How to Create Webinars that Generate Buzz

We now live in a world where working and holding meetings remotely have become increasingly common. Things may never go back to how they were before. Telecommuting is here to stay for many, making webinars critical for today’s marketing and sales efforts.

Though webinars have been around for quite some time, the new normal has certainly given them a boost. Many events, seminars, sales presentations and meetings that would once have been live and in-person have gone virtual. That’s why it’s important for businesses today to know how to create webinars.

More and more people rely on webinars in various formats to present and view information. In other words, it’s expected in many industries now particularly in B2B, that businesses will provide their prospects and customers with valuable webinars. Webinars are a wonderful way to engage with customers in today’s world.

Now this brings up a new issue. Since webinars are on the increase, how do you break through the clutter of all that new digital content? How do you attract the attention of attendees, give value and create positive buzz?

It’s no longer enough to just hop online with some hastily prepared PowerPoint slides. The bar has been raised.

Why Give Webinars?

We’ve already talked about the new focus on webinars given the increase in remote work. Here’s some other benefits.

• Webinars are popular. Every week, 54% of B2B professionals watch webinars. 54%!!!
• In the process of registering attendees and in some cases interacting with them during webinars, you can collect a whole lot of information. The kind of information that helps close deals.
• Not only can you gather information during webinars, you can directly answer questions your prospects may have. They are a great way to connect personally with prospects and clients.
• Webinars are helpful for many different purposes from education to closing sales. They are effective at every point in the marketing funnel.
• You get people’s attention for a prolonged period. People view webinars for 57 minutes on average.
• Webinars enable you to connect with people you would not have been able to otherwise. People attend webinars for a variety of reasons and they can attend from anywhere in the world.
• Webinars dramatically increase conversions. One recent report showed a 61% increase in registrant-to-attendee conversion.
• They enable you to teach something about your company or its products and services to an audience who wants to be there.

So, let’s get started!

Determine Your Purpose

We aren’t suggesting that you just start giving webinars in order to jump on the bandwagon. Determine your audience and your purpose for giving the webinar. Look at where your audience is in the marketing funnel.

The most common purpose, that of 60% of businesses, is to convert users in the bottom of the funnel into paying customers.

Choose Your Specific Topic

Now that you’ve determined your purpose for giving the webinar, choose a focused topic to help you fulfill that purpose. Sure, it needs to be relevant to your business. But it also needs to be valuable to your audience.

How to find your topic? Any number of ways. For instance

• Hold polls and surveys on social media
• What social media posts and blog posts have garnered the most views, likes and comments?
• Ask your salespeople and customer service reps what questions prospects and customers ask most
• Look for topics that are focused and specific.
• Unless you are giving a webinar to current customers on how to use your product in advanced ways, in most cases keep your contact educational. You will set yourself up as an expert and your audience will appreciate the helpful information you give them.

Choose Your Format & Create Great Content

One of the most important things in how to create webinars is to choose your format. Some people think of webinars as PowerPoint presentations that either show the speaker or focus exclusively on the slides. Though that can be true, there are many other formats available. These include interviews, Question and Answer sessions, product demos and panel discussions.

Of course, your content is going to follow your chosen format. If you are using a PowerPoint, but slides should support your message, but you don’t want to include your script on the slides. That just invites people to read the slides and ignore you.

If you are not experienced in creating engaging PowerPoint slides, it may be time to bring in a presentation designer. You will need graphics and charts that emphasize your point, pique the imagination and don’t put people to sleep. Slides should focus on visuals. Text should be short and underline your point. Add a bit of humor on a slide or two to recapture people’s attention.

If you plan to host a panel discussion, you need to spend a lot of time planning your speakers, putting together questions (and asking your audience for questions in advance – more on that in a moment) and making sure your speakers know what to expect. The last thing you need are surprises.

Whatever your format, don’t plan for your content to go over an hour. People don’t have unlimited attention spans. So perhaps 45 minutes to an hour for your main content. You can follow that with maybe 15 minutes of questions if it makes sense.

