Webinar Success: The Ultimate Guide to Creating, Hosting, and Delivering High-Impact Online Events

The Thought Leadership Webinar

Thought leadership webinars refer to detailed oriented online webinars for any specific topic, which is usually hosted by the industry leader. This can also be used to market your brand or create positioning for the knowledge and expertise in the market. This is the best way to generate leads and can help you achieve objectives such as;

• Display leadership in your industry.
• Create valuable connections.
• Bring in a new audience.

A good thought leadership webinar comprises the latest trends and industry development tactics while promising the audience new reform and making them aware of the new possibilities.

The Lead Nurturing Webinar

As the name itself suggests, nurturing the leads means making a stronger bond with your audience and moving them down the funnel. This specific segment of the live webinar is designed for those prospects whose database is already with us. This online webinar is educational and does not directly market the products, but demonstrates the company’s expertise and unique approach. Lead nurturing is not a direct sales pitch but more of a demonstration of how the company is solving the problem with their product or services indirectly.

The Product Demo Webinar

Well, there is nothing to describe this type of webinar online, as we all know how a salesman gives a product demo even in the physical world. This also takes the same time and effort, but research suggests that more buyers go over digital platforms before reaching out to the sales procedure. This live webinar provides valuable information about the product and services and how they can ease the lives of the users, as well as the key functionality and the nitty-gritty that users are looking for. Making this the best way to generate leads while closing some of the deals at the same time.

The Customer Onboarding/Training Webinar

A customer onboarding and training webinar is a sort of interactive webinar that will help you to offer more product value to your audience. An onboarding webinar gives your customers the chance to use the product more effectively right away, and it helps you forge a long-lasting favourable relationship with the company. Also, instead of giving training one and one you can easily host a live webinar for several customers at once.

Tutorial Webinar

Just like a product demo webinar online, it is also a form of a tutorial, but the only difference here is that you are not giving a demo, but instead revealing a new development. This is purely a form of informational way of giving the new technology advancement or the product features to the existing customers to create value. This can be an interactive session where you can reveal some of the less common features and can ask the customers to submit their queries to improve and get customer feedback.

Corporate Communication Webinars

These types of live webinars aren’t for any marketing purpose but solely for business communication in the corporations. This format is intended to be very helpful for companies having global offices or workforces. For any important discussions with employees or clients, companies can take advantage of live webinars and their many features, including presentations with both virtual and audio components combined.

E-learning Webinar

Webinars online or e-learning webinars refer to a format in which a teacher or anyone (usually an expert) shares information about any topic, or it can be a series of webinars covering many classes. Simply an online class where learners can also ask questions and interact.

Automated Webinar

This type of webinar online can be described as a pre-scheduled and pre-recorded video. Over a specific platform, the webinar is scheduled and will run on a specific time. This does not come under live webinar type.

Reach A Greater Audience

An online webinar helps you reach a greater audience without any hustle. As in a live webinar, you can invite as many people as you want with just a simple link through their smartphones or laptops. The internet doesn’t have any boundaries, so the potential opportunity to reach people from different demographics is huge. This helps in getting more viewership, which can lead to greater awareness of the hosting institution.

Cost Effective & Saves Time

Undoubtedly, online webinars are cost-effective and save time too. Hosting webinars online not just saves the time and money of the host but the attendees too, as the physical events or seminars cost travel expenses, accommodation and others, while the live webinar can be attended from the ease of any place. This is not just beneficial for us, but for the environment as well.

Educate Your Audience

Online webinars are simply the best emerging platform to educate your audience. Many educational institutes utilise this, which any business or individual can use for information sessions. Additionally, it can be used as a platform to live review products with your prospects about the service or product, or how to resolve any issue in the product with your customer, or any kind of online webinar as it creates an authority of yours in the industry.

Improve Your Brand Awareness

Online webinars are helpful for improving brand awareness. Here you are able to create an engaging session which people may share on their social media or refer to others, resulting in improvising your brand. Furthermore, the more insightful your webinar topic and knowledge, the better your chances of developing trust and a relationship with your audience will improve too.

