For an RIA with $500 million to $5 billion in assets under management, the point isn't whether webinars would generate registrations. They would.
A more important question is the time between the capital spent to run a webinar and the decision that it was (or wasn't) money well spent.
Here's where it's useful to think about Meta ads.
A webinar is an event. The firm picks a topic, builds a presentation, sets up a registration page, promotes the webinar, sends reminders and sits back. Over the course of two, three or four weeks, it may well become clear whether the market had interest in the topic.
In the meantime, much of the budget for the webinar will have been spent.
With a Meta ad, a campaign could, on a day-by-day basis, show whether someone clicked on the ad, filled out the landing page, watched the video, qualified and scheduled an appointment.
That doesn't necessarily mean Meta is better. But it does mean it would be easier for the firm to assess whether its campaign was working.
There is another distinction of even greater importance: intent.
Someone signing up for a webinar on "Retirement Planning Strategies" may well have an interest in retirement planning. They may well not necessarily have an interest in talking to the firm, moving assets or changing advisors.
And here could well be a gap between a successful webinar campaign and no business development.
Webinars have a role in the marketing mix of an RIA. They can be a good way, for example, of keeping a prospect engaged, of creating content for use elsewhere and of building on relationships with people who already know the firm.
But if the goal is to turn cold audiences into qualified prospective clients, there are limitations to the webinar approach.
The Timing Problem With Webinars
More important than the platform is the feedback loop between webinar and outcome.
Think of what needs to happen before an RIA could judge its webinar. It picks a topic. It puts together a presentation, builds a registration page and creates advertising for the webinar. It launches a campaign. It begins accepting registrations. It sends out e-mails to remind people of the event. It finishes the presentation. And the presenter is ready.
Then, the event happens.
Only then does the firm find out how many people attended, how long they stayed, whether they found value in what they heard, and whether any of them wanted to speak with an advisor.
That can well take weeks of work at the firm before getting useful feedback from the event.
The problem isn't just a question of timing. In the time between, a number of things could well have changed.
Let's say 300 people registered for the webinar but very few wanted to meet with an advisor. Where, then, did the strategy fall apart?
Maybe the topic attracted the wrong people.
Maybe in the ad the firm promised more than the webinar delivered.
Maybe the firm got low-intent registrations on the registration page.
Maybe the firm chose too broad an audience.
Maybe people signed up because they thought the topic was interesting but didn't feel they had an urgent enough financial need to meet with an advisor.
Maybe the webinar was strong but the call to action was weak.
Maybe they were the right kind of prospect, but they simply didn't yet trust the firm.
In time, a webinar might show that the strategy didn't work. But it would be harder for it to show where.
Meta Creates a Faster Feedback Loop
With an always-on Meta funnel, the order of events changes. Rather than asking people to sign up for an event in the future, the funnel could start providing value right away.
Someone sees an ad. On the landing page the firm picks up another signal. They watch the video. They answer some qualification questions. They book an appointment.
The firm sees activity every day.
And now the firm could more easily diagnose what might have gone wrong.
If people aren't clicking the ad, maybe the ad, the message, the positioning or the audience was off.
If they click but don't move on, maybe the offer or the landing page wasn't right.
If they watch the video but don't qualify, maybe the message stirred up curiosity in them, but not a particular need.
If qualified people reach the point of booking but fail to schedule, perhaps the process of qualification and appointment could be improved.
If people are scheduling appointments but the quality is poor, perhaps the firm needs better qualification criteria in the funnel.
More important than whether any one problem could be fixed is this: in the course of a campaign, the firm can see through the system what is and isn't working.
And the firm doesn't need to wait until a scheduled event to know whether the market is responding.
That insight becomes more important as the RIA grows.
A $500 million firm trying a new acquisition strategy would want to know whether its message resonated. And a multi-billion dollar RIA with growth ambitions, a marketing department and multiple advisors would want its feedback loop to be as effective as possible.
The faster the firm pinpoints a problem in its process, the less capital it would be wasting in supporting it.
A Webinar Registration Is Not Buying Intent
A second key difference is between intent and interest. Here's where reporting on a webinar can be misleading.
A registration can be counted. Someone gave contact information and signaled enough interest to sign up.
But what did they really want?
Let's say an RIA sponsors a webinar on "Retirement Planning Strategies."
Someone sees the ad, thinks the topic could be useful to him or her, and signs up.
That person may well be nearing retirement and thinking of switching advisors.
Or he or she may be five years from retirement and just wanting to learn more.
