March 13th was the day we had to shut down in Rhode Island. We always had webinars on our to-do list, and the shutdown forced our hand. Our first was March 16, and since then we’ve been doing them consistently three times a week on different topics at different times of day. Here are some tips for success:
1] Don’t just think about leads...
Ultimately, we want to help elevate contractors’ brands, so we structured our webinars to be as educational as possible. If they leave here smarter than they were in the beginning, that’s the goal.
2] ...But generate leads
In terms of leads, we’re at around 25-30% on average. There was some warm up time for lead generation, but now there are people who came to our first webinars—who were in no way ready to have those conversations then—reaching back out and saying, “Hey, can we have that in-depth conversation now?”
3] Saturday mornings are best
We’ve been doing in-showroom workshops for a long time, and always noticed that Saturday mornings draw the best attendence. When we first started with webinars, we figured that people were at home and starving for content. We thought it would be great to have weekday virtual coffee breaks and happy hours. Those worked to a certain extent, but we found that Saturday morning remains the best day and time. We will still offer something shorter, like 30 minutes, during the week, but we reserve longer webinars with in-depth conversations for Saturday.
4] Limit the number of attendees
Before the pandemic, we would cap our in-person events at 25 in order to give people the attention that they need and facilitate real conversations. Any more people than that made it challenging for us, and we’ve found it is the same way with webinars. Our virtual sweet spot is 12 to 15 people.
5] Develop a process that works for you
As we’ve gotten better at hosting, we’ve changed the dynamic of the moderators. For us, a team works better than a single presenter. That way, one person can be monitoring the chat and throw any questions or comments up to the other presenter, like “Hey, Jan has a question. Why don’t we jump on that before going to the next topic?” If anything gets too in depth or off topic, we say, “Let’s setup a call after this and do a deeper dive.” That personalized, real-time attention is really engaging and makes people feel like they’re important.
The National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI) is a medium for business development, advocacy and industry education. NARI connects homeowners with its professional members and today has 44 chapters nationwide. go to NARI.org.