Webinars are a powerful part of your marketing and sales toolkit. These virtual events are a great way to share knowledge, introduce products, generate interest, and move people further down the sales pipeline.
But planning, hosting, and executing a webinar? It’s enough to cause some serious stress.
With the right roadmap, learning how to host a webinar is surprisingly easier than you might think. We’ll examine how to plan, organize, and host a webinar that provides information, depth, engagement, and fun without the hassle.
All the best webinars start with one thing — careful, strategic planning. After all, you can’t convince your audience that your virtual event is worth their time if you haven’t spent enough of yours putting it together. Take your time, brainstorm adequately, and inject creativity to get the best results possible.
If you’re searching for a place to start or you’re new to webinars, learn how to host a webinar step-by-step with these 10 tips.
Engaging webinars can generate new leads and sales and improve customer engagement and brand awareness. To attract customers' attention, however, your webinar topic needs to have instant appeal and an engaging structure.
Start by choosing subject matter that appeals to your audience. Perhaps they want to better understand a new product feature or learn some tips and industry trends. Look for a specific topic that you’re an expert on, and that has close links to your product or service. Make it exciting for potential attendees, too. Look for an interesting angle, exclusive content, or fresh new opinions to share with your viewers for more profound takeaways.
Next, decide on the webinar format. You can host an interactive panel session with a moderator, opt for a Q&A session, or have a teaching-focused presentation focused on product usage and troubleshooting.
Each webinar presentation has its own merits, but think about your target audience’s goal and pick a webinar format that suits this. For example, if you’re teaching a new product feature, a masterclass-style format works best. A panel format with guest speakers or influencers is a great option for sharing opinions and insights.
Unless you’re a small business owner, figuring out how to host a webinar is rarely a solo effort. To ensure the webinar flows smoothly with minimal hiccups, you need a great team of people, each with their own responsibilities.
First, someone should handle the event planning and organization. Their role is to take the webinar from idea to reality, handling all the details along the way. This role includes creating registration forms, booking speakers, arranging event technology, and communicating with others.
Another key member of your webinar team is your speaker or host. This person is the face of your webinar and needs to engage your audience to listen, get involved, and offer a call to action (CTA). Those who are warm, charismatic, persuasive, and confident in front of the webcam are ideal.
Successful webinars are often supported by other team members, too. Marketers can help with lead generation, SEO, content marketing/email marketing, and your overall event marketing strategy. Technical assistants can be on hand to help with any issues on the day (breakout rooms, internet connection, platform functionality, etc.), conduct webinar recordings, and prepare the speakers in advance. Product experts are also great people to involve, especially if you want to demo your product features.
Hosting a webinar can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. When it comes to technology, there are lots of options, from standard video conferencing tools to dedicated webinar software.
Everyday video tools like Zoom and Google Hangouts are great options for a casual webinar where you don’t have too many guests joining you. They’re also good if your audience isn’t great with technology, as chances are these tools are already familiar to most.
For a larger number of attendees or a more specialized webinar, consider investing in a dedicated webinar platform like Zoom Webinar, GoToWebinar, or ClickMeeting. These virtual event platforms have extra features designed to make hosting a webinar easier — like webinar registration pages, pre-event waiting rooms, and interactive features like real-time polls and whiteboards. Pricing varies widely, so analyze each platform’s features and your needs before you buy.
The beauty of a webinar is it absolves you of hunting for a venue. Instead, this virtual event allows geographic independence, encouraging people from all corners of the world to tune in. Still, you want to maximize the chances that people can attend by choosing the right date and time.
Think about when your target audience is most busy and when they have free time. If they’re busy during the day, an evening webinar might work best. For others, a session they can join over a lunch break is the better option. Choose a day of the week that suits your audience and topic best.
Time zones are also an integral consideration. If you’re only hosting one webinar, choose a time that works well for people in multiple time zones. This is especially important if you have a global audience, as someone’s 2 p.m. is another person’s 5 a.m. If you’re limited by speaker availability or other constraints, consider making a recorded version available to people who pre-register or host multiple webinars on different days and times.
