How to run successful webinars in 2026 with Nyrie Roos

If you’re not using live webinars or if you’re treating them like a “training” session, then this podcast episode is for you.

Webinars are one of the most effective ways to turn interested prospects into paying clients when they're done well.

In this episode, I sit down with webinar strategist Nyrie Roos to discuss why webinars continue to outperform many other marketing tactics, what separates high-converting webinars from those that fall flat, and how AI is making the process faster without replacing the human connection that drives sales.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is business owners treating webinars like training sessions. We both agree that a webinar isn't about teaching people everything you know. It's about helping your audience understand what's possible and showing them why they need your expertise to achieve it.

Nyrie also shares her simple five-step webinar framework, explains how to improve attendance rates, what really influences conversions, and why having the right audience matters far more than simply getting more registrations.

You'll also discover:

✅ Why webinars still convert better than many other marketing channels
✅ The biggest mistake most business owners make during webinars
✅ Why over-teaching actually reduces sales
✅ How to transition naturally into making an offer
✅ The five-part webinar framework that consistently converts
✅ Ways to improve webinar attendance and engagement
✅ How AI can dramatically reduce webinar preparation time
✅ Why authenticity matters more than automation

If you've been thinking about running webinars, or you've tried them before without getting the results you hoped for, this episode is packed with practical advice to help you create webinars that build trust and generate more clients.

Also, if you'd like to see where you could be losing potential sales before people ever reach your webinar, Nyrie is giving listeners access to her free AI Funnel Detective.

It analyses your sales funnel and highlights where opportunities could be slipping through the cracks.

🎁 Grab the free AI Funnel Detective here!

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to my podcast because more like this is on the way!

If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

👉 WHAT'S NEW: I've built an AI-powered Digital Marketing Platform, SellOn.Social. This is not a training program. This platform aims to automate and streamline the process of clarifying business positioning, generating marketing content, and building a consistent lead-generation system on social media.

And please connect on social media and let me know what you thought of this episode!

