There’s a reason why so many marketers swear by webinars. They work for so many industries. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute found that 47% of B2B marketers reported webinars as the content assets that produced the best results. But webinars aren’t just a hit for B2B businesses–pretty much any business can benefit.
How can you make sure your webinar delivers the best return?
In this guide, we’ll show you how to host a webinar from the prep to the main event through the follow-up so you can ensure success. Here we go.
Contents
🛑 Why wait for actionable marketing tips and tactics? Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, The Performance Tip, and get expert business growth ideas, information, and inspiration delivered to your inbox.
How to host a webinar: The prep
The first part of hosting a webinar is the planning. This is like any other marketing activity. Before you start creating content, you’ll need to set your objectives and focus on meeting those goals to make the time investment worth it. This is especially true when you’re running your small business or working as a one-person marketing team.
Here’s how to get started.
1. Set your goal
What do you want to achieve with the webinar? There are a few different reasons that you could be running a webinar for your marketing strategy:
- Lead generation: This is the most common, particularly for a B2B webinar marketing strategy. When you’re creating a webinar for lead generation, you want to make sure it appeals to your contacts, relates to your business, and offers compelling value.
- Brand awareness: Webinars are a great way to make more people—and more potential customers—aware of your brand and understand your product or service offering. Co-hosting webinars is especially effective for this goal since you’ll be able to reach your partner’s audience, too.
- Education: Some webinars are geared towards educating people who are already connected to your brand. For example, if you have a free tool or resource, you might host a webinar that explains how to get more value out of it.
- Community engagement: If you have a brand community or a network of users, you might host a webinar that’s less strictly related to your business and more related to common interests to foster engagement.
Once you have your reason, you should set SMART goals for your webinar: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. A SMART goal will help guide the rest of your webinar prep, hosting, and follow-up.
And remember, there may be overlapping motivations. You could host a webinar for lead generation that also appeals to and engages with your community. That’s a win-win, but it’s also a best-case scenario. You want to set your goal so that you know who you’re hosting the webinar for, which brings us to the next step.
2. Identify your target audience
Once you have your goal set, you’ll need to determine your webinar’s target audience.
For instance, if you run marketing for a college or university and you’re looking to generate new leads, your audience includes potential applicants. This means anyone who filled out an information request form, started an application but didn’t submit, or even stopped by your booth at a recent career fair.
This email promo includes webinar information, key dates, and links for the main goal: more applications.
👋 Free guide >> How to Find Your Target Audience in 6 Steps (With Examples!)
3. Choose your topic
With your goal and your audience defined, the next step is settling on a topic. In some cases, you might have this in mind—a new product launch, a new offering, or a current event that’s relevant to your business.
In other cases, you have a fun, creative question to answer: What type of content appeals to your audience and supports your marketing objective?
If you have customer personas, now is a great time to break those out and brainstorm. What pain points align with your product or offering? What’s been coming up in conversations with your customers recently? What’s a seasonal change that your customers and prospects need to prepare for? These are all good starting places.
Webinars can cover just about any topic your audience is interested in.
4. Involve any guests
In order to attract more new leads or build brand awareness, you might consider partnering with other brands on the webinar. This could involve co-hosting and sharing the promo responsibilities and the registration lists. Another option is to feature a speaker who will appeal to your audience, including leads and new prospects. Take this example from Sephora, for instance. The beauty brand featured a speaker affiliated with Olaplex as a brand ambassador who has a following of her own.
If you’re looking to partner with a speaker or a co-host on the webinar, be sure to reach out with plenty of time to work together.
5. Schedule the date and time
When you’re choosing a date and time, make sure it works for your schedule. You need to be available and online a little before, during, and a little after the webinar.
And make sure it works for your audience. If you’re not certain when that would be, start by looking at available data. In its webinar benchmarks report, ON24 found that the best time of day to host a webinar is either late morning or early afternoon. And according to GoToWebinar, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to host webinars.
Now, this data skews towards knowledge professionals, primarily in tech. If that doesn’t work with your audience, go with your gut. For instance, take a look at that Boston College invite earlier. The time is 7 p.m., which works for students and teachers, their target audience.
6. Pick the right platform
This step is straightforward logistics. You need to use a webinar hosting platform to host a webinar.
Zoom is the default for many businesses because it’s easy to use and affordable (the free tier does allow for some low-level webinar capabilities). But there are several more:
- GoToWebinar
- Zoho Meeting
- Google Meet
- YouTube Live
- Adobe Connect
- Webinar Ninja
The important thing is to choose one that works for your brand, your budget, and your attendees. You want it to be easy to join you.
7. Draft an outline
There is a lot that goes into planning a webinar, but don’t forget the basics, too: You need to prep your content. Start by spending some time drafting an outline of the webinar.
- Introduction: At the beginning of any webinar, you should start by introducing the host, your brand, and the topic for the day.
- Main body: The main body outline will depend on your format. An interview, a presentation, or a demo will each be organized differently. But whatever it looks like, start putting your ideas together now. Webinars shouldn’t involve reading a script, but you don’t want to wing it.
- Q&A: Webinars offer great opportunities for engagement with Q&As. Make sure to account for extra time to answer any audience questions, whether it’s at the end, after the main content, or extra time throughout the webinar as those questions come in.
- Call to action: When you’re signing off, make sure to leave your audience with a call to action. Encourage them to reach out for more information, check out your new offering, follow you on social media, attend your next webinar—whatever it is, leave them with another action to take.
8. Create your visuals
Webinars are a visual medium, so take the time to prep your assets. This includes your slides, demo reels, charts, graphics, and backgrounds that you’ll use during the webinar session. These don’t have to involve a graphic designer or lots of time. Adobe Stock and FreePik have lots of webinar background options, and Canva has tons of resources and templates that are easy to customize with your branding.