Once you’ve selected a topic and booked a speaker, start creating content. The content you create will depend on the format you’ve chosen, your subject matter, and what your audience wants to see most.
Think about the goal of your webinar from both your and your audience’s perspective. Plan your content around this, and then create slides and visual elements that support the information your expert plans to share. If you’re sharing a lot of technical information or data, slides with graphs and charts are essential. For a product demo, show the features with screen share.
To make your webinar engaging, create some visual slides that add interest to the virtual event. Even if most of your webinar features a live video feed from a speaker, creating a template welcome slide, agenda slide, and outro slide with your branding is helpful.
Keep your slides clean and simple. You want your audience to listen to your speaker, not read through a wall of text. Include just enough to engage attendees who can’t follow the audio conversation. It may seem minor, but content creation is a crucial part of learning how to host a webinar.
With your format chosen and your content ready, the last thing you need before you host your webinar is the right equipment. Whether this is just a simple laptop or a more elaborate setup, you need it set and ready to go.
For an informal free webinar you can likely make do with a standard laptop and webcam. The quality won’t be amazing, but it’s a more affordable way to broadcast to your audience. For a more professional look and feel, invest in high-quality equipment.
High-definition webcams or video cameras and professional headsets improve the audio and visual quality immensely. There’s nothing worse for your audience than knowing the content is great but not being able to concentrate on it because of bad audio. Level up your equipment and give your experts a better chance to engage viewers and encourage them to take action.
Running a live virtual event can be nerve-wracking, especially if it’s your first webinar. To calm your nerves and learn how to host a webinar successfully, get your team together beforehand to practice.
Hold a dry run of your webinar weeks before it’s scheduled. Set up your equipment, have guest speakers ready, and run your slides just as you would on the day of the event. Doing so will identify potential issues, ensure everything’s working, and make everyone involved more comfortable.
As well as running through your webinar, prepare your team for what they should do if something goes wrong during the webinar. Have an assistant ready to support them, and let them know who to contact or what cues to share if they need help during the live event.
Optimize your guest list for a successful webinar. Promotion is key, so focus on generating demand and signups for your virtual event.
Design an attractive landing page and run digital marketing campaigns to reach your target audience on social media platforms, through ad networks, and in relevant digital communities. Feature a strong call to action to encourage people to register for your event. Introduce a referral incentive, too, so people are more likely to forward the details to a coworker or friend.
Once your webinar guests have registered, continue communicating with them ahead of the event. Send reminder emails to registrants so they don’t miss the event and give extra value to those on your email list by sharing further insights about the webinar in advance.
With all the preparation and testing completed, your team should be ready to smile and deliver on the day of the webinar. Welcome guests as they tune in for your live webinar or have a holding slide ready with some useful information in the pre-event virtual lobby. Maintain a high-energy approach to the webinar and encourage people to participate when the opportunity arises.
Provide plenty of value with useful information, and offer resources and materials for your audience to download so they can spend more time listening and less time taking notes. Don’t forget to record your webinar, too, so you can offer it on demand to people who are unavailable.
The event may be over, but your relationship with your viewers is just beginning. Following up after the webinar enables you to gain valuable insights, retain existing customers, and make new sales.
Communicate with your webinar attendees after the event and continue to develop a connection with them. If your webinar was part of a sales funnel, let them know about any exclusive or time-limited discounts they’re entitled to.
You can also share useful resources like files, links, and reports and let people know where they can find you on social media. Now is also a great time to send a post-event survey to capture feedback that you can use to shape future webinars and events.
Now that you have a basic idea of how to host a webinar, you’re on the right track. However, your work isn’t done. Stiff competition in the webinar realm means you’re always fighting for attendees and new customers. Make your event more enticing and differentiate yourself with these tips.