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Transcript

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The fact is most people are over-teaching in webinars- Yeah… and they're not actually giving people a reason to come back and tap into their expertise. Yeah. And the second biggest mistake I see is in the offers How the transitions into the offers are made and how they're positioned, because most people, a lot of people initially aren't comfortable with actually asking for a sale. So they're two of the biggest keys that I actually see. Welcome to The Social Media Takeaway. I'm your host, Louise McDonnell, and this is the show for business owners who want to know how to use social media more effectively to drive sales and leads for their business. If you enjoy the show, please make sure that you give us a follow, and if you enjoy this episode, please make sure you give us a five-star review and share it with all your friends. So today, I am delighted to welcome Ngaire Ruth to the show. Ngaire walked away from corporate life in 2008 to build something of her own. She went on to lead teams of more than 100 people, generated over 20 million in revenue, and co-founded the digital marketing agency, Xplosion Marketing. Today, she helps coaches, consultants, and service-based entrepreneurs stop being their best-kept secret in their industry, and she does this through Webinar Conversation Acceleration System. She shows experts how to turn webinars and online events into a consistent stream of high quality clients, and she's worked with over 1,000 business owners across four different continents. You're very welcome to the podcast, Ngaire. Thank you, Louise. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm really looking forward to our conversation together today. Yeah. As I love webinars as well, I love doing a live launch. I love doing an, a live event. So for people that are listening in that maybe don't share that love, maybe you could tell us why they should pay attention. Yeah, look, I think one of the reasons why they should pay attention is because it's a great way of actually reaching a huge part of your target market. And this is because once you get a webinar or a presentation online, and you get the right partners on board, and you get your launch set established, and a strategy… Strategy is so important when we're talking about anything to do with business. But when you get this done, then you can get your message out to a lot more people, and that, of course, comes back to you in terms of return on investment and more revenue and more clients. So it's a great way to actually capture a lot of people at the one time without having to do the one-on-one that you may be used to doing or spending your life in the direct messaging or the DMs, as I call it. And the beauty of the webinar system is you don't have to spend a huge amount of money on ads. It's good to invest a little bit of money when you're ready to go. Don't get me wrong, ads work really well, but it's a great way to actually be out there and actually just kick yourself off with the webinars. Get in front of a, an audience, and it doesn't cost you anything really to do this. It's just about having conversations with partners. So then you can have conversations with their audiences and you get, getting your message out there. So then once you've got that recipe right- And you've got that system down pat, then you can just keep… It's like a wash, rinse, repeat. So it's a great way of leveraging you, getting yourself visible, and getting out there and getting more clients. So again, I'm gonna bring it back a step or two,'cause I know, like, I love running webinars, and, and I understand what you're saying. But I also know that sometimes when I talk to people in my own coaching academy and I say working with a partner, and then they stop me and they go, "What does that mean?" So for someone who's listening saying, you know, you said you're gonna work with a partner and they're going to email their list, can you just explain how does that work? Yeah, sure. So one of the key things that we do with our webinars and that we teach our clients to do is to get great, what I call partners on board, or strategic partners on board. So they are people that you will connect to out in the world that already have your target market on their email list, or they're connected to them. So say for example, you were doing website creation, then you might partner with someone like us who does webinars and have a really good list of your potential target market. And what you do is reciprocal collaborations. And what that means is you will send some emails for them potentially. This is one way to do it. And they will send reciprocal emails for your event and to promote you to their audience. So you're cross-populating audiences, so to speak. And the beauty of this is when you get these partners on board that what happens is as you build momentum… And it could be a simple lead magnet swap to start with to get to know each other's audiences. Once you build this, then you can populate what I call your promotional calendar. So it's just a monthly, 12 monthly calendar. I work on 12 months. And I have about 20 or 30 really good tried and tested partners that we actually cross-promote with every year. And what happens then is you actually build trust with these partners. You build relationship because when you're connecting with partners, the key thing is, and this is just a tip for people that are already out there and thinking about doing it or maybe doing it, it's about building the relationship with them and working reciprocally so you are giving good value to them. And as part of that too, a lot of partners will actually work on a commission basis. So there's two levels of partnerships that you can have. There is what