If you have not watched parts 1 through 3, and you want to watch them in order?  Just scroll down.

Also, be sure to check out our trove of awesome articles in our blog. We’re sharing years of  proven experience and ninja-like direct marketing secrets that can make your marketing so much more effective. 

If you’re new to using webcast platforms for direct marketing, lead generation, premium content, coaching or engagement programs you will gain many useful tips… and save you tons of headaches. 

If you’re an old dog who wants to learn some new tricks, or a business owner who wants to generate more revenue from your list and site traffic or increase customer 

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It’s a marketer’s dream that can provide a great experience for the user and drive conversion rates like no other medium.

But, it is not without its limitations.

The platforms that offer the most useful functionalities – the powerful conversion tools – often have a significant constraint in terms of audience size.

I was recently asked by a client if we could do a webinar with prepared communication elements. “Sure” I said as my wheels began to spin on her project.

“How many people do you expect to attend live?” I asked.

“About 15,000 to 25,000,” was her reply.

Screech!!! 

I explained that while there are webcasting platforms that are robust enough to host tens of thousands of people in your live audience, the cost is substantial – over $5,000 for one event.

What’s worse is that the platforms that can hold large groups are not among the very best webcast platforms for conversion webinars.

Those platforms share a minor technological constraint. Your “room” is full once your live audience swells to a mere 1,000 attendees.

Once I revealed that, the idea of using a webinar, as far as the marketer was concerned, was dead. Simple math made it “impossible” in her mind.

If I can’t put 25,000 people into a webinar, I cannot use a webinar for this marketing initiative. So, I’ll just go with a video instead.

Wait… Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Webcasting gives your video or multimedia something a streaming video can’t.

The interactivity and features that webinars bring to the party can drive a huge boost in your conversion rates and sales.

If we apply a little Asymmetrical Thinking we can enjoy the fruits of those benefits.

How?

Use prepared elements. Record the main part of your presentation. Then, host the same webinar multiple times, limiting the size of each webinar to an audience of 1,000 (close the doors at 1,500 registrations).

By doing this, you’re turning the proverbial “lemon” into some very tasty lemonade.

Think about it, if you had a webinar room that held all 25,000 people… realistically, how many could attend all at the same time and day that works best for YOUR marketing calendar?

Big trade shows can draw huge crowds like that. Major recording artists can pack stadiums with one concert. Professional sporting events can draw huge crowds.

But the typical Internet marketer publisher starting a webinar marketing program needs to have reasonable expectations

Even if you have an active list with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. These people work, they have families. They have plans. How could one event… at one time… on one day… be convenient for them all?

Squeeze Your Audience Into Just One Event Only If You Want to REDUCE YOUR TURNOUT

Think about it. Why do Broadway shows run twice a day six days a week? Why are movie theaters running the same movie five times a day in two theaters?

The nature of any pre-scheduled media event is that it will naturally only be filled with people for whom the time and day is convenient. And it will eliminate many of the people who would like to attend, just because it doesn’t fit their schedule.

If that makes sense, then it makes sense to run a series of events on the same topic and make it easy for your audience and yourself by filling most of the time with prepared communication and limit live elements.

Start by making three dates available and market your events with a strict limit of how many can attend.

On the registration page, have your web development team display how many seats remain out of the 1,000 that were available.

In a universe of potentially 25,000 attendees… having room for just 1,000 in one event could spur a “feeding frenzy” with your leads jumping at the 1 in 25 chance.

It’s a great way to demonstrate scarcity, establish urgency and build social proof all at the same time.

And, with a smaller audience segment, you’ll be able to run your multivariate tests to establish which lead, pricing and offer will convert best.

Then, once you’ve optimized your message for maximum conversions, you can invite the rest of your list to a fully-interactive replay version of your best-performing webinar.

That’ll drive a higher overall conversion rates and because of the added convenience for the user, a bigger overall reach.

Mark Hirsch is the founder of WebinaROI and the author of Funnel #645, a step-by-step guide to developing and automating your webcast marketing, which is available free for a limited time. Click here to get your copy.

The post How I Learned to Love the Webcast Medium & Work Around It’s Weakness appeared first on WebinaROI.

About 5 to 10% of the adult population has that special something that enables them to get up in front of an audience and deliver a great presentation.

Another 20% or so could muddle through one, mustering just enough charm, wit and charisma to keep an audience on their side.

Let’s face it, some people just have more of a knack for the spoken word than others.