A few of Canva’s webinar templates.
This step also includes creating snippets or graphics for webinar promotion, bringing us to the last item for prep.
9. Promote the webinar
The final step in planning for the webinar is getting the word out. Post details about your webinar on social media channels, in Discord or Slack communities, and send emails to your network.
Promoting through multiple channels is good practice, but be sure to focus on your email promotions. Send dedicated invites, include links to register in any newsletter, and encourage your team to forward these emails for 1-1 outreach. GoToWebinar found that 57% of all webinar registrations come from email, so it’s worth the extra attention.
Social media is the perfect channel to promote your webinar.
How to host a webinar: The main event
With the proper planning, hosting the webinar itself will be straightforward. You know what you’re doing, why, who you’re talking to, and what you’re saying. But there are still a few things you need to keep in mind. Here’s what you need to do while you’re running the webinar.
10. Test your setup
Whenever I’m working on a webinar, I always try to have every speaker sign on about 10 minutes before the start time. This allows time to test my setup before the webinar starts and attendees start jumping on.
Make sure you have a few minutes to test your own setup. That includes internet connection, audio quality, and any screen sharing you’re planning on doing.
Pro tip: If you’re playing a video with sound, test this a few times.
11. Engage your audience
Remember, the benefit of a webinar over an on-demand recording is that you have a live audience. Be sure to engage those participants. Here are a few options:
- Chats: Most webinar platforms will involve a chat function. A low-stakes way to invite your audience to participate is to ask everyone on the call to say hello and share where they’re joining from. You can also get more specific, asking a question for people to pop answers into the public chat function.
- Polls: Another great option is to host a poll. Ask a question about the topic of your webinar to encourage webinar attendees to participate in the call.
- Q&As: These are a webinar mainstay. Most platforms have a specific question box function that allows you to manage which questions you answer and which the audience sees. Remind attendees to drop any questions for the speakers in the question box throughout the session.
Be sure to communicate with your attendees the best way to engage, and keep an eye on the public chat and any direct messages with questions.
12. Close with a call to action
When you’ve covered all the content and answered all the audience questions, it’s time to conclude the webinar—ideally within 60 minutes, the average time attendees stay.
When you’re closing, summarize the key points, but also remember to mention any follow-up actions. Direct your attendees to schedule a demo for your software or set up a visit to get an estimate. Encourage those interested in more to check out the resources on your website, watch your other marketing content, or reach out to talk about alternatives.
Ending with this call to action sets the stage for a continued relationship with your webinar attendee, which is the goal regardless of your marketing objective.
Add a QR code to your call-to-action to make it easy for your attendees to take the next step.
How to host a webinar: The follow-up
Closing with a CTA is great, but for the best chance of converting attendees into long-standing customers, you also want to follow through with another touchpoint and more value after the webinar is over. Here are a few ideas on how to do it.
13. Send a thank you email
After your webinar, send a thank-you email to all registrants, not just your attendees. This will provide another reminder to anyone interested in the topic. Plus, a good session description will foster FOMO and encourage future engagement.
In addition to the appreciation and the quick recap, share any resources you promised or references during the webinar. This is a great opportunity to promote related content and deepen the connection with your brand.
14. Share a recording
If you can, share a recording of your webinar, too. Include a link to it in your thank you email, promote it on YouTube, post it on social media, and even publish it on your website. While the best opportunities for engagement occur during the live webinar, that’s not the last time the material is valuable. In fact, 63% of webinar views are on-demand.
Remember, the webinar is valuable content you spent time creating. Distribute it in several ways to get the most out of it.
15. Analyze your performance
Before you close out this webinar, spend some time reviewing the performance. Take a look at your attendance rate, the average length of time people spent in the webinar, the conversion rate, the number of questions, and poll responses you received. Consider reviewing social media engagement rates, as well as email open rates and click-through rates. All of this information will help you get a better idea of how effective this webinar is for meeting your goals.
Lots of different ways to measure webinar success, as Influno found.
Now, this information is primarily for you and your team. By reviewing the metrics and, if possible, taking a look at attendee feedback, you can determine what worked well, what to skip, and what to try in the future for even better results. But it’s good to keep in mind that this is also for your audience.
Whenever I sign up for a webinar, I want it to be helpful. I want to walk away with a new skill or understanding, a new resource to turn to, or insights that I didn’t have before. I don’t want to leave disappointed or skip out early and unsatisfied. Taking the time to analyze performance, review metrics, and revise your approach helps you and your audience save time. Delivering more appealing, more engaging content doesn’t just get you better results. It provides value for your audience, too.
16. Nurture your new leads
The final step in hosting a successful webinar is to nurture your new leads. Beyond the automated thank you email, a personal outreach is called for. So take the time to look at the new contacts. Identify their industry, role, interest level, and lead score if you have a lead scoring system. Make sure when you reach out, it’s as personalized as possible.
In your CRM, make sure to note which leads originated from that particular webinar. The host, the medium, and the content may all be clues as to how best to engage and convert your new leads into new customers
Now you’re all set to host your next webinar
A webinar is an investment in time and effort, but that’s why it’s important to make sure that you are following the steps to get the most ROI on this marketing activity. Here’s a step-by-step recap for hosting a successful webinar:
- Set your webinar goal
- Identify your target audience
- Choose your webinar topic
- Involve any co-hosts and speakers
- Schedule the date and time
- Pick the right platform
- Draft your outline
- Create visuals
- Promote the webinar
- Test your setup
- Engage your audience
- Close with a strong CTTA
- Send a follow-up thank you
- Share the recording
- Analyze performance
- Nurture your new leads
Now, use these steps to generate leads, engage your community, and, most importantly, host your best webinar yet.
