Webinars provide an ideal platform for your company to establish yourself as a thought leader in your space and help develop your brand voice In addition to that, webinars can be a significant revenue driver for your business. However, webinars are fairly time-consuming to produce. As such, it is important to properly plan and execute your virtual event in order to get the most out of it.
Here are the 5 steps you need to follow in order to successfully run your webinar from beginning to end:
1. Map out a Webinar Program
When planning a webinar, it is important to look at your marketing calendar. As you look at it, strategize how you can fill in program gaps and needs over time and how your webinar would align with your content strategy. From there decide what specific buyer personas or verticals you would like to capture with your webinar, but make sure it is unique from your other marketing strategies. Once you have identified your gaps in audience and content, you can drill down into specific topics. If you have produced other webinars in the past, it is a good idea to look at their metrics and see what resonated with your specific audience. Also look at blog posts that performed well, and any FAQs from that buyer persona.
2. Promote Webinar across Various Channels
Once you have selected your webinar topic, it is time to start promoting. The first step to properly promoting your virtual event is to create a compelling registration page that drives conversions. You should allow a minimum of one month to promote your webinar. Email and social media are two highly effective channels for webinar promotion. Start by emailing your list of contacts with the webinar details. Then share the event on your various social media channels. Leverage any influencers you may have to do the same as well. Paid social media advertising can also be useful in driving registrations. Be sure to narrow your audience to your specific verticals or buyer personas for the best results.
3. Prepare and Go Live
At this point, you will want to complete a dry run of your webinar to ensure all of the kinks are worked out. Make sure you are prepared in the event of any technical issues or malfunctions. For instance, if you lose audio, it is important to have a plan to quickly get back up and running before your attendees check out. Be sure to send a final reminder email to all those who have registered. Once you have covered all of your bases and send out your final reminder email it is time to go live with your webinar!
4. Follow Up
Once your webinar is over, you have one of the most important tasks left: the follow-up. Be sure to touch base with those who attended your webinar to continue the conversation. These follow-up conversations will help keep your audience moving along your conversion funnel. It is also important to follow up with those who registered but never attended. Send a recording of the webinar so they can watch at their leisure and connect with your brand. If they interact with the webinar, you should touch base with them again.
5. Analyze Your Webinar
In order to determine how successful your webinar was, it is important to have tracking and analytics set up. Did people interact via Q&A, chat, survey etc?? If so review that data. After the webinar ended you will want to keep track of your attendees as they move along the conversion funnel. Depending upon your sales cycle, you may start to see results almost immediately or six months down the road. Once you start seeing the results you can determine how well certain types of webinars converted and base any future strategies off of these results. Share this information with the sales team so they can leverage your webinar content as they see fit with any prospective or existing customers.
Follow this roadmap and you will be well on your way to a successful webinar strategy. Looking for some help managing webinars? Our virtual event experts have over 15 years’ experience managing all aspects of online events from registration to reporting. Learn more about the webinar services we offer and contact us to get the conversations started.