Maybe you’re like that… But chances are, you’re not. If you’re like most people, you struggle with giving presentations.

The good news is you don’t need toastmasters or media training to deliver a killer presentation that engages and converts your target audience…

You just need to embrace “prepared communication”.

It’s What Makes Movie Stars Actors Come Across So Well

Think for a moment about the behind-the-scenes in a movie. Even if you’ve never been to a studio or back lot sound stage, you’ve seen enough movies and TV programs about making films to have a sense for what it’s like.

A writer or a team of writers, write lines. Actors rehearse their lines, by reading them out loud. Then, the writers rewrite parts and pieces of the script. Once the script is finished, the actors rehearse and prepare for their scenes.

Then, the cameras roll. Sometimes actors nail their lines on the first take. But usually, it takes many, many “takes” to capture a scene.

Actors flub their lines, lose their composure, laugh and break character. They get tired. They get thirsty. Their makeup runs.

And because they’re human like you, they mess up.

So, the Director works with them, over and over, to get the scene just right.

Then, all of the footage goes into post production where editors cut out the bad takes and string together the best. And viola…

All The Audience Sees Is The Movie Star Hitting His Lines Perfectly

That’s what makes movie stars so cool and larger than life. They always have the right words to say and they say it with perfect timing, which just isn’t the way it works in the real world for the majority of people… who were not born with the gift of perfect delivery and timing in every situation…

This is the Great Equalizer 

Did you know that the webcast medium – is the ONLY medium – that can give you the same edge that movie stars enjoy?

It’s true.

You can use the webcast medium for presentations that blend “prepared communication” with real-time, LIVE elements.

So, When You Mess Up, It’s No Big Deal

Your flubs end up on the cutting room floor as out-takes.

What your audience sees in your webinar is you at your best. They don’t need to see the four takes that you needed to say your line ‘just right’.

What this does for your image and your audience’s perception of you is phenomenal.

No matter what gifts you have (or lack) as a public speaker or presenter, every webinar you create can be more engaging, more interactive and can be personalized on-the-spot to your audience.

I know of no other medium that can make you sound smooth as silk WHILE allowing you to have immediate, dynamic interaction with your prospects and customers.

You can’t do it with YouTube videos or by putting video on your homepage. Only webcasting gives you this power.

The question is…

Can the movie star edge benefit you?

Drop us a line and we’ll schedule your complimentary strategy call.

Happy Marketing.

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The hottest thing in online marketing among publishers these days is the Video Sales Letter, sometimes referred to as a Video Sales Page. These direct marketing multimedias are typically long videos, full of both informational and marketing content.

In its simplest form, the VSL is a slide presentation, black text over a white background with voiceover narration that matches the slides verbatim.  The VSL is embedded on a webpage, and plays automatically when the page loads. User controls are limited to pause and play. At some point during the video, the “Order Now” button appears, usually directly below the video player.

If you’re in Internet marketing or online publishing, you’ve seen a ton a Video Sales Letters. You’ve probably used them a few times yourself.

The very first one I produced provided a significant lift… 

I began creating Video Sales Letters several years ago. My employer at that time had heard VSLs were increasing conversion rates by as much as 400% in some cases. The task was simple, just take the long sales page copy, tweak it a little and present it in an AV audiobook form. Frankly, I wasn’t a fan of the look, but it worked the first time… and every time thereafter.

As this practice spread, the simplest type of VSLs began to lose some of their competitive advantage. Conversion rates have fallen, but are still better than a static HTML pages.

In response, Video Sales Letters have become more sophisticated over time, as publishers ramp up production values to regain that edge.

Video Sales Letters today have become far more “multimedia”, featuring video, stock images and footage, along with narration and text. From what I’ve seen and heard, they continue to provided a DOUBLE DIGIT BUMP over the same copy on a static web page.

A double-digit bump can mean a lot of money…

On a launch that would otherwise generate $1,000,000 in sales, the Video Sales Letter can bring in an extra $100,000. Not bad for a multimedia that might cost $2,000 to $4,000 to create.

That double digit lift cannot be ignored by any smart Marketing Director. The tactic has worked and it continues to. But the lift is slowly waning, and more and more marketers are looking for new solutions.

Enter the automated webinar…

With a slight tweak to the scripting of an existing VSL, marketers can repurpose or extend their message to a medium that engages far better and converts at even higher rates.

There are several webinar platforms that allow you to take the typical Video Sales Letter and make it interactive. The added features enable marketers to collect useful sales intelligence from prospects and hold the audiences’ attention longer.

