How to host successful webinars
Webinars are a fantastic driver for lead-generation. They help a brand to establish themselves as a thought leader, but especially to convey striking messages both to leads as well as existing clients.
Why to host webinars?
Webinars are like blog posts: you create them once and they stay for a long time, keeping on generating traffic and mostly as well leads. They as well showcase your knowledge and give you the possibility to highiight your clients or partners by inviting them as your guests.
I’ve covered the “why’s” in another blog post.
However, running a successful webinar requires a lot of preparation and hard work. Here are some tips to help you produce a successful webinar that will leave your audience wanting more.
Preparation
Before you even think about launching a webinar, you need to do your research. Find out what topics have been popular in the past, the typical length of successful webinars, and the type of content that resonates with your audience. Once you have all this information compiled, you’ll be able to plan out a webinar that meets your audience’s needs.
Topic
Choosing the right topic for your webinar can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some tips for finding the best possible topic for your webinar:
One of the most important things you can do when selecting a webinar topic is to know who you are speaking to. Knowing your audience will help guide you toward topics that will resonate with them and make them more likely to attend. Think about what they care about, their interests or challenges they face and use this as inspiration for potential topics. Aligning the topic closely to your activity is crucial as well. Otherwise you will inevitably attract people who are far from being potential clients and a such (cruel to say, but true): time wasters.
It's always good to research what topics competitors in the same industry are discussing or what topics influential people within the industry have been talking about. This can give you great ideas for webinar topics and provide insight into how successful similar talks have been. But be careful not for fall prey to the temptation to go mainstream. Finding your niche and working on that is important.
Ask Your Employees/Customers: The best way to find out what topic your audience would be most interested in is by asking them directly. Send out surveys, polls and emails to your employees or customers and ask them which topic they would like to hear more about through a webinar.
Sometimes the best topics can be sourced from questions existing clients have. These are real problems that they want to be solved and as such perfect candidates for a webinar. Of course only in case the topic is interesting not only for this specific client.
Technology
It goes without saying that you’ll need the right technology for hosting a webinar. Make sure you have a reliable internet connection, good audio and video quality, and a user-friendly platform for streaming the webinar.
While there are plenty of webinar platforms on the market you need to carefully chose the one that will fit your need. For instance Boothted focuses on providing a platform that is extremely easy to use, fully branded and can bridge the gap between webinars and hybrid events. This might be right choice for you - or maybe not.
Choosing the right platform means to invest a considerable amount of time and money to have everything up and running. You probably won’t change the platform for every single webinar.
Besides the platform you as well need to have your own “studio” up and running. Don’t worry, it’s not that you need to set up an expensive TV-studio, but investing a little bit of time into arranging your room so that it looks nice and professional as well as a bit of money into a decent microphone, some basic lighting and eventually a better camera than the one you have built-in into your computer can pay off.
Pre-webinar promotion
A webinar won’t be successful if nobody attends. Before you launch the webinar, promote it on your website, social media, and email list. Give your audience plenty of notice, and be sure to include all the relevant information, such as date and time, topics covered, and the link for joining the webinar.
Make sure the content of the webinar is engaging and relevant enough to persuade people to join. You can also use influencers in your industry to help spread the word about your webinar. Use hashtags on social media and tag key influencers who might be interested in attending. Additionally, create promotional graphics that feature essential information such as date, time, topics covered, etc., and share them on multiple platforms. As we are mostly targeting a B2B audience, my best experience has been LinkedIn. Not only sharing the info with my own followers, but as well in relevant groups.
OIf course ideally you have an email-list with subscribers ready to promote your webinars as this will bring you probably the best return rate. Don’t forget as well to consistently fill up your mailing list with new subscribers.
Don’t underrate as well the opportunity to have your guests promote your webinar. They can drive substantial traffic to your webinar. Therefore you should help them by providing them with visuals for the webinar they can post, pre-made texts, tag them in post and more.
Overall, make sure you’re consistent with your promotion strategy; post reminders about the event regularly leading up to it and remind people why they should attend. The goal is for everyone to look forward to being part of the event, so make sure your webinar is well-promoted in order to ensure success.
Engage your audience
Once the webinar has begun, make sure to keep the audience engaged. Ask questions, start discussions but be sure to keep it focused on the topic at hand. Invite participants to share their opinions or experiences with the subject matter; this can help create an interactive environment. You can also use polls or surveys as a way for attendees to provide real-time feedback.
At the end of your webinar, make sure you leave time for follow-up questions from the audience. Pay attention to any comments or questions that come up during the presentation, and address them in greater detail afterwards if possible. Finally, don’t forget to thank everyone who attended! Showing appreciation for their participation is a great way to ensure that they come back for future webinars.
Boothted has several ways to engage with the audience built in that I love to use during my webinars. While attendees can use the chat to network, the moderated and up-voteable Q&A section helps to funnel questions to the speakers.
A more passive way of engaging is to provide hand-outs to the audience or Boothted’s FAQ section.
By engaging your audience, you can make your webinar more interactive and enjoyable while helping to build relationships with your attendees. With these tips in mind, you’ll be sure to create a successful webinar that resonates with its viewers!
Monitor the performance
During the webinar, monitor the performance of the webinar. Keep a close eye on the metrics such as the number of attendees, the average duration of viewers, and any other data that will help you improve the quality and effectiveness of your webinar.
With the time you will see some patterns what works best, what less and what topics and speakers resonate the best with your audience.
After the webinar is before the webinar
I highly recommend to host a series of webinars, especially as your audience will only grow with the time. Once or twice a months should be a good rhythm to start with.
Once your webinar is over you need to make sure to thank both your speakers and your audience. Provide the audience with a link to the replay and eventually additional information. The goal is clearly to create an added value for your audience.
I have made the experience that you should not limit your outreach only to those who have attended the webinar, but of course also include those you’ve initially invited. Boothted gives you the possibility to handle the replay as a webinar-on-demand. In this case attendees will have a similar experience compared to a live-webinar.
By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to producing a successful webinar that not only meets your goals, but also provides an engaging and informative experience for your audience.