Webinars are fantastic ways to communicate with your customers. They’re an opportunity for you to display your passion and skills, introduce clients to new aspects of your products, and grow your market along the way. As webinars have surged in popularity over the years, many people are now asking how to make their webinar stand out from the crowd. Let’s take a deep dive into webinar producing process.
Winning Webinars for Your Audience
Every marketer wants to produce a webinar. Webinars are fantastic ways of connecting with your audience, building strong connections to your brand whilst widening your reach across the web. However, when marketers produce webinars for lead generation purposes without putting their audience first, the outcome is a dull and uninventive webinar that is more likely to turn your audience away from your brand.
Get into webinars for the right reason — because you have valuable content to share with your audience. Niche ideas, superficial topics and sales pitches don’t make good webinar content. Before you start planning your webinar, make sure you have great new content or a fresh new angle, to enrich your audience’s lives. Ready to go? Here’s our complete checklist for your content, planning and webinar building process.
How to produce a successful webinar?
1) Settling On A Subject
Vague webinars that move from topic to topic will quickly disinterest their audience. Whilst those watching your webinar might not be intimately familiar with your brand, it’s likely they’ll have some idea what you do. Don’t turn this into a sales pitch.
Your subject should be specific enough that you can go into detail, revealing some valuable tidbits of information that your audience wouldn’t otherwise have found. Honing in on specific topics lets you take a deeper dive and mine a little more value for your audience.
2) Meet The Experts
Standing out in today’s market means wowing your audience with your expertise. Webinars are your chance to prove you’re a leader in the field, not just another follower.
Picking the right speakers is critical to building trust with your audience. Look for experts, of course, but consider their ability to connect with viewers. Even the most intelligent person can bomb a webinar if they’re uncomfortable on camera. Here’s what you want:
Deep knowledge of the topic is paramount — your speakers should be true experts, capable of tackling any question that comes their way. This not only ensures the credibility of your webinar but also helps your audience to trust in your expertise.
Broad understanding of the field — they should be able to connect the dots and explain how their topic fits into the bigger picture.
Camera presence is a game-changer — your speakers should be engaging and comfortable speaking to an audience through a screen. This level of comfort and engagement is what keeps your audience hooked and ensures the success of your webinar.
By choosing speakers who meet these criteria, you’ll be well on your way to delivering a knockout webinar!
3) Finding The Format
Without the right format, the best content can fall flat. Will you have one speaker engaging with the camera the whole time, or two or more speakers working together in dialogue to share your content? What about a Q&A format where information is contextualized to particular questions your viewers may have? The speakers’ skills and the content should guide how you want to present it.
4) An Approach To Promotion
A webinar is a great opportunity to promote your brand but only if it finds the right viewers. Make sure your webinar is linked to vital keywords so that users can find it — using tags on YouTube and hashtags on other social channels will make it easily searchable. If you’re going to be sharing your webinar on Facebook or Instagram platform, think about how you might create abridged versions to fit their different formats.
5) Building A Slick Slide Deck
Your slide deck provides the main visual element of your webinar then it has to grab your audience’s attention immediately. Create your slides to work with your script — that means reducing redundancies so that you’re not replicating information in the script and slides. The slides you contextualize your script — finding ways to show your audience what the speaker is telling them in compelling ways is key.
6) Scripting
If you’ve ever been to a comedy club on a Monday night, you’ll know that improvisation can be painfully hard. Writing a finely honed script will allow your speakers to convey all the relevant points in a fluid and comprehensible way. Your script and your slides should be produced in tandem to create a webinar where every moving part works to create a cohesive whole.
7) Finding The Right Platform to Produce a Webinar
Choosing a robust webinar platform will eliminate technical hitches which can hinder your webinar. Some platforms offer interactivity, live chats, and unlimited attendees, whereas smaller, niche subjects find more economical platforms with limited viewers more effective. Your subject-matter experience and the ambitions for your webinar holdings should lead you to the right platform.
8) Identify Your Metrics
Webinars can be a hugely valuable marketing tool, for example, in the field of lead generation. But if you don’t already measure your success in these areas you’ll have no idea how your webinar has affected your growth — and you can’t capitalize on your success in the dark. Prior to running your webinar collect the relevant data about lead generation and conversion to see the effect your hard work can have.
9) A Quality Transmission Represents Your Brand
Poor quality audio can hamper even the slickest webinar, so make sure you have the tools to provide your audience with an experience that represents your brand at its best. Even the most secure web connection can fail, so consider calling into your webinar through landline phones — this will ensure high-quality audio that everyone can hear.
10) Test, Test, Test before Produce a Webinar
With so many variables from connection to platform affecting your webinar’s success, don’t take any chances with the live event. Run at least one practice webinar to test that your procedures are up to scratch. These tests don’t only reveal any weaknesses in the technology, they also ensure your team is up to speed.
Conclusion
A great webinar will strengthen your brand and act as a fantastic marketing tool, bringing in leads your sales team can convert. Follow our webinar checklist to produce a webinar and stand out from the crowd, and you’ll return your attendees to the webinar.
Lauren Groff is a writer at UK Writings and Boomessays. She trained as an event planner and has helped hundreds of organizations physically and virtually run successful events. You can read more of her work at State Of Writing service.