How much longer?

In my experience, a webinar audience is 4 times as engaged than the Video Sales Letter audience.

A very informative thirty-minute VSL will hold perhaps 20% of the audience through the end. I’ve scripted and produced conversion webinars that hold 80% of the audience for over an hour.

If that’s not reason enough to start your own testing with webcast marketing, I don’t know what is.

Click here to download our latest ebook absolutely FREE… 

The 15 Essential Points Every Successful Marketing Webinar Script Must Cover.

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I considered entitling this article Sticking Your Head in the Sand. By either name, this common mistake is the biggest stinker of the bunch.

With all of the tools available to us as online marketers, I am amazed at how many “marketing experts”, publishers and online entrepreneurs IGNORE the best thing about online direct marketing!

(But as I’ve said before, there are companies that market online. And then, there are companies that know how to harness the power of interactive online marketing.)

What Are You Ignoring?

If you’re like most companies that market online, you’re probably ignoring the fact that you can measure everything you do.  And you can test various things to find what works best. When you find something that works even a little bit better, it can dramatically grow your business. IF you have the time and resources to gather that information and take it to the 2nd stage.

If you aren’t measuring and testing your businesses online marketing funnels; if you are just going from one campaign to the next without creating an evergreen, automated and interactive marketing process; you may be be leaving millions of dollars in revenue “on the table”.

I’ll explain more about the PositiveROI Equation another time. But suffice to say, with the type of information that you can access easily through free online tools, you should never, ever market only the basis of one person’s hunch, opinion or creative.

Test and interact. Let your target market tell you what they will respond to.

I recently mentioned this to a struggling online entrepreneur who responded “Well, if this were a pay-per-click ad, that would be easy to do… but this is a live webinar we’re talking about!”

I explained how easy it is to test several variations of your webcast marketing event. “You can test as many variations as your traffic and budget allows!”

Keep Your Tests Simple

The Lead, The first 30 seconds of your webinar must grab your audiences’ attention, drive home the primary benefit of attending, and promote the holdback. Let’s say to keep our test simple, we are going to test two variations of your opening statement. Lets call these variations of your webinar A and B. For example, you might choose one of your primary benefits as the lead in A and focus on another in the B lead.

Then, Test pricing, Now, we add the second variable. The same product with two prices gives us four versions of our webinar to test. For this example, we’ll price the product $29.97 in version A1 and B1, versus a flat $29 price point, which we’ll use in webinars A2 and B2.

And Vary the Offer. if you’re really adventurous, test showing a comparison of two distinct offers with varying prices and the combination of premiums and other value-adds that you offer. We’ll call them the “low, medium and high” package, call this one X vs. a “low versus a high”, this variate we’ll call “Z”.

Now, with very minor changes to scripting, you have eight combinations of the same marketing webinar (A1X, A1Z, A2X, A2Z, B1X, B1Z, B2X and B2Z.)

Making these variations is very a small matter from a planning and production perspective, but most companies that market online don’t take the time to do it!

Most companies that market online devise one presentation and run all of their leads through it. What a huge mistake!!

Drive Leads, But Go Light on the Gas

By running a small test-sized group through each of the eight versions of your marketing webinar, you may very well find one version that out-converts all of the others by a wide margin.

Even if you can only squeeze out one half of a percentage point. That little extra edge is the first hurdle that you must cross to turn a small success into a million dollar business… or take a million dollar business and explode it to the $10 million mark… or a start up can go from zero to $1 million in under a year if they approach webcast marketing and marketing webinars with the goal of putting their webinars into automated marketing funnels.

It all starts by opening your eyes, taking your head out of sand and making the commitment to know your metrics.  If you’re too busy to know your metrics, hire a good agency to do it for you.

Testing is the key to unlocking greater success and making more money in your online business.

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In my early years as a retail stockbroker, I was fortunate to have learned and studied all manner of sales technique.

I changed careers at the age of 24 and was in PR for the eleven years that followed.

During that time, I honed the craft of integrating brands and marketing messages within newsworthy content that earned editorial coverage on consumer media outlets around the nation.

All of that experience was fertile ground for what has become a successful and rewarding career as an online marketer.

Iʼve learned many things along the way, and itʼs my mission to share my experiences and information with you to help you reach your business goals.

Recently, I was asked the question…

Arenʼt all webinars “direct marketing” webinars?

To this, my response is flatly, “no, theyʼre not”.

A webinar is a medium… a stage if you will.

