and attention are in good hands, and that I can safely believe everything you tell me for the rest of our time together.
Tim Minton
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. But let’s keep going. So the next stage is we want the future that they’re describing the speaker. So what’s happening here?
Dean Waye
So you’ve opened up the gap, you’ve established yourself as with expert authority, and then you let’s talk about three concepts. There are overall three concepts for the entire thing. There’s the negative present, if the present was a negative, there’s no problem to solve. So why are you on this webinar? There’s the positive future and the negative future. At this point in a presentation we’re dealing with the positive future, you want to talk about benefits. You want to talk about what customers are people who did what you recommend? Did or you know, did what you did, or bought what you sold, the other something good happened to them, and they have something good that they didn’t have before, or they no longer have something negative that they did have before.
And if what you sell is complicated, it’s worth repeating. This is about benefits, not features. We get into features of your product or your service later in the presentation. But its benefits and showing them you know, the happy future if people do what other people have done and basically bought something from you got it?
Tim Minton
And I’m guessing by negative present, you don’t mean that you got me a bad birthday gift?
Dean Waye
Yeah, no, I really need a new name for that.
Tim Minton
Okay, I like it. Okay, so we tell the audience about the positive features, the future, I mean, and then the next thought they should have is, okay, this will help us get what we want. But at the same time, it’s not necessarily like our fault that we don’t already have it. So why is it important to tell them that it’s not their fault?
Dean Waye
Yeah, I’ll tell you why. This is the this is the thought that people should have at this point in a webinar or presentation. And this is the one that oddly enough people find most surprising, like, Why do I have to tell them like anything like that. And I mean, the thing is, nobody’s going to sit around for an hour and listen to you blaming them for their own negative present that they’re living in. So even if their bad situation, or their lack of something, or their need is their own fault, it’s still never completely their fault. You always have to talk about a reason that their negative present exists external to them.
So I came up through tech, so it couldn’t be cost effectively solved before now, or the solution didn’t exist before. And because we invented or some other problem or thing had to happen first, before this problem could be fixed, right? Something else needed to happen or be invented, or whatever. And now that we can do like, you know, you couldn’t do Uber before cloud existed, that kind of thing, right. And so like, you know, and like at least 3g or 4g phones were available. And so there’s some other problem or event that needed to be resolved first, whatever, you absolve them of blame. And then you can talk to them about getting them away from this negative present, and into a positive future.
Tim Minton
Okay, so you mentioned Uber, but you should do this for b2b audiences as well, right?
Dean Waye
Oh, yeah, I pretty much only work for b2b, this is critical. I could spend two hours just explaining all the reasons why like making the audience feel like their negative present is not their fault is absolutely critical for a b2b audience, like do not skip this step. Because you think it’s like silly, because you’re not selling soap or something.
Tim Minton
Okay, fair enough. So let’s keep going next one on our list. So it’s, it’s complicated, I don’t really understand it. But they’ve already done all the thinking and all the work on it. Now, when I read this on the list, before we went live, Dean, I thought that this one was really interesting. And for me, it was interesting, because this is where we actually talk to the audience about something technical.
Dean Waye
Yeah, this is the part where the speaker gets to geek out. Right. So this should be the reaction after you finished explaining how your solution works. You were transparent, you know, you explained and listed your features, you showed a complicated diagram or workflow, because you wanted to slightly overwhelm the audience, right slightly. And they came away thinking that this is too big to do for themselves. Because you know, in software, and in tech, especially, there’s always a danger of the customer is going to figure they could build it themselves rather than buy it from you. Right? So it’s like, okay, this is too complicated is too big for us to do ourselves. But thankfully, your company has already worked it out, right, put in the effort, invested the resources, whatever, and a positive future if they give you money, right. So,
Tim Minton
so it’s my favorite part of the webinar, and you said, it’s the part where you get to geek out over the product, essentially.
Dean Waye
Yeah, what happened before is we used to introduce the speaker, no gap, right? introduce the speaker, throw up an agenda, and then go right into the geeking. Out How Does It Work section, and that would be almost the entirety. And that’s, I think we’ll get into that shortly. But that’s it was a bad idea. That’s one of the reasons like CTAs didn’t work.
Tim Minton
You see this all the time, by the way. Do this Yeah.
Dean Waye
So yeah. And that is, it really is one of the reasons why we used to have so much trouble getting people to respond to a CTA we didn’t open with a gap. And we just beat their attention to death. And then we wondered why nothing ever came of it. So now we start with a structure where we slightly not much really slightly reduce the How does it work or geeking out part of the presentation, just so we can frame up things ahead of time, so that that they can be addressed and Unlike you also want to set up the audience’s predisposition so to speak so that when you get to the call to action, they’re more predisposed to I use predispose a lot and explanation predisposed to pay attention to it and comply with it.