is called a joint venture partnership, and that's the situation where, as I've been talking about, you'll do reciprocal cross-collaborations and promotions for each other. There is also the affiliate partnerships where that is a transactional thing where you might get someone to promote your product or service offering to their list or to their audience, and there is just a commission fee that is paid to them. So a lot of these partnerships work on affiliate commissions where you might pay them 10%, you might pay them 30% of the offering based on the conversion and the sale at the end of it. I hope that makes a little bit more sense, Louise. Yeah, no, I think, like I just think it's important for somebody that this is new for just to be able to break it down. Okay, so we understand now that we're going to use partners to promote the webinars. I also use paid ads as well. I use paid ads on Meta to promote mine. I find them very effective. So a- apart from promoting the webinars, like what other… You say you have to have a strategy, so what else do you recommend to people when they're looking to start using webinars to grow sales and leads? I think one of the key things that I find is the big mistakes that people make is they don't go out, and they don't get a coach or someone to actually guide them through the process, and they think, "I'm just going to actually throw a webinar up or a presentation up, and everyone will come, and it's all going to be good." And this leads to some of the most common mistakes I see that are happening with webinars, and particularly in, with conversions, registrations, and show-ups. Because you need to have a structured system, a plan that you work to, like anything that you do in life. And y- there are steps in the process that are tried and tested and work And we use this in our digital marketing agency, Explosion Marketing, to actually get new clients and get new leads in. So there's a particular strategy that we work to, and it's a five-step process. And if you're following the process, you're not likely to actually then be making mistakes that are costly mistakes. And some of the biggest mistakes that I actually see is people treat their webinars like a presentation. You know, they're really dry and they're boring. They've got no life or no fun in them. Instead of having a conversation with people, and I see our clients grow in this. They get better and better at doing this, and they spend weeks in perfecting these beautiful slides, which is great. They show up and they deliver great content, and then they make an offer at the end and they wonder why nobody buys. And the fact is, most people are over-teaching in webinars. Yeah. And they're not actually giving people a reason to come back and tap into their expertise. Yeah. And the second biggest mistake I see is in the offers. How the transitions into the offers are made and how they're positioned, because most people, a lot of people initially aren't comfortable with actually asking for a sale. So they're two of the biggest keys that I actually see. Yeah. I always say to people as well, like a webinar is not a teaching event. If you're teaching, then you're, you're, you're not gonna get sales because I always say you have to remember that somebody who's coming in is not an expert on the subject matter. You have to be careful that you don't overwhelm them. So I know when I started doing webinars, I made all the mistakes when I started. I, like I started delivering webinars over 10 years ago, and I remember my very first webinar and my attitude was,"I'm just gonna show them how much I know and they're gonna want to work with me." And that is 100% the wrong thing to do. And at the end of the webinar, everybody was like, "Thank you so much, Louise. That was wonderful. We're gonna work on this and then we'll come back to you." So they didn't feel they needed me because I had given them so in- much information. And I did them a disservice in so many ways because, number one, I probably overwhelmed half the people there because I gave them far too much information. Number two, they felt they didn't need me, but I knew that they, I hadn't even given them a 10th of the information that they actually needed to, to succeed. So yeah, it's not a teaching event. Completely agree with you there. That was the first thing you said. And the second thing, being completely uncomfortable. Why, Ngaire, why, why, why, why as business owners are we uncomfortable asking for money? Why are we uncomfortable? It's a psychological thing. I believe it's your mindset. It's quite okay to actually expect to, to actually put yourself out there and to be paid for the expertise and the value that you actually have. And I think it comes down to believing in yourself, knowing that you are good at what you do, and it's quite okay for people to pay you for that expertise and to be able to, to work with you. So having that belief in yourself is so critical. And I think with, particularly when we're talking about webinars, transitioning into the sale by making sure that right up front of your webinars you let the audience know that you are going to be making them a very special offer towards the end of it. So you future pace that in your webinar. So psychologically they're prepared for it. They know it's gonna come. Most people know it's gonna come in a webinar anyway. And psychologically, especially when you're new at webinars, you're letting yourself know that it's okay to actually make that transition to the sale. And when you are making the transition to the sale, it's very important in your webinars and when you're making your offer not to make it like that real used car salesman approach where you get this and you get that now, and sign up now because there's only 20 places left, and all this sort of thing. Mm-hmm. But making it a really professional conversation. If you work with me, this is what I'm going to deliver for you. So everything you do needs to be very intentional, and it needs to be very focused on the people that have come along and that are watching your webinar. Everything needs to be about them. And when you put yourself in that space and you're having the conversation with people and they're interactive webinars, you feel comfortable making that transition, too. And of course, experience doing this, it ha- it says a lot, too. So the more you do it, the more comfortable and the better you become at it. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And tell me, have you ever had any disasters? Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Probably just a couple of months ago. I wouldn't call it a complete disaster, like I didn't lose all connectivity or anything like that. But I was away. I was visiting family in another state, and I just had my laptop with me. And I'm used to having screens, okay? A couple of screens, and having this set up on one screen and what I need on another screen. Because our webinars, I do presentations that are actually demonstrations of some of the AI tools that we use and how they create the webinar slides for our clients. And because I was on a laptop, I had great t- difficulty with the technical side of things. And then the AI failed on me as well, because the connection was really poor. So that was really interesting. But look, you just go with the flow. You don't get… I think because, uh, you just get to the stage when you've done enough webinars too where you just move yourself through it and go, "Hey, really sorry guys this has happened. Really mucked this up and can't demonstrate this for you today. But what I'd like to do is offer a free one-on-one call where I'll walk you through the actual content that I can't show you today." And just apologize, and just keep moving on. So yeah, that was my most recent sort of disaster. I remember not so long ago I delivered a webinar and… Well, that's my, always my big worry is I know I can deliver the webinar, I know I've got the, the content, I know the format, I'm comfortable with it. But I'm always a little, in the back of my mind I'm always worried about the tech.'Cause that's something you just have no control over, whether the tech is gonna let you down. Anyway, this particular webinar, I… W- the webinar was brilliant. And I don't know about you, Ngaire, but even if you're the only one on screen and everybody else is just a, a name, you can't actually even see them, you can feel the energy. You can feel- Mm … the energy of people. I always can feel the energy. But just as I finished the webinar, didn't the power go out from the, in my office. Just bang, everything went. And I sat there and I was like, "Oh my God." What if this had happened an hour before? I would've been devastated because you put a lot of time and effort into running these, and energy. So yeah, so disasters happen, but you just have to get on it. And I love that advice that you gave, that we are human and sometimes things don't work, and you just have to say, "That's fine. Fine, we'll move on." You mentioned your AI tools there. Can you tell us a little bit more about those? Yeah, sure. So I've got a range of AI tools that we use, and one of them is called Ava, and it's the AI virtual assistant. And Ava work- walks through every part. She gets to know the, the person or the presenter first, so she asks a number of questions, and then she works through the five-step process that we teach our clients, and she develops, with the input from the user, the content for all the slides. And what she does then is she creates the whole slide deck for you based on the number of slides that you need. She then goes on and she does the full script for you as well. And then she'll go on, she'll do your affiliate emails, your pre- and post-launch emails, anything that you actually need. She'll do your sales page copy, and she will even look at your offer for you. So it's a really brilliant system. That's just one of the tools that we use with our clients. So the whole process from end to end, we actually help our clients to do on AI, and then the whole slide deck is created, and you can transfer this to PowerPoint or you can transfer this to just Google Docs or Google Slides, and it's just brilliant. And you can get all that done because we do a little pre-work. We have month or weekly coaching calls, and there's a little bit of pre-work that's done. So by the time they get into using the AI tool, then they've got all the content that they need to put in the information about who they are, what they offer, who their target market is, any URLs they've got for pages for the AI to draw on. And it then takes that information, including their discovery story, what we call their moment of aha, this is what I've got and this is what I did with it, and this is why it's really great, 'cause it works. Puts that all in and makes a real story flow, and it's all about storytelling through that, and then just a glimpse of their model. And their model is simply the process that they use. It could be a three-step model, a five s- five-step model, whatever that is. To actually deliver what they do for their audience and very visual on these things. And it's really great. I think the great thing I love about it is not only that it, it… I used to spend virtually weeks creating a presentation, let alone anything else, and this is done for you within an hour with everything. Your slides, everything to deliver delivered to you, and it just makes it so much easier. But at the same time, I think it's really important to emphasize that AI is a tool. It's a resource. It doesn't replace you. And that human connectivity, that part of you that makes