He or she may already have an advisory relationship.
He or she may have little in the way of investable assets.
He or she may be looking for information from several financial firms.
He or she may have signed up because he or she thought the topic might be useful, but had no interest in attending.
Each of these people would count as a registration.
And in that case, the report on the marketing could look good, even if little business came out of it.
Interest in a topic is not the same thing as intent to change a financial relationship.
And for an RIA, that's important. It's not an impulse decision to change advisors.
Someone may want to move assets, consider his or her existing relationship, consult a spouse or other family member, shop around, consider fees and trust a potential new advisor.
Someone who wants to watch a presentation is quite a step removed from that decision.
Nothing wrong with that.
But when registration volume is analyzed and the conclusion is drawn that, through the acquisition process, the firm is attracting prospective clients, that conclusion may well be wrong.
The firm could be attracting an audience. And that's different.
The Webinar Can Attract the Wrong Kind of Attention
Often, educational topics will appeal to people. That's one of their strengths. But it can be a weakness if the goal is to acquire a client.
Consider a webinar on "5 Tax Strategies for Retirees." Many people will find the topic useful. They might well sign up, but they may not necessarily be thinking of switching advisors. They may just want the information.
So could topics of, say, retirement income, Medicare, investment strategies, market outlook, estate planning or Social Security.
Such topics may well have value for someone, but they won't necessarily drive acquisition.
The more educational a topic, the more likely it will draw people wanting education, not an advisor.
That doesn't make the webinar a failure as an educational tool. But it changes the expectations of the firm in relation to the webinar.
If the goal is to build on an existing audience, education would add value.
If the goal is to engage cold leads, the mechanism through which the firm acquires them would need more relevance between the person's situation and the service.
A Registration Is Not an Attendee
And there's a deeper problem of intent.
A registration is not an attendee. And an attendee is not necessarily an engaged prospect.
A person may register for a webinar three weeks in advance and then forget about it. He or she may get a reminder, realize they have other commitments and decide not to go. They may show up for a few minutes and leave. They may watch without interacting. They may attend out of interest in the topic, but none in the firm.
This creates a progression that matters:
Registration → attendance → engagement → qualification → conversation → client.
At each of these points, the person could well be moving away from the original audience.
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with a webinar. But the number of people who register is only the start of the funnel.
In particular, attendance at a webinar from a cold audience can be tricky. Someone already familiar with an RIA might well attend. But a total stranger, seeing an ad for an educational webinar, is less likely to feel compelled to show up at that time.
The calendar creates friction.
Such a person would need to recall the date of the webinar. He or she would need to be free at that time. He or she would need to think this webinar would be worth giving up an hour.
A recording would help, but then the firm would need to follow up with that person in some way. And he or she still wouldn't necessarily have much buying interest.
The 10-Minute Video Solves a Different Part of the Problem
One helpful way to think about a Meta funnel is to let go of the idea that education has to take place at an event. It doesn't. In many respects, a 10-minute video explaining a financial problem could do much of what a webinar would.
It could lay out a problem. It could describe the approach of the firm. It could signal expertise. It could point out common misunderstandings. And it could show a prospect what working with the firm might look like. And, in the right case, it could build enough trust for the right person to act.
What differs is how it is presented. In the webinar, we might say, "Come back on Thursday at 7 p.m. and we'll show you this." In the funnel, we might say, "Here's an explanation. Watch it now."
This difference may seem small. But in practice, it makes a difference.
With on-demand education, there's no need to coordinate a date. The prospect doesn't need to remember one. The presentation doesn't hinge on that evening going smoothly. Instead, the prospect could watch it when it speaks to them. And more often, there could be a path from curiosity to action.
Someone who sees an ad, watches the video, sees their own problem in it and then books an appointment shows more intent than someone who left her email address to hold a seat three weeks from now. Each of them would be useful information. But they mean different things.
The Real Advantage Is Not Speed Alone
It would be easy in this comparison to say "Meta moves faster." But that would be a weak point. More importantly, in the funnel the firm is spending money and gaining insight.
Let's say a campaign is built around three different ideas. Over the next few days, one of them starts to generate much more engagement than the others. Now the firm knows something. In subsequent versions of the campaign, it could highlight that message.
And then we could look at the landing page. Maybe people are coming to it, but not moving forward. Now we know that too. Perhaps the offer could change. Or the questions in the qualification form. An educational video can be different. So can the booking process. And it could become more iterative.
A webinar campaign is more of an event. You build a campaign, promote the event, run the event, look at its outcome and then think about what to do differently in the next one.