Tim Minton
Got it? Got it. So. So this is essentially the meat of the session, right? It’s the biggest part of the webinar.
Dean Waye
Yeah, people register and attend to get these kinds of details. Right. Nobody watching this, right now came here to stare at you and me and our faces for half an hour. It’s just not a thing. They came for the details. And again, like the details aren’t the problem, the details, don’t kill the audience’s attention. Not establishing the other stuff like the positive future ahead of time was the problem. And why the details ended up boring the audience’s and they would bounce out of there.
Tim Minton
Yeah, let’s hope they didn’t come to stare at us. Okay, so you talked about the negative president, you talked about the positive future. So I’m guessing the next section has to be the negative future. And this is where people say, we don’t want the problem of not doing anything, right. So we need to actually make a move, take action and do something about it.
Dean Waye
Yeah, so I mean, we’ve, we spent a very small amount of time, describing a future where their negative present wasn’t resolved. And so it continued on into their future, right. And b2b gonna have a lot of options here. So it’s usually something like, you’ll lose money every day until this problem is fixed, or your competitor will gain on you every day, until this problem is fixed. And so the challenge is that in b2b, there’s no scarcity. So urgency is almost impossible to achieve with anything external. It has to be felt internally.
Tim Minton
Okay. Can you expand on this a little bit? Dean, I think this is an interesting point.
Dean Waye
Okay, so in b2b, you can’t say there are only a limited number of units left to buy, or we won’t sell this product anymore after a certain date, or this discount. You want to get this discount if you buy by the end of the quarter. Like everyone knows, that’s bullshit. b2b and b2b companies don’t buy things that they can’t also buy tomorrow. Continuity is a very big thing in b2b What if they resell it, all of a sudden, they can’t get any more of it doesn’t make any sense. And urgency tied to dates doesn’t work very well, either. If you I did mostly enterprise sales. And so these are like big deals, and they will take a long time to, you know, eventually close, but you can’t say like, Oh, you’ll get 10% off. If the deal closes by the end of this quarter.
That’s bullshit. They’ll come back next year and say, Hey, remember that discount from last year? We’ll take that now. And you’ll give it to him? Because if you don’t, your competitor will. So scarcity isn’t really a thing in b2b. That’s why you describe an internally focused negative future, like the solution saves you money, and you’re losing money every day. You don’t own it. Something like that.
Tim Minton
Yeah, yeah, there’s definitely no scarcity in b2b. That totally makes sense. Okay, so that brings us into the end. Action, the CTA. This is where people need to think, Okay, I’m going to stop worrying about this, I’m going to do it. People like me have the same problem. They have a solution I’m going to do something about.
Dean Waye
Yeah, CTAs are another topic we could talk about for two hours easy. But at this point in your presentation, you briefly described the negative future after giving them the details of what you sell and showing them the positive future and the negative present before that. So then you give them one, maybe two possible calls to action. And you can either give them hard or soft CTAs but never a vague CTA. Okay.
Tim Minton
What do you mean by vague something like visit our website? I see. I see them all the time in webinars.
Dean Waye
Yeah, that is that one sucks. That sucks. Bad, right? Like, be very clear about what their next steps could be a softer CTA. Get them to subscribe to your newsletter, like nurturing campaign, like subscribing to a newsletter, or clicking to see a video or see a recorded demo. A harder CTA and I don’t mean the harder is the more difficult but harder isn’t a more specific, you will perform an action kind of CTA is they could join some sales forces have opened Q and A’s like once a week or once a month where basically like, all their prospects and leads are invited to come in and just ask questions about the product. Or they can book a discovery call or a one to one demo. Right?
That graduates them from a lead to a prospect but either way harder or soft, because you’ve taken them through the series of stages in your webinar. The call to action is a way to move away from a negative future and toward a positive future because they identify with it now, because you framed it up from the beginning instead of just dumping them in the details. And so they think, okay, yeah, I can take that step. taking that step is what people like me would do.
Tim Minton
Right, right. So making it all makes sense, bringing the audience on the full journey, essentially.
