Seeking Opinions On The Value Of Webinars

You can get 500-1000 leads from a well promoted webinar. Your best bet is probably going to be to partner with some industry organization or publication that will promote your webinar to their lists, budget a grand or two for that, depending on the organization, size of list, etc.

If you get 1/4 of the registrants to actually attend the webinar, that is a good turnout. Either way, you get the leads from the webinar registrants.

You can go with a sales slant, or a technology slant, or anything else you want. Just make sure the webinar description matches the content, and you deliver on the topic. Don't promote a webinar for "Solving PTZ Maintenance Problems" and then just talk about your new PTZ that doesn't really "solve" problems in the general sense. Instead call it something like "Learn How Our PTZ Reduces Maintenance Costs" (this is just an example, I have no idea what you are selling). If people show up expecting to hear about a technology topic and they just get a sales pitch you will have done yourself a disservice by attracting the wrong audience. There are *plenty* of people that will sign up and attend for a sales pitch/new product, if that is your goal, be upfront about it.

Budget for an hour, plan 45-50 minutes of content, and the balance for short intro time and Q&A at the end. 20-30 slides is about right. Make sure you have a good mic/headset and do some run throughs to make sure you get the right tempo to your presentation to keep people listening and engaged. Have a few seed questions for the moderators to ask you if you don't get audience questions right away.

The thing I dont like about webinars is that people have to re-arrange their schedules to watch it. Sure they can watch a recorded version later but the likelihood of engagement goes down dramatically. Also, webinars are usually quite boring and often use power point type presentations which remind people of their high school and college years. I personally dont like watching webinars, nor do I like to give them. The webinars that are especially annoying to me are the ones where the presenter continually asks "Are there any questions so far?". The problem with this approach is that you sometimes get people who are watching who are not as experienced as you and they may ask several dumb questions that extend the length of the webinar even longer. This is a real engagement killer for me so Id say limit those types of questions as much as possible or save them till the end.

When it comes to technical teaching, I prefer a well laid out and condensed Youtube video. You have alot more options to be creative in your teachings with video and imagery that would keep your viewer more engaged throughout the entire process. Also, the perpetual marketing aspect of a nicely designed youtube video is much higher than a webinar. You will find that making an excellent youtube video takes just as much if not more work than a webinar presentation, however, the results in my opinion are far greater with youtube.

You will find that making an excellent youtube video takes just as much if not more work than a webinar presentation, however, the results in my opinion are far greater with youtube.

Have you ever seen this video? :)

In all seriousness, I am curious to hear more about your YouTube video approach. That type of video certainly takes substantial time and effort. What type of results or returns are you seeing?

most product-specific webinars that I have attended were too long, too boring and too often conflicted with other things I needed to get done during the webinars scheduled time.

Too long:  make them short and to the point - I would do no more than a half-hour max.

Too boring:  get someone who can effectively (and interestingly) tell your story  - avoid using overly-technical people to deliver your message.

Too often conflicts:  not much you can do here without the ability to alter the space-time continuum. 

Not a marketing guy, just an end-user's prospective

For professional education - I watch a lot of webinars, especially on active shooter events and school security. The problem I see is all of them are very basic with regurgitated information. Sometimes I glean a new nugget of information and that makes it worth it for me. Webinars rarely make me interested in specific products. 

For product information - I watch YouTube videos. They are shorter and more concise. Best for product research and can influence my purchasing decisions. 

Thanks for the feedback so far, much appreciated and really useful.

I personally tend to agree with the bias towards video to watch when you choose (although I'd say it is harder / more expensive to generate good quality "fresh" video content when it lacks the saving grace of interactive discussion etc you might get in a good webinar).