Are you promoting your webinars in all of the right places, but not getting the signups you expected? If so, then the problem may lie in your webinar hook. Your webinar hook is the thing that grabs your ideal attendee’s attention and convince them to sign up for your webinar. Think of it as an elevator pitch for your webinar – that thing that must quickly get your ideal attendee excited about what you have to offer and ready to take the next action to learn more. They are meant to make your ideal attendee want to drop everything they are doing so they can learn more about what you have to say. If you are having trouble figuring out what to write on your webinar registration page, creating your hook will help. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can create a profitable webinar hook and where you should be using it to increase your webinar registrations.
Create the Hook
Just like an elevator pitch, your profitable webinar hook should be succinct and persuasive with the goal of selling your webinar to your ideal attendee. Even if the webinar is free, you still have to sell it in order to get the attendee to invest their time into watching it. Your profitable webinar hook should be focused only on selling your webinar. This is not the place or time to try to include a mention of the product or service you will ultimately pitch your webinar attendees, so leave that out of the equation for now. The following are the key elements of a great profitable webinar hook. You don’t need to actually use all of them in your final webinar hook, but rather use them to craft it.
- Who you are, and why people should trust you to deliver the information you are going to deliver in your webinar.
- The problem you encountered in your personal or professional life that inspired you to create the content in your webinar.
- A tease of the solution you discovered to help you overcome your problem.
- The result of implementing the solution in your personal or professional life.
- The call to action that drives people to sign up for your webinar.
Depending on where you plan on using your webinar hook, these elements must be summarized within just a sentence or two. Remember, when visualizing your profitable webinar hook as an elevator pitch, you have got 30 seconds to present it. Here are two examples of ways that someone might pitch a webinar.
Sign up for my free webinar where I’ll show you how to increase your webinar attendance rate.
or
I’m Geoff Ronning, co-founder of StealthSeminar. I’ve worked with organizations around the world that struggled with getting people to stay on their webinars long enough to make their main offer. After observing 7 million webinar attendees across varying industries, I’ve learned what it takes to create webinars that have an 80% attendance rate. Sign up for my free webinar to learn my step-by-step process.
What makes the second one stand out?
- It tells you who I am and why you should trust me.
- It tells you the problem I encountered.
- It tells you that I found a solution to that problem, and how I found it.
- It tells you the specific results of applying the solution I discovered.
- It tells you exactly how you can learn my step-by-step process.
Your profitable webinar hook should gain your ideal attendee’s trust instantly with the assumption that they have never heard of you before now. It should tell the problem, tease the solution, and show the results you have gained from your solution (with specific numbers if possible). And it should tell the attendee that they need to sign up for your webinar to get that solution.
Where to Use the Hook
Now, we’re going to look at a sampling of key places you can must your weinbar hook to increase conversions with your target audience and exactly how to use it.
Registration Page
Your webinar registration page should be an expanded version of your profitable webinar hook. Instead of explaining your webinar in a few sentences, you have a short copy page or video to use to detail the main elements of your hook.
In the above example, you can see a quick introduction of the host, the problem of emails not converting into big profits, the tease for the solution in the bullet points, specific results that could lead to 90% of your profits, and a call to action to save your spot.
In this example, you may not see an introduction of host, but there is a trust factor that the company leading the webinar has Certified ObamaCare Advisors, which does add the element of trust. It also covers the problem of businesses not being ready for ObamaCare and information and solutions for specific things that businesses are not ready for. While this example doesn’t have all of the elements, it has enough of them to be convincing for the right audience. In addition to optimizing your webinar registration page text with your profitable webinar hook, you need to make sure that your hook is being used for search engine results (if you plan on running your automated webinar for a long time) and for social media shares. When optimizing your webinar registration page for search results, you will need to do two things. Optimize the SEO title of the page with the title of the webinar. Optimize the Meta Description of the page with a condensed version (160 characters or less) of your profitable webinar hook. Take these webinar registration pages in search results as examples.
These are written in a way that the right audience would know exactly why they would want to sign up for the webinars just from search results. In addition to the SEO fields (the SEO title and the Meta Description), give careful consideration to the images you use on the page as these may be used when someone shares your webinar registration page on social media. For example, if you have a small profile image, your webinar registration page would look like this when shared.