Dean Waye
Yeah, the audience goes on a journey and an emotional and intellectual journey. And that’s a great webinar. Like that’s a webinar that creates change. And every webinar is supposed to create change, or else why did we put in all that work? Right,
Tim Minton
right. Yeah, no, it makes total sense. You need to wrap it up from the very beginning. Yeah. Okay, Jean. Well, I think that covers our eight topics that we wanted to go through during our discussion today. We’re going to have Q&A come up in a second. But I think before we did, we did want to put a poll out to the audience here to get some of their feedback, specifically, so let’s see if we can launch this on how long people spend preparing the content for their webinars. So I think it’s interesting question, everyone has a different style. I’m curious. Maybe you could share with the audience votes? What do you do personally?
Dean Waye
If it’s going to be me, it comes down to whether or not I’m going to be scripted or not. And if I’m scripted, you’re working off of, for my clients, usually, about half of them want to be scripted, and half of them don’t. And writing the script normally takes me about three minutes of writing for every one minute of whatever set on screen.
That makes sense, roughly a three to one. Yeah. And so yeah, and that includes like editing and going back and making sure that I call forward to things and call back to other things. You know, how I like to do that. And how I like to build in the narrative things like the interstitials like, you know, all these companies have come together. Just gonna big shakeout, one of them’s gonna dominate this market, we are not that company. You know, that was kind of like the example from last week and stuff. Right? So generally speaking, three minutes for every one minute, if it’s fully scripted. If it’s not scripted, then it comes down to whether or not with the client, we’re going to do a, you know, the difference between a run through and rehearsal? No, I’m kind of a walkthrough and a rehearsal.
Tim Minton
Yeah, maybe you can explain it
Dean Waye
even for very familiar in corporate terms, like everyone who’s ever worked in any company has been through both probably only been through the run through slash walk through, a walk through or run through different names, is where someone says, like, someone, someone’s boss says, okay, like, you know, run through your slides for me. And that’s okay. Now, slide three comes up. So on this slide, I’m going to talk about x in a rehearsal, slide three comes up, and you start talking about acts like the audience’s life. You don’t say, first, I’m going to tell them about this.
And then I’m going to tell them about that. And then I’m going to ask them a question. That’s a walkthrough or a run through of the slide. A rehearsal is where you pretend the audience is live, and you’re there in the moment, and you actually do it, like you’re going to do it on the day. Not going to be surprised that it takes a lot less time to do a walkthrough. I shoot anyway than our full rehearsal. But our first full rehearsal doesn’t just take 75% more time, it is 90 times more effective. Like there’s no difference in ROI for that. I mean, no comparison, you’re way better off rehearsing than you will ever be just doing a run through.
Tim Minton
Sure. Yeah, it’s an interesting one. Because for me, I think I prefer a walkthrough. Just because then it feels like a little bit more human. I think, on the other end, that people are kind of changing the words as they go through. You’re listening to them you’re responding. But yeah, I guess it depends on the situation, how important but
Dean Waye
just understand that there’s some, there is no like, unit of work metric that we can talk about. But let’s say that the amount of work units is 100. For a presentation where between you and the audience 100 units of work will need to be combined and done. So that what’s in what you’re trying to communicate is put into the audience’s head. All right, the more of those units you do for yourself, the less work the audience has to do, the less patient they have to be, and the clearer your message is going to be for them. So while a run through is easier for you, and people tell themselves, yeah, but then I get to be a little bit spontaneous, and blah blah blah blah, which is absolutely true.
What you’re doing is you’re shifting a lot more of those work units to the audience, they have to wait while you compose a thought. They have to wait while you like stutter and have your crutch words, they have to wait while you may bring up another slide and then quickly read it yourself or remind yourself what it is you’re going to talk about. Right, you’re putting a lot more of the work units onto their side of the seesaw. And really, you want them to be up in the air the whole time like you want all of the weight or as much of it as you can to be on your side of the seesaw. You do more of the work units so that they have to do fewer working.
Tim Minton
Got it? That makes sense. I’m sure we could do a whole other session going into that topic. Yeah. But let’s wrap that there. We have a bunch of answers excited to compare afterwards. But let’s go straight into Q&A. I know we’ve had some questions in the chat. So let’s see what we can pull up on the screen here.
Dean Waye
Like, oh, by the way, now you guys do something. I’m sorry to interrupt, because you saw the flash where we had the splash screen, and it said, Q&A and stuff, right. So I mean, to me, that’s like, I would use that feature. That’s totally cool. It’s another topic we throw it up. I do want to point out for people, besides talking about how something is not the audience’s fault, and it’s never the audience’s fault completely. The other thing, one of the other things is we never have a slide a slide during the Q&A session that says questions or Q&A, like never, never, ever, ever, ever I fire any client that insists on it like absolutely not. Because so many audiences have been trained by so many speakers for so many years, that as soon as the Q&A slide or question slide comes up, if they don’t have a question.
