As more and more brands invest in online experiences, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate whether you’re keeping up with the trends, such as webinars.
Are you taking the proper steps in planning a successful webinar for your needs? There are many different things to consider when it comes down to planning a successful webinar that encourages engagement with your brand.
Let’s take a look at some of the tips you should keep in mind when you want to run a successful webinar below. By creating engaging virtual meetings and taking the time to plan out each aspect of your webinar experience, you can deliver a better event and promote your brand without fail.
1. Choose the Right Virtual Platform for Your Needs
One of the first steps that you need to consider while working on your successful webinar is picking the right virtual platform for your needs. Finding the right webcasting software is key to getting the best experience. There are many different types of virtual softwares, so make sure to look through the benefits and costs of each option.
Are you planning for hundreds of users? Or would you rather have breakout rooms and interactive options? Finding the right virtual platform and creating a virtual environment that best fits the tone of the webinar and your brand is the first step towards running a successful webinar.
2. Choose the Correct Format
Once you’ve narrowed down which virtual platform is best for your needs, you can then start to think through the format that will best suit your webinar. You can have a single speaker who talks for a longer period of time, or multiple speakers who talk one after the other. You can add interactive content like quizzes and polls, or plan for a Q&A with your speakers. By thinking through these virtual event ideas, you can truly hone in on your guests to provide them with the best webinar experience.
3. Recruit the Best Speakers to Attend
The speakers who are talking at your event are one of the biggest draws for audiences and attendees. That means that finding speakers who have large followings, are industry experts, or have a record of great speaking events. By recruiting the best speakers to attend your webinar and virtual events, you can bring in a bigger audience and improve the authority of your brand.
4. Create a Webinar Agenda
Webinar attendees want to know what’s coming up during a speaking event. Providing an agenda can help you inform your attendees and let them know what is coming up during the video conferencing event. Whether you have a speaker share their outline at the beginning of their talk or send out an agenda in advance, helping your audience plan improves the overall experience they will have with your webinar.
5. Spend Time Webinar Planning
You want to be sure that you are investing plenty of time in your webinar planning. Trying to throw an event together at the last-minute isn’t just stressful for you and your team, but it means that attendees are more likely to get sub-optimal experience. Planning in advance helps create a smooth and successful webinar.
6. Explain the Topics Being Covered
A common mistake made by those planning for a webinar is not explaining the topics being covered in enough detail. A title and brief should be clear enough that a user unfamiliar with the topic or industry can get a strong grasp on what will be covered. That helps create clear expectations of what will occur in the webinar.
7. Run Trials and Practice Sessions
Trial runs and practice sessions are important to creating a smooth experience that leaves your attendees satisfied and happy with the outcome of your event. By running practices and going through transitions, speakers, and announcements, you can prepare for any mistakes that might happen and learn how to manage your webinar.
8. Build a Landing Page and Registration Process
A landing page and registration process is the main conversion for your audiences. By creating a landing page full of compelling content and an easy registration process to sign up for the webinar, you can encourage more attendees to come to your event.
9. Promote Your Event on Social Media
Social media is one of the best promotion platforms for your event. While emails and website banners can get the message out to your current audience, social media can get you in front of fresh eyes. Social media promotion ideas can help you learn new ways to advertise for your followers and new audiences.
10. Get the Best Visualizations for the Event
Staring at a speaker without any visualizations can quickly become boring for audiences. Each speaker at your webinar should have clear visualizations and interesting slides or graphics to accompany their speech. If you don’t want speakers to bring their own, you can provide the best visualizations for your event.
11. Double Check Your Internet Connection
Is there anything worse than planning a webinar, getting an audience, finding a great speaker, and getting ready to start only to find that your internet connection is weak? A weak internet connection leads to stalls and delays, dropped calls, and frozen screens. All of these make your experience less than optimal for audiences. By checking your connection, you can avoid all these mistakes.
12. Set Up a Q&A Session
Q&A allows audiences to ask the questions of speakers they want answered, which allows them to feel heard during a successful webinar. Even if there isn’t time, you can have an option for questions to be sent in so that an email with the answers can be sent out to your attendees.
13. Offer Recordings and On-Demand Access Post-Webinar
Recordings and access to a completed webinar recording is a great benefit to offer your audiences. That means that the information you shared is available for longer than a one time period and your audiences feel like they get even more value from your brand and their time investment in the webinar.
14. Plan Your Follow-Up Strategies
After the webinar ends, you have a clear opportunity to get in front of audiences with your brand’s services or products. Plan your follow-up strategies before the webinar begins, such as providing event survey questions, in order to get the best results for your brand and your team and allow you to market to new audiences.
Your Webinar is Waiting
Of the many best practices to keep in mind when planning a webinar, the 14 above can get you running on the right track. Are you ready to get started? Unless you have a team whose full-time job is producing webinars, you could probably use a little help. Managing webinars with 6Connex gives you the help you want and the peace of mind you need. We’ll help you determine what features you need, then we’ll help you deliver a successful webinar. Contact us today for more information.
