Creating a webinar is one of the best ways to engage potential customers in a world that is increasingly online.
Since the advent of remote work, people rely more than ever on technology for both distance learning and social interaction.
This means more Meets than in-person meetings, more walks from the living room to the home desk than trips to the office, and, of course, more webinars instead of live events.
If ever there was a time specifically to create webinars, it is now. Not least because it presents an opportunity to deliver effective content and engage specific audiences, with the opportunity to interact and answer any questions and identify highly qualified leads to refer to the sales team.
Have we had enough of webinars?
Have we had enough of webinars? In a word, no. Although they may seem outdated, especially compared to social trends that emphasize brevity over content, they have proven to be a great resource especially in this time of social distancing.
Although nearly half of consumers said they would like to see more videos in the future (the survey was conducted by HubSpot on a sample of 3,000 consumers to understand what content and channels best attract people's time and attention), it was found that "Research content" and "Online courses," fall into the category of webinars and continue to be accessed copiously.
Remote work offers no signs of slowing down, which is why webinars remain a cornerstone in marketing and sales strategies. In the absence of in-person events, companies are increasingly turning to this opportunity, so much so that the market is experiencing over-saturation, making it even more difficult to distinguish one's event from others.
HubSpot and GoToWebinar have partnered together to help you plan a compelling and effective webinar. Do you want to host an online event that engages potential customers by driving lead generation?
Follow these steps to create an exceptional webinar that will work in 2021.
How to organize a webinar?
1. Brainstorm the right topic
Before you make your webinar, decide the topic you want to talk about.
The topic you choose should answer the questions your audience typically asks and be highly specific. For example, if you are hosting a webinar on email marketing, you may choose to focus specifically on the subject of communications.
All in all, your webinar should provide value to your audience. What topics are you an expert on? On which can you provide added value? Consider choosing an educational topic, as this type of content works.
A successful webinar depends on the alignment of the marketing and sales team, don't forget that.
Instead of guessing the topics the sales team would like to focus on, confront them before planning it.
Organize a meeting to put together new ideas for content and find out what weaknesses need to be addressed. This will go a long way toward ensuring that the follow-up is smooth once the webinar is over.
2. Choose a format
Group discussions, questions and answers, single speaker presentations, and interviews are the four most common types. Other formats include product demos and case studies.
For roundtables you can invite industry experts to discuss a niche and current topic.
For questions and answers you need the product experts on your team to satisfy doubts and information.
Interviews are also a good choice, engage an industry expert or customer to interview them about their experience with your company.
3. Choose the right platform to organize the webinar
There are many webinar hosting platforms that you can use. Popular platforms such as Streamyard, Google Meet, ClickMeeting and GoToWebinar.
When looking for an application to use, consider your goals. How many people do you think will attend? Do you need a tool that can accommodate more than 1,000 attendees? How much does it cost? And how easy is it to use? These are questions you should examine when deciding which webinar tool to use.
We also recommend that you make sure it can handle the type of webinar you want to host: can it handle panel video chats or question-and-answer webinars? The right tool for you will depend on the overall goals of your online event.
4. Assign roles to your team members
After choosing the platform, assign roles in your team. Typically, you should choose four people:
The organizer handles all aspects of planning: from conceptualization to content creation.
The presenter is the subject matter expert, from your team or industry, and will introduce your chosen topic.
The moderator is required if there are group discussions. It will help stimulate conversation among panel participants. You can also assign a moderator if you expect to receive many questions from participants.
The assistants are the team members who intervene in case of emergencies, even if there are problems with the technology. Like the moderators, the assistants can also manage the chat box during the webinar.
5. Produce the content
Once you've found the tool and decided on the topic you want to present, it's time to create the appropriate content for the webinar you wish to host.
Will it be a Presentation or a live Q&A panel? Either way, you will need to prepare content.
For example, if you are creating a Presentation, you will need to take care of the slides and make sure that they are visually appealing including through interesting graphics, images, or GIFs.
If you're hosting a webinar as a discussion, gather questions from the audience and prepare more to punctuate the time during your session.