They’re allowed to mentally checkout or even physically, checkout? Sure. Alright, so we never give the audience permission to checkout. And we sure as heck never encourage them to checkout. So a splash screen with Q&A is watch if kiss, right? Leaving up that thing? No, absolutely not. What you leave up is your call-to-action screen, and you leave it up the entire time that you’re in the Q&A, like your call-to-action slide and the entire Q&A period overlap each other directly. Like in a Venn diagram, it’s one circle. Okay, we call that the linger slide, because it lingers for the entire remainder of the webinar until the entire session is torn down.
Tim Minton
Okay, I like it another Dean ism. But okay, let’s get into it. I want to do this Q&A, so that we have time to go forth. So first question here from Dr. Christopher. Do you have to use emotive and compelling copywriting styles to keep your audience from leaving?
Dean Waye
No, absolutely not. In fact, it will turn off a lot of technical audiences the way granted, I mean, at my company, best and webinar company, we have writers and speech writers who help clients of all sizes, do this and create their content. But no, not at all. The only there are only two things to keep in mind. One if you use the right structure. And Tim, I think it’s next week, we actually go into the actual structure, like basically buckets for content. But you’re this bucket in here, fill that bucket, fill that bucket, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve got a great CTA that people are going to respond to. So structure. And then secondly, I like to make sure that the entire script if there’s going to be a script, is that a fourth grade reading level and English fourth grade reading level? Fourth grade?
Tim Minton
And why so low?
Dean Waye
Okay, so there are a few reasons 1/4 is most people are going to listen to a webinar, instead of looking what’s on screen. I mean, you know, prior to services, like contrast, there wasn’t even any way to do anything interesting on screen, right. And so like it was just a static image. So most of them, you know, they can, they can ingest a static image slide in a second, or fractions of a second. And then they can go back and like, clear their inbox or whatever. So they’re listening to it. So audible information works great. At a fourth-grade level, the audience, everything is more visual, everything is shorter, it’s more punctuated, it’s tighter, it’s more sort of, it’s more declarative, and they don’t have it goes right into their head without them having to process very much of it.
So that’s the main reason why everyone should try to write at fourth grade level. And you know, Microsoft Word and Hemingway app and a lot of sites now will actually in real time, show you what the reading level is for your thing. The other thing is, I mostly work in tech, which means lots of people who learn English as a second language. And when you’re talking to an audience where a large proportion learn English as a second language, keeping everything at fourth grade, no matter how complex the concept is, keeping everything at fourth grade English means that they’ll understand it, even though it’s not their native language. Got it? That makes sense? Two reasons, I guess.
Tim Minton
Okay, cool, great answer. Okay, let’s see if we have another question that we can pull up here. Just go through the list. Okay, this one is from Victor s. Button. You
Dean Waye
have this one. Okay, yeah,
Tim Minton
I can take this one. aren’t things that pop-up on-screen distracting from the main message in a webinar, like books? Okay, this is a great one. I think yes, if it’s not interesting to look at, but for the next generation of webinars, we’re aiming to make the visual part as appealing as the Audio part. So you actually just kind of touched on this. But that’s because you know, if you think about it, most people go off and do other things during webinars, they’re looking at their second screen, they’re on a different tab. It kind of makes sense of like, I don’t think that my face is particularly interesting to look at for 30 minutes. And I don’t even think he would do that in a real conversation.
But a good popup or visual, I think keeps people engaged. And if people are more engaged in, you understand more about them, if you understand more about them, they’re more valuable. So we talked through this last time. So it’s important for us, at least when we build contrast that we put this into our product. And I think it’s especially important because it’s really expensive and really hard for a company to do this, right. It’s so time consuming if you had to make a visual for every single part of your presentation. So the idea is that we sell that for you. Yeah, I mean,
Dean Waye
what a lot of people like they feel it, they Intuit it in a marketing department, for instance, or a sales rep when they’re putting together a webinar. But they never really express it or articulate it to themselves is that doing a live event like a webinar, or an interview is this closest, most companies will ever come to producing a Live episode of a TV show? Yep. And making something visually interesting, live is extraordinarily difficult. Just as anyone involved in like, you know, theater, or any of the performing arts, you almost want some you almost want something new happening on screen every few seconds, especially since every year, people are watching more and more online video. And I mean, the amount of time per day that we spend watching video now is insane of all types, from YouTube to social media to you know, movies and whatever. Right, and like, we expect something to be happening pretty much all the time. And you can’t really do that.
