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It is very tempting to directly focus on the webinars themselves: the content, the slides, the presenter. But if you don’t set a clear goal, your webinar can still fail. How do you set a good and clear goal? The answer lies in the funnel.

The question you have to ask first is: “why do we want to organize this webinar?” In other words, what is the eventual goal of our effort? When we ask these questions, we regularly receive the following answers:

• “We want to share information about our product.”
• “We want more customers.”

In our experience, these kinds of goals are too vague. The result of vague goals is that you also get an unclear outcome. As a result, you will have the impression that your webinar “did not work”.

A webinar does not stand on its own

This is important to realize. A webinar is often part of a process or series of consecutive actions that focus on the eventual goal. For example, sales. This is also called a “funnel” in the marketing world.

How does the funnel work with a webinar in it?

The webinar is often a step for people to really get acquainted with your product. The next step could be, for example, a visit to a website and the step after that an appointment with an account manager. With every next step, people drop out, but eventually an x percentage of visitors will become customers. By creating such a view you can see where this happens exactly, for example, when the number of customers lag behind. You can then also intervene in a more focussed way. If there are enough people on the landing page, but no one clicks through to the sales page, something goes wrong there and you can make adjustments.

Sharp evaluation

Suppose the goal of a webinar is that as many participants as possible schedule an appointment with an account manager. The eventual success of the campaign depends on the number of accounts opened or subscriptions started.

The goal is to host a webinar for 150 participants and get 25 appointments out of it. Eventually this should result in 7 subscriptions. The advantage of a funnel is that during the final evaluation you can see exactly in which “layer” it went well didn’t. Was it because of your invitation process, your landing page, your call-to-actions? The more specific you are, the sharper you can evaluate. And the more successful your webinars and thus the whole campaign is.

Additional advantage: clarity for the organisation

By mapping out the entire process in this way, you also ensure that it is clear to everyone within your own organisation what is going to happen. By far the most webinars have the goal that the viewers perform a certain action, but even if you want to transfer knowledge it can’t hurt at all to check if you have succeeded in your intention.

Our advice: always make such a funnel yourself, even if it’s a scribble on the back of a beer mat. This will help you enormously to clarify what you are doing and contributes positively to the final result.