[Updated May 21, 2024]
Webinars have been growing in popularity as they help educate prospects, help marketers qualify those prospects, and can easily be turned into multiple quality content pieces.
You don’t need deep media training to effectively host a webinar, but there’s an art to making an eye-catching one. We know we bumbled through our first webinar, improved processes for our second, and then developed a solid system by our third. Those bumpy early webinars taught us a lot. Here are the best webinar practices we used to up our webinar game
1. Guest Speakers
When we were first getting started, we typically had our CEO or Chief Sales Officer present with a guest speaker on our webinars. Now we’re lucky enough to have a dedicated webinar host. While having a credible host is great, having guest speakers is what really elevates your authority
Our guest speakers are usually thought leaders in the presales and sales industry but look for the thought leaders your ICP gravitates toward. There are two huge benefits to this approach:
- Their Following Becomes Your Followers. Influencers have their own dedicated following, which means that their whole following has now become a new potential audience for your webinar.
- Trusted Source. People are more likely to trust that it is a worthwhile event to attend when a reputable name is attached.
Your company becomes associated with this trusted source; helping your company build credibility and new trust.
2. Use Poll/Survey Questions
It’s not enough to broadcast the information you want to share. People often do other things while webinars, like online shopping, other work, or even cooking! You need to keep people engaged so you know you have their attention.
The best way to keep your audience engaged is to sprinkle some poll or survey questions throughout the webinar. There are multiple platforms that allow you to create questions and ask them whenever you want throughout the presentation. You can also share the results with your audience. Asking the right questions will give you insight into what sort of audience you’re pulling in, and if it’s the right one. It can also help you personalize the topics to make the webinar even more applicable to your audience.
3. Make Sure a Webinar Recording is Available
Many people sign up for webinars, expecting to not make the event. Why? Because they know that a recording will be available.
This isn’t a loss for your marketing team. They have already registered and are more likely to pay attention to the webinar when they can watch it at their convenience (and rewind pieces they really like or even turn on subtitles!). The only con is that they can’t answer poll questions or ask questions themselves during the webinar. So be sure to send out a recording to all registrants and attendees after the event. If you still want some insights into the portions they found most useful, create a demo of the webinar.
What have you A/B tested with your webinars, and what have you found to work best? Of course, using poll questions in a webinar is easier to implement than getting a guest speaker on board, but testing out new approaches is the best way to optimize your webinar for both yourself and your audience.