A funnel that runs continually could more closely resemble an operating system.
Instead of asking "Did last month's webinar work?" we might ask "What does the data show for this week?"
That distinction matters for an RIA committed to developing a repeatable acquisition funnel.
Webinars Still Have Real Advantages
That said, there's nothing wrong with using webinars at an RIA. In some circumstances they make sense.
The first is the existing pipeline.
A prospect may well have met with an advisor from our firm. He or she might want to learn more about our approach. A webinar could give this person another reason to engage with us. Another person might have come to an introductory meeting but isn't ready to act. He or she might want to hear a presentation. Or someone on our email list might want to hear an educational presentation.
These people already know who we are. And in this case the webinar isn't starting from scratch in building trust between them and our firm.
Often, when there's already a relationship, a webinar would work well. It could help keep a prospect up to date as he or she moves through a longer decision process. And it could help keep our name in front of clients and referral sources without the need for an event.
The second advantage is logistical.
No room, no catering, no printed material and no need for anyone to travel to a room. A webinar could engage prospects in more than one state. And if, for example, our clients are spread across several states, that could be valuable.
The third advantage is content.
A good webinar doesn't necessarily fade away at the end of the event. We could keep it in our library. Parts of it could be turned into short videos. Ideas could form the basis of emails. Key points could become articles on our website. Clips could be used on social media. And we could build advertising creative from the presentation.
In that way, the webinar would be more useful than a one-night event. The mistake is to assume that in a webinar, every function will work equally well.
Use Webinars for Nurture and Meta for Acquisition
For many RIAs, the best use of Meta and webinars would be together, in different roles. Think of the funnel at two levels.
Meta could pick up the cold audience. Its role would be to engage people who haven't previously heard of the firm and move qualified prospects into an educational process. In the process, it could qualify them and open the door for a consultation for those interested.
Webinars could pick up people deeper in the lifecycle with the firm. Someone who's consulted with the firm, signed up for an e-mail list, heard of the firm in some other way or simply attended a past webinar could be invited to a more in-depth educational session.
Here, the webinar would pick up warmer prospects. This changes its function and its economics.
No longer would the firm be asking a stranger to see an ad, register weeks ahead of time, remember it, show up at a particular time, understand it and then consider calling an advisor. Instead, that stranger could first enter the firm's acquisition funnel.
And the webinar could be used to build on that person's engagement with the firm.
In this role, each asset has a different job. Meta would pick up opportunities. The webinar would build on people already in the ecosystem of the firm. That's a more natural use of the two tools.
Webinar Content Can Become Meta Creative
And here's another reason RIAs shouldn't think of webinars and Meta as competing tools.
In a webinar, an advisor might present, say, a particular financial challenge. In that process, the advisor would raise questions from prospects, encounter objections, use certain language and lay out the problem in detail.
All of that could feed into advertising. A two-minute part of the webinar could become a short educational video. One of the questions raised could drive an ad. A misunderstanding could spark a creative idea. And a framework could support an ad.
The educational content already produced by a firm can feed into its acquisition process.
Value can exist in a webinar even if it doesn't directly result in a prospect. It could add value to the acquisition campaign through insights from the audience.
This is particularly important for firms that have spent a lot of time and money creating educational content. This doesn't mean they need to cut back on their content. But they could better distribute what they already have.
The Blind Spend Problem
Most risk in spending on a webinar comes when a firm spends a lot of money before it knows whether its message will resonate.
Let's say a firm spends weeks building up to a webinar only to later realize its topic isn't one its audience would engage with. In the meantime, they spent money on advertising, spent time on the webinar, wrote up the presentation, sent out reminders, held the webinar.
Only then could they decide whether its audience was right for this topic. That's a costly process.
Or consider a topic that draws registrations but not good prospects. Now the firm could well ask whether the fault lay with its audience, its topic, its message, its registration page, its follow-up or its offer.
The longer this process takes, the more time the firm could spend on a given activity without realizing its assumption was wrong.
In that sense, spending on a webinar could well feel like spending in the dark. That doesn't mean every dollar spent on promoting a webinar is wasted. But often a firm will spend resources before it could have feedback on whether it was money well spent.
Meta doesn't eliminate wasted spend. No acquisition channel does.
A continual funnel into potential buyers would give the firm more chance to pick up early signs of wasted spend.
An Industry Reporting Partner Reached a Clear Conclusion
An industry reporting partner, who follows marketing effectiveness across 50 to 100 advisory firms, was asked which of the tactics had lowest return. The answer was webinars.