Improved ROI

Your webinar can be used to generate revenue and conversions. If you establish yourself as a thought leader, potential customers will be more inclined to trust you, and consequently your product or service. Furthermore, as you share and promote your webinar, the increased recognition of your brand will naturally increase conversions too.

Choose Your Topic

Once you understand the targeted audience, it’s time to pick the topic. There are numerous methods to consider while picking the right topic. Here are some suggestions to think about:

• If you are a business person, explore deeper the most popular blogs.
• Research about what data is missing from the industry.
• Try the Google search console to find out the most popular questions that are relevant to the industry of your work.
• Respond to questions from the audience and provide solutions.
• Give no-cost training on the business solution you are using.
• Teach your audience how to perform something they are unable to do.
• Check out your FAQs, and select the most frequently asked questions to be your subject.
• Use social media platforms polls to identify which topic information your audience is looking for.

Always remember that a webinar needs the topic that is most relevant to your audience and one that is in demand among the audience and industry too.

Identify Your Targeted Audience

It is always better to identify your targeted audience and their key expectations from the event. Try to figure out the answers to this below-written question first.

• What is my ideal client profile?
• What are the questions my audience has?
• What are the biggest pain points for my audience?
• What can I do to best educate my public?
• What are the main interests of the viewers?

The more you learn about your audience’s expectations and what they would like more of, the better the webinar you can host. It’s a good idea to do thorough research on the market and client profiles prior to choosing your subject.

Choose A Date And Time For Your Webinar.

The simple understanding is that nobody wants to wake up at 4 am to join your webinar. So, select a date and time that best suits your target audience. Also, consider the time zones if your event is going to be in different countries.

Select Your Webinar Team

Selecting a team is as important as selecting the topic because the webinar runs live and a single mistake can demolish your reputation. If you’re part of more than one person, then it’s best to assign certain tasks. Consider delegating different people to manage the webinar, develop the content, advertise it, and then present it.

Choose The Format of Your Webinar

Consider the range of opportunities you have to present live at an event. It’s up to the host how he wants to make it. It can be just simple talk or an interview where the audience can participate in the Q&A sessions. Or a mixture of these various kinds of formats. The ideal format for webinars will be determined by the topic, your audience, your team, and your network.

Find Speakers To Present Your Webinar

The next step is to look for speakers after you’ve chosen a topic, time, date, and format. You can host the webinar yourself, or you can look for members or an industry expert to speak. It is important that when you invite someone to participate in your webinar, you give them all the necessary information in advance. Additionally, when an industry expert says something, it creates credibility, leading to the creation of a brand.

Plan Your Programme

Take the time to jot down an agenda and an outline, then practice it until you can do it. Even though it’s unlikely that you’ll need to spend 100 hours preparing for a speech that lasts an hour, it’s still a good idea to create an agenda and hold several practice sessions.

Take a Test of Equipment

It is a good approach to test all of your equipment. From the camera to microphone, to your system, do check all those things before you go live. Never give any scope of error.
Even a simple mistake can break the signal between you and your audience, and that’s not what you want. So, practice the script and test all the equipment.

Choose a Professional Webinar Platform and Services

This might be listed as one of the last steps, but it is the most important aspect of the whole webinar. The right platform will help you to offer many features and tools to make the webinar interactive and interesting.

Still, it all depends upon the requirements and your personal preferences. A good platform easily accommodates a large audience for your webinar. While offering the opportunity to the presenter to present videos, slides, and additional Q&A sessions with ease.

As there are many factors which depend upon this point, let’s understand the procedure of how to choose the right platform and what features to look for in-depth.

Customization options

Choose the interactive webinar platforms that allow you to customise lots of things such as adding company colours or logos, and using custom backgrounds as you want is the best option. Customisation helps you to look different from all the other webinars platforms that your audience has attended. It also gives you an added advantage over the competitors.

Easy-To-Use and Mobile-Friendly

It should be easy to set up and use a webinar platform without any technical knowledge. It should be simple to use and easy for users to sign up. Because your audience expects it to be mobile-friendly, as there are more mobile users than computers or other gadgets. We used to carry mobile phones everywhere, so the audience could access webinars from anywhere they wished.

