You sign up for a B2B webinar. You get 14 reminder emails over the next two weeks. You show up. Three talking heads are reading slides over a screen-shared deck. Within 7 minutes, you’ve muted the tab and gone back to email. That’s how the webinar funnel looks today on the attendee side.
Show-up rates for B2B webinars now hover around 25-35%. People register and ghost. The ones who do show up are tabbed out within 10 minutes. Yet companies are still pouring budget into ON24, Zoom Events, and GoTo, running the same 45-minute slide-deck-and-panel format they ran in 2019.
Here’s the real problem: a 45-minute slide presentation with three panelists isn’t content. It’s a meeting you weren’t invited to. And in a world where buyers are already drowning in AI-generated slop, a staged “expert panel” reading from a script is the last thing they want to spend their afternoon on.
This channel has been around in B2B forever. And although it is not being fully replaced, here are the new content-formats gaining traction in B2B.
1. Live podcast recordings / fireside chats: Instead of three panelists reading bullet points, you get two smart people having an actual conversation. The format flips the dynamic, your audience feels like they’re eavesdropping on something interesting instead of sitting through a presentation. Bonus: one production gives you a webinar’s worth of leads, a podcast episode, and 20+ clips for social. Three distribution channels for the cost of one.
2. In-person dinners and roundtables: Going back to the IRL newsletter I wrote in December, this is the natural evolution. Run the math: a webinar with 200 attendees converting pipeline at 2% = 4 deals. A curated dinner with 10 perfect-fit ICPs converting at 30% = 3 deals. Same pipeline, infinitely more relationship equity. And the cost? A webinar production (platform fees, promotion, prep) typically runs $5-10K. A curated dinner runs $2-4K. Cheaper AND better.
Read the full IRL newsletter here: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7404249659499659264/