you, needs to be reflected in any presentation that you do, and especially in your live presentations. Absolutely. I, I couldn't agree more. So you mentioned a few times there your five-step process. What are the five steps? Okay. The five steps are essentially establishing what it is that you're going to be- Pitching to your audience or the offer that you will be making. There is then your discovery story. There is then presenting your roadmap. There is also then a demonstration or case study around it, and then it's the transition to the offer. So there essentially, that's an overview of the five-step process, but of course that's very high level, and each section drills into how you're going to deliver this and what you do for your clients. And like I said, everything you do in a presentation needs to be about them. Yeah, share a little bit of your story, but it's gotta be all about them, their problems, their issues. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because first of all, you gotta get their attention to make them want to go. So have you any tips? Like I know one of the challenges people have now is, okay, getting people to register is one thing, but how do you maximize show up rates? So if you get 100 people to register for your webinar, what's the average show up rate at the moment and what can you do to maximize that? Sure. So I think the average show up rate is about 30 to 40%. That's the industry standard. How you can maximize that, w- we at times, just to share with you, some webinars we do will get around the 40%. Some webinars will get about, around the 70, 80%. It depends on the audience, whether you're going out cold to market or whether you're going out to a very warm audience. So what you can do to actually maximize that is make sure that you're providing good quality content to your audience, but not overfilling their inboxes or SMS on their phone to remind them to come along, and give them value along that way. So it could be little videos that you give them. It could be anything that's going to lead them into wanting to turn up to learn something more. So I think that's really important to actually do that. And one of the key things that we do as well, you can actually… Or two things that we do. We have one of our team call those that, that have elected to put in their phone number to give them a reminder call just to say, "Hey, the webinar's on tomorrow. Really looking forward to seeing you." If they don't pick up the phone, which a lot of people do, they just leave a voice message. So that's a really good way, just that really intentional touch points. And the other thing you can do is actually offer an incentive to turn up and stay to the end. So it could be something that you're giving away of value. So they call it gamifying sometimes. I don't like that term. I like to think of it as you're giving away, adding more value to your audience. And if you do that, even if someone's not ready and not in a position to actually work with you or go forward with you at the time of the webinar, it's amazing how many people will come back post that once they're ready. To actually then take up what you've got to offer. So always treat it in view of relationship with your audience and how you're taking them on a journey. And so what would be considered the industry norm now in terms of conversion from a webinar attendee to selling a product or a service to them? So what's the average rate there? Yeah, if you're getting the right audience in the room and making your offers in the right way and making them so they're totally irresistible, you should be getting about a 70% conversion rate. Okay. So 70% of everybody turns up buying. Yeah. What kind- You should do if you're doing it right. What kind of price point are we talking about there? So is there different conversions for different price points? So if you're selling something that's 30 your dollars versus 300 versus 3,000 versus 30. Once again, it depends on the audience you've got in the room. If you've got the wrong audience in the room, it doesn't matter what you offer, they're not gonna buy. If you get the right audience in the room, then they will buy 'cause they're there because they've got a need. If y- you're targeting your audience correctly, then on the whole, you're gonna know that they're a potential client or a potential purchaser. So I know that's very vague, but I think what is important to realize today- In today's economy, and we need to all be aware of this, depending on where you're pitching in the market, I think if you think about it like this, okay? We're on a bit of a slope economically across the world, and I think we realize that. So people that are down the bottom end of the slope, they're struggling to even pay their credit card bills or anything at the moment. So you've gotta make sure that what you're pitching, if you're aiming for that end of the market, makes it really doable for them. So being creative, really creative in the way you're offering what you've got and the service that you're offering in a way that is affordable to them. I think if you're offering at the other end of the market, if you're going over that 2K mark, then it's really important to take them to some sort of call, and not make it a sales call. Make it some sort of call where you're giving them more value, and then they will turn into a client most likely. Because it really… I think anything over 2K on a webinar, when you've only got someone for an hour and a half, it's hard for them to actually really know you and trust you to be able to put their money into your service, and I'm talking US dollars here. Like, on webinars in the past, I could sell 25K programs, but I can't sell a 25K program straight off the back of a webinar today. I cannot do that. So it's really part of having that