The content you create and deliver through this powerful medium is what defines it.

For your webinars to be “direct marketing webinars”, they must have the following three ingredients.

1. Calls to Action
2. Incentive to Act
3. Interactive Loop

Most marketers and consumers are familiar with the first two ingredients. The call to action, or CTA, and the incentive to act.

Every good direct mail promotion or infomercial includes these ingredients in abundance. “Call our toll free number now,” is a classic call to action. “Click here to order” is another.

A good example of incentive to act is commonly seen in DRTV, “If you order in the next fifteen minutes, weʼll double your order.”

Both of these ingredients are easily scripted into a webinar, and depending on the technology platform you use, your buyers can simply click a button, or pick up their
phones to respond and place their order.

Without these two key ingredients, you canʼt call your webinar a direct marketing webinar.

Just as you couldnʼt possibly bake homemade cookies without having flour and sugar. Both are essentials.

The third ingredient is one that only the most sophisticated and patient online marketers and Internet entrepreneurs put to use.

The Interactive Loop, is a simple four-step process. Set a goal, test, measure, repeat.

(I recently gave a presentation with more detail on this process, which is available to members of our Webcast Marketer .comUnity).

Like the more widely used direct marketing channels, webcasting provides you with an ideal platform to do just that.

If you have an HTML sales page or a video sales letter that is already converting well, itʼs easy to repurpose your copy into a direct marketing webinar.

Just remember to include your calls to action and give your audience an incentive to act now.

Use the simple interactive loop process to set a goal in line with your current customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value metrics, test with a small budget and you
can quickly find that direct marketing webcasts provide a tremendous lift over other forms of online marketing.

For more information on direct marketing webcasts, download our free eBook, The 15 Essential Points Every Successful Marketing Webinar Script Must Cover.

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If you are going to use webinars for marketing, you need to beware of one KILLER error, this can have a bigger impact that any of the other three common mistakes we’ve covered to date in this series.

Before I reveal the killer in this whodunit, I need to take you back a few years and share an example that closely parallels the mistake we want to avoid…

I was working inside of a fast-growing online financial publisher. We became aware that our competition was having success with a technique called a video sales letter.

In essence, a video sales letter is like an audio book. A narrator is reading is a long-format direct marketing sales page, set to a series of simple slides which display, word-for-word, the script that the narrator is reading.

You’ve seen tons of these online by now. Catchy headline, black text over white background, no video player controls. A promise by the narrator that the video would soon be taken down from the Internet… These video sales letters seem to go on forever. Often with no call to action until the video had played for 45 minutes or more.

Well, our competitor was having great success, simply converting their long sales pages into these simple videos.

We had heard of one video sales letters outperforming the HTML version of the same copy by as much as 400%!

With all the buzz inside our small industry, it didn’t take long for video sales letters to became all the rage in financial publishing. And even though I didn’t personally like them, they were working. Driving huge lifts over the HTML version of the exact same sales page.

And you can’t argue with the metrics…

On average, our video sales letters were driving a double-digit lift.

Our copywriters requested video sales letter versions of all of their sales pages, whether we were doing launches of new information products, creating squeeze pages for lead generation or running internal promotions to market to our own list.

It was a great return on our investment… a Junior editor’s time for two or three days, could increase conversion rates by 12%, 20%, 35% and more. Where do I sign up?

Eventually their effectiveness waned.

Why? Because our audience started to recognize that they were being sold to every time.

The first few times a user would see a video sales letter, his or her response rates went through the roof, because it was a novel approach.

The user was more engaged, and initially, they had no expectation that they were being sold to.

Like the “Boy Who Cried Wolf”… Only in Reverse

After a year or so, every time our users saw a video sales letter start to play, they knew we were selling them something.

So, over time, the video sales letter’s lift began to evaporate. They were still working, but their effect was muted, (from what I heard, the effect waned for the competitor who had started the trend too).

The moral of this story is don’t become predictable.

As an online marketer, you are smart to learn to use webinars in your marketing. They give you more interactivity. They’re more engaging. And you can gather a lot of information about your audience.

But you’ll be a lot smarter if you use webinars for more than marketing.

Give your audience informative webinars with no strings attached. Create a series of webinars that provides great editorial value.

Then, as your audience is watching and interacting with your webinars – when their “guard” is down – use webcasting to close the sale, and you can see a huge bump in your metrics too.

Mark Hirsch is the founder of WebinaROI.com. We help marketers leverage the most powerful direct marketing medium ever created.

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