Whereas if you have an image that is customized to promote your webinar, social shares of your page would look more like this.
If you don’t have an image on the page, you can still have one show up in social media shares by implementing Facebook Open Graph tags on your webinar registration page. These will also allow you to customize the exact text that appears in the social share to use your webinar title and profitable webinar hook. StealthSeminar customers can contact support for help with optimizing your webinar registration pages for search results and social media shares.
Emails
When you send a webinar invite to your email list, you need to make sure your profitable webinar hook is in the right place in your emails. Take a look at this sample of webinar invites from a Gmail inbox.
What you see first are the email subject lines, and after that, you see a preview of the first bit of text on the email. These two areas are crucial when it comes to optimizing your emails with your profitable webinar hook. Setting the subject line of your email is simple. The preview after it can be a little tricky as many email newsletter templates have default wording in them that comes before the design. You do not want to waste your email preview on text like what follows this subject line.
When you create an email to promote a webinar, send a test to yourself to see what comes up in the preview line. You might need to edit the first sentence of your email to make it count, or you may need to get into the HTML of your email template and add a hidden line of text above any default text that comes with the template to ensure that doesn’t get used in the preview. You should use the A/B testing features in your email marketing service to see what subject and preview lines get the most webinar registration conversions.
- Subject lines defining a problem.
- Subject lines teasing a solution.
- Subject lines showing specific results.
The email subject line has one goal: to get people to open your email. You do not have to convince them to register for your webinar in the subject line, but in the email text to follow. Since people are already on your email list, you can skip introducing yourself. The only exception to this is if you are promoting a webinar where someone else is the host or the main guest of the webinar. Then you will need to introduce them and why your email subscribers would want to learn from them. From here, you can use the body of the email relay a shortened version profitable webinar hook, followed by a call to action to click through to the webinar registration page. Or you can go with a long-form email that convinces people to register using your call to action links. Again, this is something you should test with your email subscribers to determine whether a short teaser email or a long-form email converts best in terms of click-throughs to your webinar registration page. If you have the ability to setup conversion tracking in your email marketing service, you should be able to find out which of those clicks lead to the most conversions.
Webinar Teasers
If you are promoting your on-going webinars on other networks like SlideShare for presentations or YouTube for video, you will want to include your profitable webinar hook and link to your webinar registration page within the presentation and video content. You will also want to include the hook and link in the description beneath your presentations and videos.
Note that sites like SlideShare and YouTube cut off descriptions at a certain point. You will want to make sure your profitable webinar hook and webinar registration page link appear before that cut off point so that people see it without having to click anything to see or show more.
Interviews
Keep your profitable webinar hook handy when doing audio and video interviews. If your automated webinar is the main thing you plan to promote, write your hook on a notecard and keep it in front of you along with an easy to say link to your webinar registration page. You may want to use a service like Bit.ly to shorten the URL so you can say bit.ly/successwebinar as opposed to your full registration page URL. This card will prompt you when you get to the point in the interview where you can promote yourself. Depending on how the interview is formatted, and how much time the host allows you to discuss your webinar, you may want to have a short and long version of your profitable webinar hook ready to go. Also have some bullet points listed if the host asks you for more details.
Testimonials
You are not the only one who can create profitable webinar hooks. You should invite your webinar attendees to create them as well. People who loved your webinar will likely want to give you a glowing review, but may not know how to format it. Send your attendees a quick survey after the webinar that allows them to answer the following questions.
- What is your name and job title?
- What problem did you have that led you to sign up for this webinar?
- What solution did you discover in the webinar for your problem?
- What kind of results do you expect to see by implementing this solution?
This will make it easy for your attendees to give you a testimonial, and it will give you great marketing material to use to promote your webinar with hooks that your ideal attendees can really relate to.
In Conclusion
Your webinar hook is KEY. If the hook is too much hype it won’t be believed, if it is not tantalizing it won’t be interesting. Make your webinar hook head turning and believable. It will boost your webinar registrations, attendance and sales. I would love to hear your thoughts, comments and questions below.