Best Practices to Create an Ideal Webinar

Webinars are increasingly becoming a popular tool for multiple industries around the world. They're being widely employed by marketers and other professionals to effectively establish conversations with individuals to display products, services, and generate potential leads.

A webinar is a web-based meeting or presentation held in real-time with individuals around the globe.

Why do B2B marketers create a fuss around webinar promotion? Creating online presentations, marketing through social media, real-time interactions, and conversations with the help of powerful tools like desktop sharing is a cost-effective way and can be done anytime, anywhere. They are quickly eliminating venue and convening costs of conferences. But don't jump to any conclusions just yet. Webinars require the same amount of preparation as conferences. Below we shall discuss the best webinar marketing practices to help you conduct a successful webinar and achieve the maximum ROI.

Planning a Benchmark Webinar

As we discussed above, webinar marketing requires the same amount of preparation as conferences do. And it will be foolish to organize an automated webinar without meticulously planning the following factors:

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• Choose a Captivating Topic: Before thinking of doing a live webinar, make sure your content strategy is strong enough. Research what topics might interest people of your industry or what are the burning problems they face. Pick a broad topic to indulge a broader audience in your webinar and to generate a higher number of leads from the audience present. Think of what insights can you provide on these topics and create a compelling headline. Mean to sell values rather than pitching for sales. Choosing the most relevant topic is a crucial part of your marketing plan.
• Creating Buzz: Once you've decided on the topic of your webinar, you must create enough buzz around your future webinar. Use as many channels as you have at your disposal. Emails, social media, phone calls, business contacts, responsive landing page, etc.: burn them out. It's no use if no one attends your webinar. While webinar content is crucial, but the way you market your live seminar to consume that information is equally essential. 

Promotions only work if they are done close to the event date. Clinically, start promoting no early than 3-4 weeks before the event and ramp-up promotions during the final week. It is observed that 64% of registrations take place during this period. Also, to keep your webinar registrants high make sure you target the right audience, offering content that resonates with your target audience as well as makes the entire registration process convenient and simple. 

The Launch

Find out what would be the perfect day and time to launch your paid webinar. Studies suggest that Mondays are the busiest days for professionals, while Fridays are spent wrapping up, which leaves mid-week the best time for conducting an evergreen webinar.

Create a well-organized webinar registration platform with minimum input fields. Keep in mind that the excess input fields act as a barrier to the completion of that form. Reminders through emails and phone calls are a good idea but avoid sending more than 2 reminders as attendees might conceive it as harassment. Simultaneously conduct your social media marketing activities in full swing. These digital marketing efforts will not only ensure an increase in your webinar attendance but also positively affect your lead generation strategy. 

• Curate Content: Doing a webinar without compelling content is like skiing without skis. It is a very important part of your webinar strategy. Make sure to engage attendees with high-quality content. Draft content in different formats to make visualization easy. For example, a blog post, multiple short clips gathered together in the form of a video. Skip some slides if necessary and offer to provide them post-event content to keep the audience wanting.
• Setting up the Right Environment: It goes without saying that to organize a professional webinar presentation you need to set up a retired room with the least distractions, a reliable internet connection, and a streaming sound of the highest quality and the most accurate webinar platform. You don't want yourself to be distracted by a weak internet connection or complaints about noise interruptions. Having all your resources in place lets you be reflected as a good webinar host and thus gives your audience a satisfying digital experience. 

Presentation Tips

• Audience Interactions: An interactive webinar engages the attendees and makes them feel like a part of it. This can be achieved by using tools like desktop sharing and showcasing infographics, keynotes, pictures, and videos.  Please note: Video marketing drives twice the engagement than any of the above. Another way to drive engagement during the webinar is by giving it a personal touch. Pick up questions from the attendees on the chatbots and answer them personally. Also, be enthusiastic. Strong and valid interactions with the audience forms to be a huge part of the customer journey of the interested attendees.
• Create Polls and Surveys: Creating live polls and surveys is a great marketing tool to indulge attendees in the webinar presentation. Decide how you show the poll results to the webinar attendees. Display the number of attendees on a poll result. It's a great way to make an impression. Survey how many of them would like to attend another webinar from you or display live registration links for the next event. Rehearse the webinar and set up timings for polls and surveys. Focusing on these webinar marketing strategies increases your chances of getting more candidates in your webinar funnel. 

Post-webinar Actions

• Catch-up for Reviews: Ask the attendees to fill out a survey form towards the end of the webinar. Reviews are valuable assets. They provide invaluable insights into the positives of your webinar marketing activities, presentation, and also make it easy for you to address the shortcomings. Other mediums through which reviews can be collected are post-event phone calls or emails. These mediums showcase that your presentation wasn't a one-way speech and that you value their point of view for making changes in your webinar marketing strategy.
• Provide Webinar Recordings: It is observed that people prefer having a webinar recording to catch up on the missed-out parts or just to view it one more time. Therefore, it becomes imperative that you record the entire event and provide it to the attendees along with additional material. This webinar marketing strategy is one of a kind and is a steadily growing concept.
• Target Absentees: Never disregarding absentees is one of the few virtues a marketer should have. Contact them through phone calls or emails. You might obtain important leads somewhere in there that might've missed out on attending the webinar. Offer to provide webinar recordings or registration links for future webinars. This will make them interested and they might end up registering or your upcoming webinar.  

Concluding Thoughts

Webinars are used by various industries for multiple purposes. An online seminar must be meticulously planned and executed using various webinar marketing strategies to obtain the desired result. Think of what benefits your audience and which webinar tool works best for them. Aim to provide the attendees with a product or a service that will surely solve their problems. Attempt to build a valuable relationship with the attendees, as they might become your customers. Finally, the aforementioned factors should be minutely looked into, planned, and implemented to create a benchmark webinar. 

Marketing webinar isn't easy, but if done right, it can do wonders for your business!