Have Multiple Features

You should be able to easily record and share sessions using the webinar platform. Your audience can access your recorded webinars at any time and view them at their convenience. You can get feedback from your audience by using polls or voting.

Email Marketing

Many online webinar services and platforms allow invitations to be sent via email. If you aren’t comfortable using it, you can integrate your existing email marketing software with quality platforms.

Customer Support

Are there any videos or other resources you could use to help? It is impossible to solve all of your tech problems by yourself. You can count on the webinar service providers who offer 24-hour customer service, an extensive library of instructional guides, and a vibrant community of users for the webinar platform.

Automation

It is important to rely on automated webinar platforms and services for tasks such as sending reminder emails to attendees before the scheduled time. It is possible to set up webinars ahead of time with a start/end time. These webinar platforms will be time-saving for organisers.

Pick a Compelling Webinar Topic

The secret to a successful webinar is choosing a topic that is in demand and that people want to learn more about. Content is king, and relevance is a must. The subject must be appealing. Without it, there is no point in holding a webinar because you won’t get any attendees.

Knowing your audience and the popular subjects that people are interested in learning about will help you choose the best topic. Start compiling a list of the information they want and the things they are looking for. Include topics from the current industry that are relevant to your target audience. However, selecting the popular topic requires you to also demonstrate proficiency in it as doing so will help you establish your industry expertise.

Make a Presentable Presentation

Nowadays, webinar services and platforms allow users to share PPTs or slides, which creates an efficient presentation and provides participants with in-depth technical information.

A professionally designed slide deck can captivate your audience right from the beginning. At the same time, a boring presentation can make your audience turn away. The presentation is the primary medium for interaction with your hosts and the primary thing they’ll be looking at throughout the course of the event. It is essential to ensure that the presentation will keep their attention until the end. Take this as an opportunity and use attractive images, videos, animations, and colours to make it look soothing and appealing to the eyes.

Add Poll Questions

It’s a brilliant idea to include poll questions in your dull webinar, but with a variety of questions that pique participants’ interest in responding. Adding funny or sometimes irrelevant questions can be a good idea, but not too much.

If your webinar participants are responding to the poll questions that were added in the middle of the session, it can be useful to record the responses to determine whether the webinar is going well or if you need to add something else. The additional advantage of poll questions is that if participants respond incorrectly, it suggests that the information needs to be reviewed.

Polls aid in information retention after the webinar has ended. Rather than just watching and listening, participants are required to interact with the content.

Insert Different Forms of Content

The addition of different forms of content creates attractiveness. A webinar online with a similar tone of content doesn’t appeal to the user. A single minute of boredom can lead to disapproval of your whole webinar session and the effort you have made. To some extent, it is essential to make them interested and entertained, whether through your words or by including visual elements like pictures, slides, brief videos, and others.

Include Group Discussion or Interactive Sessions

Humans are social animals and having the time to do networking and group discussion is the best thing they wait for. Giving the opportunity and time for interactive sessions and group discussions can help you increase your engagement.

Repurposing

At last, repurpose the webinar, use it to upload it over your social media channels, and offer the recorded webinar to anyone who wishes to know more or to the registrants who unfortunately didn’t attend the live webinar.

Additionally, you can also send the ppt, any case study or informational content to the people who need to make the optimal use of your prepared resources and hard work.

Analytics

Well, this helps you to improve your next webinar online. Other than that, keep eye on the analytics of the whole webinar and analyse the pattern (times where most of the attendees feel engaged or bored).

Follow-Up

With the information and data collected with the help of the live webinar, it’s time to call, text, or mail the prospects for your services.

It is of no worth if you don’t send follow-up mail to the attendees regarding the services or products you are targeting.

Pro Tip*: If you are a brand or business, make sure you offer some discount to all the attendees who order or buy your products now (or for a limited period). If someone gets a discount just by attending the live webinar, there is nothing big for anyone.