That shouldn't be taken as proof that webinars never work.
More accurately, this note is about the risks of using webinars as a tool for cold acquisition. It's important to consider the context here.
In the right circumstances, webinars can be a great way to educate people. In the right circumstances, they can be a great way to build on an existing audience. And in the right circumstances, they can produce valuable content that can be reused.
But just because a webinar might excel at any of those things doesn't mean it would necessarily be good at turning strangers into clients.
That's a distinction RIAs need to consider before deciding whether to use webinars.
What Should an RIA Measure?
One challenge with webinar campaigns is that the most easily measured outcome is often the least important. Often we report on registrations. But registrations are many steps away from generating revenue. A better assessment of a webinar would start further down the funnel.
Registrations: How many people registered? Good to know, but only partially useful.
Attendees: How many attended? That narrows down the number of people who registered.
Engaged attendees: How many engaged with the webinar, asked questions, or otherwise showed interest? Here we start to see something of the quality of the audience.
Qualified conversations: How many of these people then took some action with the firm? This is more closely tied to the outcome for the business.
New clients and new AUM: What ultimately came from the campaign? At this point we could start thinking about whether the acquisition strategy of the firm was fulfilled by this webinar.
And the same could be said of Meta. Rather than stop at clicks, leads or impressions, the firm should focus on, for example, appointments, conversations, new clients and new AUM.
In some ways, at each of these points, Meta could give the firm some indication of what was happening. And in that way it could begin optimizing the campaign before we knew its outcome.
When a Webinar Is the Right Tool
A webinar would be useful, for example, if the firm wanted to scale its education of an audience. And more likely, if that audience already knew the firm.
Existing prospects could be invited to a more detailed presentation. Clients could be brought up to speed on an element of planning. Useful content could be sent to referral partners. An email list could be refreshed.
And, for some firms, a webinar could be a good vehicle for content creation. From one webinar, the marketing team could pull together considerable content. And for a firm with a distinctive educational approach, a webinar could give prospects more value than a video.
But in using a webinar, we should think about its strengths. It is a tool for nurture and education. It isn't always a tool for sales.
When a Webinar Is the Wrong Tool
A webinar is unlikely to be the best tool if the goal is to regularly bring qualified prospects from people who haven't heard of our firm. Nor is it likely to be the best tool if we want fast feedback on, say, a message, an offer, an acquisition idea or audience.
If we ask, "Will people in this market respond to this message about their problem?" we'd want some kind of tool that could quickly feed back on that message.
If we ask, "Will people who know us stay engaged with us over time?" then perhaps a webinar would be a good tool.
These are two different questions. And it's a mistake to try to answer them with one tool.
To drive acquisition from cold leads we'd want a quicker feedback loop.
To nurture people who already know us, a longer feedback loop could work.
That's the key difference.
Meta Ads and Webinars Solve Different Problems
And if we think of each channel in its most basic terms, the question becomes more clear.
In a webinar, we ask a prospect to agree to attend some event in the future. In a Meta funnel, we present an educational opportunity to the prospect right away.
In a webinar, we'd first see registrations, then engagement. In a funnel, we could see engagement every day.
In a webinar, we could build a long-form content piece. In a funnel, we could continually share that content.
A webinar could work well for people who already know us. In a funnel, we could start a conversation with someone new.
One doesn't necessarily preclude the other. For many RIAs, more important would be the place of each in their acquisition process.
If they already have a good pipeline, a webinar could help move prospects along in it.
If they need more consistent opportunities, a constantly-running acquisition funnel would more directly help them test an idea, find demand for it and set up appointments.
And if they have good content for a webinar, why not use it?
Use it.
Break it into clips.
Use its ideas in ads.
Turn its strongest explanations into short videos.
Put the recording into nurture sequences.
Let the webinar add value to their acquisition process. Don't expect the webinar to drive their acquisition.
Most important, stop treating a registration as the finish line. In an RIA, our goal isn't to fill up a virtual room. It's to have meaningful conversations with people who might want to do business with our firm.
More than anything else, this is where webinars and Meta part ways.
A webinar can inform. Meta can spread that information over time.
A webinar can nurture. Meta can acquire.
A webinar can create content that can be used over and over. Meta can turn this into an ongoing way of prospecting.
For firms that need regular new prospects, it's not just a question of whether, say, one medium costs less per registration or gets more registrations than the other.
It's a question of whether the firm can see what's working soon enough to make better decisions with the next dollar. That's the value of a shorter feedback loop.
