How to Host a Webinar

How to Host a Webinar

Learn how to host a successful webinar.

Webinars (also called web conferences) are used to conduct live training or presentations via the Internet. They have also become a very popular lead generation tool for sales and marketing.

How to Host a Webinar

1. Choose the webinar hosting service

This article on Webinar Services explains the options for the technology you'll need to run a webinar online. There are lots of tools and services that are specifically designed for webinars.

Top Suppliers for Webinars

2. Plan your webinar

Just like with a live seminar, you'll need to make sure your webinar will be a good ROI (return on investment) for your sales/marketing budget. That means figuring out what your objectives are, what topic(s) you will cover, who your speaker(s) will be, how you will get people to attend, and how you'll follow-up afterwards.

Marketing Planning and Strategy
Budgeting for Marketing - costs and ways to save money
How to Determine ROI for a Trade Show - you can use these same principles to determine the ROI of your webinar
How to Collect and Save Customer Information - think this through NOW when you are planning your webinar! You want the names and permission to contact all the people who attend your webinar.

TIP: Check out etouches.com, a company that offers software designed by event planners to manage events and trade shows. Many large companies use them for managing RSVPs. They offer software to help manage every step of the process.

3. Create your marketing for the webinar

How to Attract People to Come to Your Webinar
Ideas and tips on Seminar/Webinar Marketing
Promote the webinar ahead of time with:
- Email Marketing
- Direct Mail Postcards
- Invitations
- Direct Mail Letters
- Mailing Lists
- CRM (customer relationship marketing)
- How to Develop a Customer Contact Plan
- Create buzz through Social Media Marketing

TIP: You'll look bigger and like a "safer buy" if all your marketing and sales materials are part of an Integrated Marketing Campaign.

4. Prepare your webinar presentation

People on webinars want to be edu-tained. That's a combination of educated + entertained. On a webinar, you are competing against Facebook, checking email and all kinds of other distractions to gain someone's attention. You have to keep it lively!

There will be people with a wide variety of knowledge about the company and the topic most likely on your webinar. You may want to target your webinar to people with different levels of expertise and instead of hosting one webinar, host several. One for people who've never done something before; another webinar for people who have tried and failed; another webinar for people who want advanced tips. You'll have fewer people that attend each webinar but it will be much more relevant and they'll be much more engaged.

Online Sales Presentations How-to Guide - if your webinar has any type of focus to sell something, this guide will be helpful. It's written for a sales person or company making a presentation to a prospective customer/client so you'll need to tailor the ideas because you'll have a webinar full of prospects.
Sales Presentations How-to Guide
Public Speaking tips to help you prepare a worthwhile talk. Read this!
How to Promote Yourself as an Expert

5. Do a dry run, don't wing it!

Do a dry run of your webinar to make sure you are comfortable operating the technology and everyone knows their role.

TIP: some tips on things to think and talk through before your webinar

Ensure everyone is delivering a consistent message and understands the financial ROI required to make the webinar worthwhile. Fortunately, the financial stakes are lower with a webinar than they would be with a seminar, but nevertheless it's critical to put your best foot forward.
Be sure to think through who will manage the time if you have multiple speakers. Someone needs to act as a friendly but firm moderator to keep things moving along and to keep the energy level high.
How will you promote yourself or your company in an appropriate way during the webinar? A webinar is an educational event so it can't come off as a pushy sales message or people will drop off the webinar. Instead, think of sound bites (short messages) you want the moderator or host to use throughout the webinar to promote your company, products or services.
- Are you aware of Hallmark Hall of Fame movies? Hallmark does a great job of "wrapping" the programming with their brand messaging.
Figure out what tone and personality you want to convey for your webinar. Like NPR? Or more action-packed and quirky?
How will you handle questions and comments made on chat from the audience? Will you choose a few questions to answer and take the rest of the questions "off air"? Or have someone responding to chat?

From our experience: people attending webinars are easily distracted by emails, people around them, Facebook, Twitter... They may be like people with ADD (attention deficit disorder) - keep it moving! Edu-tainment is the combination of education + entertainment. Successful webinars achieve this balance of educating (selling) and doing so in an entertaining, engaging way.

6. Follow-up after the webinar! You've paid a big price in time to get these leads!

TIP: Make sure everyone working the webinar understands how much revenue must be generated to cover costs. That will help people focus on qualifying people and spending their time with following up with the prospective customers, not the tire kickers.

How to Generate Qualified Leads

TIP: Extend the reach of the people who benefit from your webinar

Post the webinar on your website
Post the webinar on YouTube. Learn more about Video Marketing and all the places you can post your webinar.
Post the slides on SlideShare, a free site that showcases slide presentations.
Create an eBook of the slides and promote that on Facebook, Twitter and on your website and email newsletter. Also include a link to the webinar video replay. That gives people an option of how they want to learn - by reading something or by viewing the webinar video.
Write a summary of the key insights from the webinar and send that out as a press release.

7. Measure the Return-on-Investment for your webinar

How to Determine Marketing Effectiveness and ROI

Know this: Most people attend webinars to learn what's new and to learn from experts. It's critical to follow-up after the webinar to nurture the leads and better qualify the people you collected information about.

CRM Customer Relationship Marketing

What do you have to say about webinars?

We're starting the conversation. Give advice about hosting webinars. What have you learned works? Doesn't work? Share what you know and learn from others by reading their advice on the tabs on this article. The MarketingZone Editors will continuously update this article and highlight the best ideas shared by the community.

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