If your webinar attendance is dropping, it’s not the audience’s fault

Webinars have long been a go-to asset in a marketer’s toolkit. However, over the past four years, registration and attendance numbers have steadily declined. If that’s the case for you, then you’re doing them wrong.

In 2024, 25% of organizations ran 50+ webinars per year. Meanwhile, attendance dipped to under 30% — down from ~50% in previous years. What’s gone wrong? 

How 2020 broke the webinar

Before the fateful year 2020, webinars weren’t as popular a content type as they are today. Businesses relied more on in-person events to make connections. 

The COVID pandemic changed that. Suddenly, everyone was remote and virtual from one another. However, the need to connect and share who we are and what we do remains.  In 2020, virtual events exploded as businesses pivoted from in-person gatherings. The tech kept pace — even Zoom added webinar hosting capabilities.

It was easy and relatively low-cost for organizations to host virtual events that would bring in hundreds or thousands of leads. We wondered if we’d ever see the need to return to in-person events. But, you know what they say about too much of a good thing.

We killed the webinar. We overdid it. We flooded inboxes with invites and turned thoughtful educational experiences into thinly veiled product pitches. We measured webinar success by the number of leads, pipeline and revenue, but forgot to track KPIs that improve the webinar experience. 

Wistia’s 2025 State of Video Report shows the most significant drop in video engagement in the past four years. It’s not about shrinking attention spans — it’s rising expectations.

Dig deeper: How the event-first approach to marketing can maximize research ROI

Why webinars still deserve a spot in your strategy

Despite this, the humble webinar remains a worthwhile marketing asset. 

Video is a learning channel. We rely on it to learn and to show us how to do something. My YouTube search history shows that I’m using video to learn about everything from why my plants keep dying to how to clean my humidifier.

4 ways to modernize your webinar strategy

1. Shorter webinars win

An hour is a long time for anyone during the average workday. If you want not just sign-ups but attendees who stay, trim it to 20–30 minutes. Get to the point fast. Skip the 10-minute intros.

2. Reconsider your webinar cadence

If you regularly produce webinars, are they delivering strong registration and attendance? If not, you need to reconsider your webinar cadence. Don’t be afraid to scale back to once every two months or once every quarter. That will also give you more time to create more thoughtful webinar content.

Dig deeper: How 3 companies are reinventing event marketing with SoLoMo

3. Make your webinar content work for everyone

For the audience to get value from your webinar, it must provide educational content addressing their pain points.  For you to get the most value out of the webinar, the content must position you as an expert who can connect the dots from the audience’s pain points to your product or business. 

Webinars are frequently little more than thinly disguised sales pitches. To avoid that, you need a “light bulb moment” where the content organically connects to you. When I was at Litmus, we experimented with webinar formats, and what consistently resonated with attendees was a straightforward slide deck paired with a clear, visual narrative.

Attendees want to follow along with visuals that enhance your story — not distract or overwhelm. A well-crafted slide deck brings structure and clarity to your content, making it easier for people to stay engaged and understand how your insights connect to them.

That means no slides full of bullet points. Visuals should elevate and illustrate your story, not repeat it in text form.

A good slide deck isn’t enough. A webinar needs to be interactive to be engaging and successful. 

Give people the opportunity to interact. If you’re feeling bold, take questions live via chat. Prefer structure? Save 10 minutes for a Q&A.  I’ll often plan webinar content and length around anticipated ad hoc answering of attendee questions. 

Polls are another great tactic for engagement and giving speakers a breather.

Conversational points like this are another good way to break up the feeling of being talked at, which can come with slide deck presentation-style webinars. 

4. Do webinars have to be live?

It’s traditional for webinars to be live on a specific date and time. However, this can be problematic when working with speakers in very different time zones. Consider pre-recording it. Air it at the usual time, but free up everyone’s day of stress.

As well as helping with the logistics, pre-recorded webinars:

• Allow you to produce more polished webinars as you will have time to edit the recording.
• Eases the pressure on the day for everyone involved, including guests and speakers.
• Gives you some video fodder to promote the webinar (Everyone loves a good trailer!).
• The speakers can engage with the attendees throughout the webinar.

What happens after the webinar matters most

It’s common to think of webinars as one-and-done types of content. All of the energy and work is put into producing and completing the webinar. 

According to Wistia’s State of Video Report, the average on-demand video pulls in views for 3-4 months after the live event — sometimes even longer. Are you playing the long game with your webinars? Here’s how you can:

Turn the webinar into a blog post: That is the easiest type of webinar repurposing. Doing this requires knowing which long-tail keywords will help SEO and LLMs find your content. Don’t regurgitate the webinar as a blog post. Center it around a specific long-tail keyword relevant to your existing SEO strategy. It must answer a key question people are asking. This tactic is not worth it if you don’t have that in place. 

Turn the webinar into short video clips: 1-2 minute videos shared on organic social media or uploaded to a YouTube channel are a great way to get more out of your content. To succeed, they must contain moments that share something essential or answer your audience’s question.  Generative AI tools can help. Feed the transcript into your weapon of choice and ask it to find quote-worthy soundbites. If you turn the webinar into a blog post, embed these shorter video clips to improve engagement. 

Content syndication platforms: If generating leads is important, consider tapping into content syndication platforms like BrightTalk to increase the lifetime value of your webinar content. You’ll be able to use content syndication to reach new audiences — and more targeted ones. 

Be brave — Ungate

Webinars are traditionally a demand-generation tactic to get leads for your organization. It makes sense to register by filling out a form. But forcing people to do so to watch the replay? Not so much.

Consider a phased approach to ungating your webinar:

• Phase 1: Immediately after the webinar, host a gated, on-demand version of the webinar recording on your website. Distribute this through organic social media. 
• Phase 2: After three months, ungate your video. Host the full webinar on your site. Drive traffic through your key distribution channels. When you share clips of the webinar on organic social media, drive people back to your website to view the full webinar.
• Phase 3: Upload the full webinar recording to your YouTube channel to bolster SEO. Remember to optimize it for YouTube: Create an attractive thumbnail image. Write an optimized title and description that make it easy for your video to be found. Embed relevant calls-to-action in the video itself to drive traffic back to your website.

Video is a major part of search. According to Semrush, search results with a video thumbnail now make up 30% of all organic results, up 72% from 2023. 

Don’t count the webinar out just yet

While the term “webinar” is derided, it shouldn’t be considered useless content. Poor performance from webinars means you haven’t adapted them to the audiences’ changing needs. Video remains one of your most powerful tools — and webinars, done right, are your secret weapon.

Dig deeper: How to use HubSpot to improve your webinar strategy