"let's do a webinar together"

For about a year, the webinar was the easiest marketing job going.

I was in-house through COVID, and my KPI was top of funnel leads. The webinar was how I hit it. If I got to the back end of the month and the number was light, I'd just put another one on. Pick a topic, write a title, send the invite. People signed up. The number went up. Everyone was stuck at home with nowhere to be, so a webinar at 2pm on a Thursday was, weirdly, something to do.

That wasn't skill. It was timing. We had a captive audience and we mistook it for a working channel.

The invite goes out and you can almost hear people sigh. They know the shape of it already. A nervous host, a stack of slides, ten minutes on who you are before anything useful happens, and a pitch bolted onto the end.

So they register and don't show. Or they show, mute it, and get on with their email. The format hasn't got worse. People just have somewhere else to be again.

The usual response is to make the webinar tighter. Shorter, better slides, a slicker follow up. None of it helps much, because the slides were never the problem. Watching someone present is boring, and a slightly less boring presentation is still a presentation.

The thing to change isn't the webinar. It's the reason anyone would give up an hour for it.

Anyone that's followed me for any length of time knows that I love to gamify marketing, recently we did that with one of our clients.

With Polaris we didn't run a webinar. We built the A/B Test Gameshow.

It works like this. We put real A/B tests up on screen, two versions of the same site side by side. One of them won, one didn't. The audience votes for the one they reckon performed better, and then we show what actually happened. Get every round right and you walk away with €100, which keeps everyone honest and paying attention.

It suits a CRO agency in particular, because of a problem every CRO agency has. People assume they already know how conversion works. Bigger button, brighter colour, clearer copy. The instinct feels obvious and it's usually wrong.

So the room votes, confident, and then watches it go the other way. Nobody had to be told they were wrong about anything. They worked it out live, which is the only version of that lesson anyone remembers.

That's the part most people get backwards when they're trying to look like experts. You don't tell people you're good at this. You let them have a go, watch them miss, then explain why. Being right reads very differently when the audience has just been wrong.

Plenty of qualified leads, three partners who wanted to run it again, and a room that voted, asked questions and stayed to the end.

That last bit matters more than the leads. Plenty of webinars get registrations. What they don't get is attention. People sign up and then drift off around the twelve minute mark. This lot stayed because they wanted to see if they'd call the next one right.

It's worth being clear about what actually changed, because it isn't only that people got tired.

Webinars used to live at the top of the funnel. You ran one to reach people who didn't know you yet. Someone saw a title they liked, signed up, and found out you existed. That was the whole point, and it's the job mine were doing during COVID.

These days they've slipped down the funnel. The people who turn up to a webinar already know who you are. They want the product demo, the new release, the roadmap. Useful stuff, but it's late stage. You're talking to people who are already inside.

Which is why the old top of funnel webinar stopped pulling. A presentation or a case study doesn't bring a stranger in anymore. They've sat through too many.

The gameshow puts it back at the top. You don't need to know the first thing about Polaris to enjoy guessing which page won. The game is what brings people in. The expertise is what makes them stay and trust you.

Before booking another one, two questions.

Where does it sit in the funnel, and what do you actually want out of it? A demo for warm leads and a gameshow for cold ones are both "a webinar" and should have almost nothing else in common. Work out the job first, then build the thing. Most people start with "let's do a webinar" and back into the rest, which is how you end up with a format doing a job it was never shaped for.

And don't run it on its own. A one off webinar is gone by the next morning. The ones that earn their keep sit inside a bigger campaign, with things leading into them and things coming off the back, so the conversation doesn't stop the second you hit end meeting.

The webinar isn't dead, as the LinkedIn Gurus will tell you. The easy version is.

Back then it worked because nobody had anywhere else to be, and "put another one on" counted as a plan. It doesn't now. You need to know where it sits, why you're running it, and what happens after.

If you run a CRO, retention or growth agency and you're sick of presenting to a muted room, this is the kind of thing we build. The A/B Test Gameshow was the first one. There'll be more.