How To Create Better Webinars

Following on from the previous point, a scheduled content dry run serves as a check-in point for organisers and speakers to review webinar content together. This doesn’t just ensure the content is ready in time, it also allows you to check it is aligned with your promotional content and your target audience.

The ideal time to schedule a content dry run is around 4-5 days before the webinar. This gives presenters enough time to create the content in the first place, while giving organisers enough time to review the content and request any amendments ahead of the live day.

Interactivity creates audience engagement, and audience engagement improves the audience’s positive perception of your webinars. Interactivity, such as polls, Q&A sessions, surveys etc, is an easy way to improve your webinars. Ensure interactivity is aligned with the webinar content for relevance and increased participation.

In addition to engagement, interactivity also provides audience insights that may otherwise be difficult to gain. Aggregated interactivity feedback allows webinar organisers to identify areas of interest, trends, and potential problem areas.

The quality of a webinar is often judged (at least subconsciously) by how well the webinar is produced. If you use a dedicated webinar producer, they will usually take care of all technical aspects. However, some aspects are still controlled by the speakers. Ensuring that webinar presenters are comfortable with how the webinar tool works results in fewer on-air mistakes, such as being on mute, running polls incorrectly, advancing slides at the wrong time, or struggling with screenshares etc. A comfortable speaker is a confident speaker, and confidence is audible and makes for a better audience experience.

The most obvious improvements to webinars can be made on audio and video quality. In fact, this is so common that we have created this video on how to improve your video presentations. In short, invest in a decent podcast microphone (or wired headset) and an HD webcam. Also consider your lighting and background. Taking shortcuts on these aspects will invariably result in unfavourable comparisons to webinars who have made the effort to improve these aspects (which is increasingly the case).

With so many webinar platforms for organisers to choose from, selecting the most appropriate one for your purposes and requirements can be dauting and difficult. Do you go small and cheaper or big and more expensive (but probably future-proof)? It all depends on the current situation of your webinar program, as well as your ambitions. You shouldn’t fear changing webinar platforms after a year or two, but do take into account that the longer a platform has been used, the more likely it is that you have integrations in place to connect to other tools in your marketing tech stack. Integrations make a change of platform a more complex and comprehensive undertaking. In either case, take some time to properly evaluate webinar platforms. If you need help with this, WebinarExperts is just a call or email away. We are platform agnostic and are familiar with many (if not all) of the main webinar platforms (big and small).

Live is always best. That’s it. There are very few reasons not to run your webinars live. We do understand that speakers become unavailable or may be reluctant to present “live on air”. In these cases there are alternative solutions. However, dropping Live in favour of pre-recorded content should always be the last option. Without live content there is no live interaction. Besides, you audience can tell when something is pre-recorded. Webinar performance always decreases for non-live webinars.

Successful promotion comes down to a variety of aspects. Timing being one of them. Start early, but not too early. Very early registrants tend to have a low conversion into actual attendees. Two to three weeks before is good. The time of day, as well as the day of the week, for your promotion is especially important for email (but also your social media). Plan, and be intentional, when it comes to promotional timings. Run A/B tests if necessary to find out what achieves the best results from your audience.

Our previous point talks about promotional timing, but cadence is important too. Email is still the biggest driver of webinar registrations at scale. Leaving it late and only sending one email close to the webinar is not going to give you the best results. Plan for at least two promotional emails. Depending on your communications guidelines and marketing automation setup, you’ll want to either send these emails two weeks and one week before the webinar, or alternatively include an email deployment in the week of the webinar (or even the day of the webinar – provided you have at least three working hours between email deployment and the webinar start time). The latter can drive significant registration numbers.

If your webinar content is not performing as well as you’d like, consider whether it’s too light or too detailed. You want to leave your audience craving for more, not be overwhelmed, or feel short-changed with the content you provide in your webinars. Wherever possible and appropriate, live demos are very popular with webinar audiences.

If you’re unsure what webinar formats are or which format you are using, take a look at our blog post “The Power of Webinar Formats”. Your audience is made up of people who have different content requirements. These requirements can be tied to different webinar formats. Each format fulfils a particular purpose and matching that purpose to your target audience’s preferences is key.

Running webinars in mini-series is a powerful way of increasing the performance of your webinars. This applies regardless of whether you are running a webinar program or ad hoc webinars. If you’re running webinars as part of a program, connecting a small number of topically related webinars to each other in a mini-series will increase attendance, content recall, and audience engagement. The same applies to a situation where you are running ad hoc webinars, except your mini-series will lead to a more formalised way of running webinars. It won’t quite be programmatic, but you’ll improve on the ad hoc nature of your webinars.

If your webinars aren’t performing as well as you’d like them to, take an objective look back at your webinars. Would an audience member feel like they are being addressed by the moderator and presenters? After all, your audience is who the webinar is made for. It is easy to lose track of that when you’re just presenting to a webcam. Always remember that your audience is right there behind the lens of your webcam. You should always address (and involve) your audience. You are, after all, speaking to people with an interest in what you have to say.

Don’t just let your audience leave at the end of your webinar. Instead, give them something else to engage with. That could be another webinar (from your upcoming or previous on-demand webinars) or indeed an upcoming physical event (read more about how you can drive a physical event audience through digital events). Alternatively, you may want to refer them to a whitepaper or eBook, or even a demo or conversation with a solution specialist. Whatever you do, don’t miss the opportunity to have your audience continue their content journey with you.