People are busy and often face competing demands for their time. For people on a hectic schedule or with multiple responsibilities, online events can feel like a luxury they can’t enjoy. Respecting people's time makes attendance easier for everyone.
Have webinars that are only as long as necessary. Offer a recording for people who can’t make it, and schedule your webinar for times that are accessible to a wide range of people. Do whatever you can to make the webinar open and accessible to the maximum number of attendees.
Zoom fatigue is real, and virtual events often don’t distinguish themselves from each other in a major way—unless they’re a big, branded affair. Take inspiration from experiential events and other marketing strategies and introduce virtual event branding for your webinar series.
Use the same color palette as your brand colors to create a look and feel that stands out in the world of professional virtual events. Or, create a simple logo and templates that you can share on social media and your website to help with promotion, and personalize your webinar platform to feature similar visuals. This helps your event feel more cohesive and intentional, giving people confidence that it’s worth dedicating their time to attend.
Nothing says “unmissable event” like a big-name speaker your audience knows, likes, and trusts. If you have the budget and connections, bringing an industry expert to host your webinar is one of the best ways to drive registrations and engagement.
If an industry leader is outside your budget or unavailable, look to one of your own in-house pros to lead the session. For example, have someone from your product design team walk the audience through a features demo or ask your marketing director to lead a session about industry trends.
Some webinars feel like you’re just sitting and watching a presentation with an endless number of slides. To truly master how to host a webinar, make the event as engaging as possible for your audience so they don’t tune out.
Provide opportunities for people to comment, ask questions, or take part in polls, quizzes, and surveys. Add gamification elements to your webinar series if you can, and reward attendees with prizes like gift cards for being present, taking part, and referring others.
Virtual events can feel one-sided and lack the atmosphere of many in-person events. To address this, add a hybrid element to your online event.
A simple and effective way to do this is through event catering and corporate gifting. Use Hoppier virtual cards that allow your guests to order drinks, snacks, or lunch from their favorite local vendors. You can also use the cards as part of a digital swag bag alongside discounts, coupons, and other digital bonuses.
With so many companies competing for your target audience’s time with virtual events — often on similar subject matters — stand out by giving people something exclusive that they can’t get from anyone else.
If you can host an exclusive Q&A with an industry expert who's notoriously hard to lock down, that’s a huge win. You can also offer product or service exclusives—like the chance to trial a new feature, a free upgrade to your top-tier plan, an impressive discount on a new product launch, or a sizable gift card to a random attendee.
Differentiation is a crucial part of learning how to host a webinar. Beyond planning, hosting, and executing, you need an engaging feature to entice registrations and invigorate the experience. Hoppier provides an easy way to do this through interactive event catering and gifting experiences.
Give your guests a little pick-me-up with a Hoppier virtual card, loaded with a balance that they can spend with local vendors. They can order specialty coffee from their favorite coffee shop or get lunch from a tasty sushi bar.
You don’t have to limit the choices to food vendors, either. Keep options open and let guests use their Hoppier card as a thank-you gift, sales incentive, or digital goody bag instead. They can treat themselves to entertainment, wellness, or another product of their choice.
Sending drinks and food to webinar guests by mail can be a logistical nightmare. Forget all the hassle by using Hoppier virtual cards to put the funds and choosing power in the hands of your guests.
Create a program, customize your card with colors and branding, and set a spending limit. You can also limit vendors and set expiration dates to personalize your guests’ experience — or leave it open for a more relaxed way to engage your audience.
Webinars are hit or miss, so if things go awry, all is not lost. Sometimes, they’re amazing and full of value — other times, they’re nothing more than a badly executed sales pitch. Follow the steps above, keep your audience’s needs in mind, and introduce some interactive elements, and you have the recipe for an unmissable webinar.
If you’re looking for a fun way to add a hybrid element to your online events, give Hoppier a try. It’s a simple way to keep your attendees engaged and simplify your virtual event logistics. To learn more, book a demo with our friendly team.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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