6. Choose the most appropriate day and time
In order to choose a time and date for your webinar, we recommend that you consider where your audience lives. Use tools such as Google Analytics to see where people are, so you can choose a convenient day and time zone.
ON24 reports that Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to host webinars, between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Generally, this time slot avoids conflicts to the greatest number of people.
7. Do the dress rehearsal before the event
Rehearsals are essential for a successful webinar. Many things can go wrong on the day of the event, but by preparing you can avoid mishaps especially technological ones.
This can help you become familiar with the platform if you have never used it before.
We recommend that you create a test event on your platform. Post it, send a link to another member of your team, and try it out as if it were a real webinar. Your colleague will watch it as if they were a participant and you will be providing feedback on it.
8. Promote your webinar
Now that you've done the backend work, it's time to make sure you have people who want to attend your online event.
To promote your webinar you can create a landing page where people can register, you can promote that link in different ways.
Consider posting ads on social media and search engines. Also, we recommend using free promotion tactics: you can post it on your accounts, on your website, and send an email to everyone who is subscribed to your newsletter. It is important to use your follower base to attract people's interest.
Reminder emails are also useful. Consider sending emails such as "Don't miss" or "Places are running out" as the day approaches.
And when people sign up, remind them at the beginning of the day. You should send them the link to the webinar about an hour before, because they don't have to waste time looking for it in the registration email.
9. Follow up
Webinars are a great sales opportunity; you don't want people to forget about you once they've finished.
This is why we recommend you send a thank you email and collect feedback so you can plan better webinars in the future.
Remember that participants generally like to receive the recording, so remember to send it, it will be especially useful for those who could not attend live.
What are the tools for organizing an engaging webinar?
Once you have come up with relevant content topics for your webinar and have organized the event, it is time to let as many people as possible know about your webinar.
It's not just about generating initial enthusiasm, you have to encourage involvement.
1. Configure a search engine optimized landing page
The first step in your promotion strategy is to create an optimized landing page that can organically collect registrations.
It should contain a keyword in the title, a sign-up form like that of HubSpot to integrate with other marketing and sales tools. When a user fills out a form on a landing page or on your site, their details are automatically recorded in your CRM among contacts or as potential customers. This helps you keep track of future conversations and recognize specific audience clusters to engage with targeted strategies. power2Cloud is a HubSpot partner in italy, ask our team for more information and get started now too!
2. Promote your webinar to your contacts via email
Now that you have a landing page to direct users to, forward it to contacts who already know your company and to customers who have interacted with you in the past.
After sending a personalized email to your contacts:
- creates automatic reminders to send to prospects who have been invited but have not yet registered
- create manual email templates that your colleagues can send as personal communication to potential clients
- set up an automated email that sends notifications when a potential client registers for your webinar.
3. Promote your webinar via LinkedIn and other social platforms
LinkedIn is a great platform to promote your webinars because that's where many companies interact successfully.
LinkedIn has an option for virtual events that allows you to add the access link to the webinar. Users can also start discussions on the event page, giving you potential topics to address during the presentation or in the question-and-answer session.
You can also advertise the webinar via display ads on Google, Instagram, and Facebook, though we recommend investing mostly in LinkedIn.
4. Send reminder emails to subscribers
Even if you have received registrations, it is not certain that these users will attend. After all, if you promote a webinar a week or two in advance, it is likely that a portion of your registrants will forget the date.
Remember to send emails as reminders the day before and on the day of the live event to increase ensure attendance rate.
5. Offer something in return
An easy way to entice registrations is to offer something in return: a discount, a free consultation or trial, a certificate of participation. This will entice people to stay until the end.
6. Consider co-marketing activities
Try your hand at co-marketing. One of the best ways to gain new skills, generate interest in a piece of content and expand the reach of a campaign is to conduct a co-marketing webinar.
Instead of holding a webinar with your colleagues, engage another company that is looking for similar buyers and bring their experience to this time of discussion.
You will create interesting content and an opportunity to present the webinar to another company's established audience.
