COVID-19 has thrown the world on its head, including the way we conduct business. No matter what industry you’re in, the effects of the pandemic have been felt. For more prominent companies, schools and events, adjustments had to be made to take their business online to ensure staff, students, and attendees are still guaranteed a learning and seamless experience. For most, this has been achieved by hosting webinars.
Simply put, a webinar is a workshop presentation that brings the traditional seminar to the web. Throughout the years, webinars have morphed into educational and sales tool that is interactive and accessible to anyone, no matter where in the world they are. But with webinars suddenly thrown to the forefront due to COVID-19 regulations, many businesses have had to adjust to using this tool. To help you host successful webinars, we’ve put together this guide with useful tips and advice.
Step-By-Step Guide
1. Timing
If possible, give yourself about a month to promote and prepare for your webinar. A month will give your team and speakers enough time to develop the correct messaging. Additionally, it will give everyone time to promote, prepare, and practice. It will also give attendees enough time to register.
2. Plan Your Content
The most crucial part of a webinar is the content. It is, therefore, essential that you put effort into what you are going to present. Together with your marketing team, look at gaps that you can fill with a webinar that could promote your business or educate your customers. Align your webinars with your content strategy to ensure consistency throughout your brand. This also ensures that content is not duplicated or repeated on your website and in the webinar. Once you’ve found gaps to fill with webinars, you can start work on the content and create a detailed program.
3. Promote Your Webinar
Now that you have a detailed program with speakers, topics, and abstracts, you can promote your webinar. Use your most effective, existing platforms like email and Facebook to promote your webinar. You should send the invite at least two weeks before the webinar. Here are a few ways to promote your webinars:
- Email: We recommend sending out three invites via email. If you have a mailing list with engaged subscribers, send them an entail invite and two follow-up emails.
- Social Media: Social media is a great way to drive last-minute registrations. If your company has the budget, paid social is very useful for driving registrations to a specific target audience.
4. Prepare & Practice
Along with producing fantastic content and promotion of your webinar, you also need to prepare. A webinar’s success comes down to the one live hour where you are engaged with your audience. Because webinars are live events, so many things can go wrong. So everyone involved with the webinar must prepare and practice. Be sure that everyone is ready as anything can happen, including technical difficulties and speakers going off-topic.
5. Go Live
With practice, your live webinar should go off without a hitch. But ensure that everyone is prepared for anything to happen. Have techies on hand for technical difficulties, and have cues for speakers who go off-topic. Add additional time for these sorts of unexpected events along with emails to attendees, notifying them about what is going on.
6. Measure The Success Of The Webinar
As marketers, it is all about the success metrics of the webinar, which you can do through a detailed report. Pass this report to your sales team can leverage it when in conversations with those who attended.