Encourage Engagement Throughout the Process

From the planning stages to the webinar itself to the follow-up once the webinar is over, you should be looking for ways to engage your audience. Here are some possibilities in how to create webinar engagement:

Before the Webinar

Even if you plan to have polls or questions and answers during the webinar, we encourage you to gather your audience’s ideas in advance. One of the best ways to do this is through social media.

Not only does it give you better insights on where to focus your content, but it also promotes buy-in and excitement from your audience. When they are asked to help shape the webinar, the content is much more likely to address their real concerns. It also shows respect for your audience.

During the Webinar

Instead of just talking at your audience for the entire hour, have at least some sections of the webinar where two-way communication is encouraged. You might take a poll or invite a few questions on a specific area. You don’t want to let the audience take over if you need to educate, but you don’t need to lecture them for the entire hour either. There are various tools to permit interaction and yet let you maintain control.

After the Webinar

Ask for feedback. Most people are only too happy to give it.

Ask your audience to share a link to another live webinar or a recorded event.

Give Strategic Thought to the Day and Time

The day and time you choose, will of course vary depending on whether your audience is in your local time zone, a domestic audience or an international audience. If your audience is domestic, time your webinar to avoid commute times.

Generally speaking, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 11 am work well as does 10 am.

Unless you are holding a conference with a lot of moving parts that goes beyond a typical webinar, you may want to hold the webinar live multiple times and give your attendees attendance options both inside and outside working hours.  Some companies use webinars as sales tools, and if that’s the case, it’s almost certain you will want to give it multiple times.

If you are going to limit the number of times you give the webinar live, consider the value of recording it and making it available on your website after the last live event. This makes sense if its primary purpose is to educate.

Market Your Webinar

It’s not necessarily true that if you build it, they will come. Marketing your webinar is just as important as creating its content. Exactly how you market it is going to depend on whether your business is B2B or B2C, your industry, and the audience you want to attract and where they are in the marketing funnel.

But here are some general tips.

1. Email invitations to that part of your list that is likely to be interested in the topic.
2. Plan a series of emails that get closer together as your webinar date gets closer.
3. Send reminder emails to registrants all the way up to an hour before the webinar. This will vastly increase attendance especially for free webinars. (Attendee no-show is less of a concern if you are charging a sum people won’t want to lose.)
4. Tout your webinar all over your social media.
5. If you will have speakers, interviewees or panelists in your webinar, give them templates to make it easy for them to market the webinar in their own social media.
6. Approach industry influencers to promote your webinar. Obviously, they are a lot more likely to do that if they are presenting or speaking at the webinar.
7. Splash the webinar in obvious places on your website and create a compelling registration page.
8. Create an event page on likely social media platforms your audience follows. You can direct people who find you through social posts and ads on that platform to your event page.
9. Consider advertising the webinar in focused venues and to targeted audiences. One of the easiest ways to advertise is to simply boost your social media posts about the webinar.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Learning how to create webinars isn’t enough. We shouldn’t even have to say this, but it’s imperative that you hold at least one trial run. This is to test everything from your equipment to your timing to your content. Your practice session needs to include any guests you are planning to have.

You will be amazed at the small issues that reveal themselves in a test run that could undercut your well-planned webinar.

To test all aspects, you will want to send an invitation to the practice to some team members who can watch it and interact as the audience will during the real thing.

Follow-Up

Once your webinar is over, you are still not finished. Now comes the follow-up. Here’s noninclusive list of some actions you may want to take.

1, Email all attendees. Invite them to contact you with any further questions. Send a link to share with colleagues to attend another live webinar to listen to the recorded webinar. You might also want to offer a discount on one of your larger product offerings.

2. Contact the no-shows and invite them to another live webinar. If there are none, share a link to the recorded webinar.

3. Survey attendees about what they found valuable in the webinar and any other questions regarding the webinar and its topic that would help your sales and marketing team.

4. Share relevant information about your audience with your sales team.

Ready to Start Creating Webinars?

There is a lot to do to learn how to create webinars and market them successfully. But in today’s world, it’s now expected that businesses use this method of communicating and sharing information.

If developing webinars is new to you, you will probably want some help to get your business’s webinars off the ground at least for the first few.

Consider contacting Umbrella Local to take all the work of creating and marketing your webinar off your hands. Outsource to experts while you focus on your core business. Call us for a free consultation.