Today’s guest post is written by Tom Bishop.
Ever been to the theater?
There’s a feeling of anticipation as you enter the dimly-lit theater and find your seats. Your eyes adjust, and you notice that half the seats are empty. The orchestra tunes up, and on stage, you see the curtains part just a hair as somebody peeks out.
Behind those curtains the air is thick with anxiety. Chorus members stretch nervously. The lead man hurriedly recites lines. The diva is tossing lunch. The producer, peeking through the curtains, is wondering one thing:
Where is everybody?
He sees the same thing you did. It’s only five minutes to showtime and the house is less than half-full. If you’ve ever produced a webinar, you know exactly how this beleaguered producer feels.
It happens every time. You have more than 1,000 people registered for your webinar, and as you near the zero minute, only 300 or so have logged in. It’s a disaster. What should you do?
With webinars, you are the producer and the performer. Seasoned performers learn to imagine performing for just one person, so it doesn’t matter if the house is nearly deserted or packed. But as producer, you have to worry about the crowd. What is the right ratio of registrants to attendees? Is that something you should worry about?
You’re going to hate the answer: It depends.
If you hold similar webinars often enough, you shouldn’t expect high attendance, but everyone in your audience has a chance to see it. If you hold webinars rarely, and your topics are always new, you’ll have higher attendance rates.
For these reasons, it is nearly impossible to find benchmarks for attendance. If anybody can reliably tell you “Tuesday at 1PM is always best” it may be true for them and their business, but not yours.
To find the answers, survey your attendees and non-attendees with unique sets of questions. Why didn’t they attend? Was the webinar what they expected? Did they get enough reminders? Was the webinar too long? Did it answer their questions?
The goal of a webinar is to help people discover your company through a medium they prefer. The people who register and attend have self-selected to learn something from you. So as the performer, you forget about attendance and deliver as if they are the only people who matter.
Break a leg!
Tom Bishop is the director of marketing and communications for KnowledgeVision, an online presentation application. You can follow him on Twitter at @myleftone.
NP5G9VS73GCF