You can’t do it at all on traditional webinar platforms. That’s why sort of, like Band Aid solutions were brought in. But it’s, it takes an enormous amount of work, for instance, to have that many slides, or to do animation on slides or whatever, so that you can make that happen. And so it’s like producing a Live episode TV. And so anything that makes that easier to do is probably not distracting, but conforming to what people expect. Because having the look at someone for 30 minutes, we can’t help it will distract ourselves. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Tim Minton
All right. So important to simplify. Okay, that’s a great question. Let’s see if we can pull up another one. So let’s see here. Okay, so this one’s from Andre. And it’s really Dean, can you tell us how he creates a webinar end to end from design phase to post event phase?
Dean Waye
Yes. Yes, I can. I know how to do it. I’ve done it before.
Okay, that can be a really long one, create it from design phase to post event phase. Okay, so I normally start in the middle, I start with whatever I start in the middle, if you imagine that every live event has three phases, there’s an outreach and marketing phase to let people know it exists. There’s a live event itself, and that content, and then there’s the post event, content marketing really kind of thing, whereas it’s more advertising. In the beginning, its content marketing at the end, that’s the replay video and burning in the captions and getting the transcript done. So you can make a blog post and make it more easily searchable on Google and all the other nice stuff, creating excerpt videos that you can, and then writing the LinkedIn posts, the client like posts up and that kind of stuff. So I started in the middle, which is the live event if I’m being paid to do the whole thing, because sometimes, most of our clients, they pay for the marketing types at the beginning and end, then the whole thing is more of a, you know, full-service kind of thing.
But then inside the middle part, I start with call to action. And I want to know, and I want to decide what I want the audience to do, right, and you never get everyone in an audience to respond or you know, to a call to action. But the goal is to get everyone in the audience to reply to the call to action. And then once I have that, I can work backwards with all the main points. And then I just fit it into my structure, starting with coming up with the gap. And then the introduction. I do it enough. I know how to introduce myself. It takes like 45 seconds, and I’m done. And then going into you know the positive future parts and then why it’s not their fault and then geeking out about some technical detail. I like to put in a pivot we talked last week about the deep dive pivot or the horizontal pivot if anyone was trying to remember the deep dive is where you sort of pick one thing about your geek in that section and really flesh it out. The horizontal one was the Etsy thing we said like you know, we make this product, but it turns out people on Etsy are using it for this other thing just goes to show how versatile that sort of like an entertainment or mental vacation for the audience to do a horizontal pivot.
Right, and then a little bit about the negative Sure, and then bring them into the call to action. And then the rest of it is just once I have that, then the marketing is really simple, really simple, because I just follow the my own advice around like, for instance, rope bridges, you know, the email subject line, its only job is to get the email opened, I don’t try to educate the entire audience about everything we’re going to do in the subject line, it’s so that it gets the email open the emails job is just to get people to click to the registration page, the registration stage job is to make it as easy as possible for them to register. And then you know, a couple of follow ups between when they register and when the live event happens just to keep it a top of mind, then we move into the live event.
And then once it’s over, usually within a day or two was an email will go out to everyone who registered with a link to the blog post where we have the replay video with the captions burned in and the full transcript edited to take out crutch words like and so and right. And other things people say, you know, which sound normal when you’re listening to it, but when you have to read it, it’s like, why is this here? Why am I reading the fact that he says, um, you know, every other sentence or something like that. And then we don’t hear, we don’t consciously hear a lot of that stuff. But when it’s black and white, definitely see it and it gets annoying. And then some excerpts and little follow up videos, and then figuring out what you want to do next time. That’s the process. Start with the call to action at the end of the middle phase, and then work your way backwards using the structure and then work on the marketing with the rope bridge concept, and then do the content marketing to remind everyone how great it was.
Tim Minton
Okay, it’s a great answer. longer one, and I actually think it’s a great segue to wrap this up and kind of push into next week where we’re going to be talking about structure. So again, this week, we saw what the audience’s reaction should be. Next week, we’re gonna go through what you should be doing in order to say.
Dean Waye
that what prompted each one of those thoughts or feelings? Yeah, exactly,
Tim Minton
exactly. So that’s next week on Wednesday, same time, same place, and then we’ll have a final session in two weeks. For Dean, you’re going to do a full Q&A, and whatever anyone wants to ask, shoot. Yep. So come back for that as well. But thanks again, and I’ll see you in one week. See