conversation about what is going to be the best way to get the most impact and get the most return on your offer? What is the best strategy for delivering that through your actual webinar or your presentation? So you talked about, like, how warm the audience is. Can you give us a few examples of audiences coming from different sources, and how warm or cold you can expect them to be? Okay, great. So if someone's on your email list, they've been on your email list for a while, and they're not unsubscribing, then they're a pretty warm… They're a hot audience. I call them a hot audience,'cause they turn up, and they'll go through your webinar, and they might do it more than once. And then you've got your partners. If your partners' audiences have been exposed to you a little bit and they're be- you're being recommended to them, then they're a warm audience. If anyone's recommending you to their audience, such as their email list or their connections, then that's a warm audience because of the credibility that goes with that. And of course, the credibility of the partner has a lot to do with that as well. If you're completely going out and you're DM'ing people on LinkedIn or something like that, and that's direct messaging, if you're just going out… And we have this happen and it really annoys me, it frustrates me. Come along, watch my webinar. I haven't heard from these people. They've never engaged with me, never had a conversation, never provided really good content. Why would I be… That's a cold audience. So it's really important. And if you can get in front of groups, master classes, or present at networking groups, things like that, then that is a gra- great way to preface an offer to come along to your webinar. That gives you a warm to hot audience as well. Very good. Yeah. That's very interesting, and it makes such a difference if the audience is warm or cold. And if somebody is on your email list, like, how long are they on your list before they unsubscribe or do business with you? So it's unusual for someone to come on your list and then just sign up, although some people do. But what do you have any feeling yourself for the average, kind of That's, it's an interesting and it's a really great question. Like when we do our summits and things like that, then people can come onto our list, and they can be converted into clients. Because whenever we do a summit, I then go into a product launch or a service launch. So I can get clients from that within a month or two months tops. But there's other people I know that, and, and they'll say to me, "I've been watching what you're doing. I've been along to two or three of your webinars. My first interaction with you was probably 12 months ago." And then they become a client. So it really depends. And then when I do presentations, what I call closed-door presentations to networking groups or mastermind groups, and I do the offer to come along to one of my webinars, then the lead-in time there will be probably from the time of the presentation to the group to the webinar, probably about a month, and then they'll convert into clients. Yeah. I always find it so interesting. I love looking at statistics. So when we finish a webinar or launch, we look and we see, okay, who signed up? How long were they on our list? Where did they come from? Were they from an ad? Were they from a partner? Were they from organic, or were they from another source? And yeah, you can see the different trends emerging, and you can see the people. And again, what used to freak me out at the beginning, Ngaire, you've mentioned it a few times there now, is that sometimes people come to your webinars a few times. Mm-hmm. And at the beginning I used to freak out going,"Why are they coming back? Sure they were at this already." And then I realized, even if you come, they go and they consume exactly the same information, they'll be in a different place, and they'll take something different from it each time. So yeah, I'm glad that you said that because that was something that worried me when I started off. Now I'm like, "Oh, I, this person is here for the third or fourth time. That's fine." Ngaire, thank you so much for all your advice. I definitely think that webinars are the way to go. You hear people say webinars are done. They're absolutely not. They're the best place. You market online, you grow awareness on social media, but something like a webinar is where you can convert people and make, turn them into clients. Ngaire, you have a free gift. Do you wanna tell us about the free gift? Yeah, sure. So I've got what I call the AI Funnel Detective, and the AI Funnel Detective is an AI tool, so you'll get a taste of a- our AI tools, that has a look at what we call your leaky sales funnel and then makes recommendations of what you need to do to fix it. So hopefully you're not then leaking revenue or potential revenue from somewhere in your funnel. Fantastic. Ngaire, we will have the link to that in the show notes, and we'll put it out on social as well. If people want to find you, where do you hang out? Okay. LinkedIn. Check me out on LinkedIn, Ngaire Roos. I'd love to connect on LinkedIn. That's my playground. That's our playground. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise so freely. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks, Louise. Thanks for having me. That's it, everyone. That's another episode of the Social Media Takeaway. If you have some feedback, make sure that you tag us on social media. You'll find me under SellOnSocialM, or on LinkedIn you'll find me under Louise McDonnell. I'd love to hear your feedback and what you thought about the show. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss out on any future episodes. And if you know anyone who may be interested, be sure to share the show with them, too. Thanks, everyone.