7. Send approval surveys at the end of the webinar
The only way to improve is to know what you can improve. By sending out a survey after the event, you can perfect the next webinar. Hosting a better event can help you market it with confidence to potential clients in the future. In this survey, you can also include the link to the next webinar.
8. Provide the necessary information to the sales team
A huge part of the pre and post webinar process is making sure the right information is provided to the sales team. That's why GoToWebinar and HubSpot recommend creating a webinar hub easily accessible by sales with the following information:
- Registration on demand for all webinars
- A calendar with past and future webinars
- Documentation detailing webinar objectives, title, target person, channeling stage, key points, speakers, and logistics
- Promotional and follow-up emails
- Collection with CTAs and graphics that sales agents can include in their communications
- Collection of feedback and suggestions from the sales team for new topics to propose
Once the webinar is over, however, it's time to make sure sales teams are ready to close those leads. Send a follow-up email to your colleagues and include the following information:
- Leaders who have registered
- Leaders who have participated
- Leaders who registered but did not participate
- Leads who have never registered
- New SQL leads (users who need your product and/or service, who have the budget to buy it, and with whom they can solve their weaknesses)
- any other relevant data from the webinar
- Send email templates that your sales team colleagues can use for leads based on their webinar behavior. Include other relevant content to continue nurturing leads in the coming weeks.
What does it take to organize a webinar?
Are you afraid that your webinar will not be decisive compared to others? No problem. That's the recurring thought of all companies that put themselves out there like you.
Presentations involving only one speaker are not very interactive and we do not recommend them. It is important to use different tactics to engage your audience. Here are some suggestions:
- Discussion works really well. Scriptless webinars that solicit interactions are quite effective for engaging the audience. You could forgo slides altogether and bring together two speakers and a guest for a live question session. It is effective for encouraging participation, both to keep the content conversational, yet informative.
- Answer your customers' questions throughout the event. Try to create a webinar around your prospects' questions. Invite them to answer them live. This will help create engagement and enthusiasm for what is to come.
- Involve prospects in advance by adding interactive features on the webinar registration page. You can allow people for example to vote on the top questions. This will also help you prioritize the material in which your audience is most interested.
Webinars are one of the best ways to tie marketing to sales
According to ON24, 68 percent of marketers say webinars are one of the best ways to tie their business to sales. Webinars can help generate quality leads. Why?"
- They are very engaging. According to GoToWebinar, the average viewing time of webinar participants is 57 minutes .
- They work along the entire customer journey. From group discussions to weekly live demos, webinars are a dynamic and effective way to move potential customers along the funnel until the deal is done.
- Generate high-quality leads for sales. Webinars contain lots of information about your prospects that you can use to identify high-quality, sales-ready leads. With each recording, you can collect data on leads and engagement, which your sales team can use to start a personalized conversation.
- Interecting consumers who participate for a variety of reasons. 27 percent of consumers watch a webinar because it deepens a passion or hobby, while 24 percent said they watch webinars for the entertainment value. 18 percent, on the other hand, because they can deepen their knowledge of their work. Nearly a quarter reported attending webinars for all of the reasons mentioned earlier.
- They give you the opportunity to teach something specific about your product or industry. Thirty percent of consumers say they feel more engaged when a webinar teaches them something new. And when it comes to your product, it is safe to assume that this is very interested in conversions.
- They see an increase in participant conversion. ON24 reported a 61% increase in conversion from registered user to participant in April 2020. In 2019, it was 55 percent.
What is the next step you want webinar registrants to take?"
- Download an eBook
- Subscribe to the blog
- Participate in the next webinar
- Read this case study
- Visit our FAQ page
- Watch the demonstration video
- Start a free trial
- Request a demo
- Request a quote/advice
To make the sales team efficient and effective, it is necessary that marketers' efforts also fit neatly into the same vein.
Use the same tools such as HubSpot or Asana to organize your data and work. Make sure the whole team has the information and materials they need, with clear sharing of goals and tasks all along the way.
Listen to the experience of those already using these cloud-based tools for their work. Don't waste any more time, try HubSpot for your business now. Activate it with no obligation with the power2Cloud team now to see it in action right away.