9 Best Practices for Running a Successful Webinar

Hosting webinars is an affordable and efficient way to generate qualified leads. They allow you to raise brand awareness, increase customers’ trust, and understand your target audience. However, running effective webinars is not an easy feat, and there are various aspects that you need to get right. There are three main stages you need to consider: planning, promoting, and presenting. Following the best practices for each one is key to running a successful webinar.

Planning

Like any other marketing tactic, planning your webinar is essential to ensure success. Not only will this make the later stages run smoothly, but it’s also a vital step to gather attendees.

Define your audience and create content accordingly

Webinars aren’t the appropriate channel to hard-sell your product. Instead, you should focus on a challenge that your customers face, build your webinar around it, and then provide your services as one of the solutions.

Schedule the webinar for the perfect time

Studies show that Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to go live, as that’s when attendance rates are higher. More specifically, the best hour to run a webinar is 11 a.m., local time. If you’re broadcasting across the entire U.S., then you should go with 11 a.m. PST. Fortunately, webinar platforms like GoToWebinar make this simple by providing easy-to-navigate event managers with built-in schedulers.

Test everything before going live

Murphy’s law is a well-known concept, and it applies to webinars as well – anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So, always do a dry run beforehand to ensure all equipment is working, all content is in place, and that everything is set to host a smooth webinar.

Promoting

You can host the best webinar in the world but if nobody attends, it doesn’t matter. Therefore, promoting your event through all your communication channels is vital to generate greater interest and increase attendance.

Promote your webinar early and until the last minute

90% of attendees register during the 15 days prior to a webinar taking place, so you should start promoting at least two weeks beforehand. It’s even more important to promote your webinar on the day of the event, as over 30% of registrants sign up on the very last day.

Use email marketing

When it comes to webinars, email is the channel with the highest registration rate. Studies show that over 50% of the attendees register via email. Consequently, never overlook your email contact list when promoting your webinar.

Remind people

From the people who register to attend your webinar, only around 50% will actually show up. That’s why it’s of utmost importance to remind everyone that your webinar is about to go live more than once. A good practice is to send an email a few days prior, another on the day of the event, and the last one just a few minutes before going live. Your best bet is to use a webinar platform like GoToWebinar, which can be set to send reminders automatically.

Presenting

Now that you have a considerable number of people attending your webinar, it’s showtime. If you do a good job, not only will you convert participants to qualified leads, but they’ll also be interested in joining future webinars.

Plan your webinar to be 30-45 minutes long

We live in the digital era where people have access to information quickly and don’t spend more time on a topic than necessary. This way, plan your webinar to be around 30-45 minutes, where the last 10-15 minutes should be saved for Q&As.

Engage with your audience

Gathering a group interested in your subject knowledge isn’t easy, so take this as an opportunity to engage with your soon-to-be customers. GoToWebinar, for example, provides various tools such as polls and Q&As to help you engage with your attendees, so make sure to take advantage of them.

Convert attendees to qualified leads

Although your webinar’s focus point is to help resolve the challenge your audience is facing, don’t forget about your main goal: sell your product/service. The best way to convert your participants into hot leads is by providing a simple call to action at the end of the event, prompting users to get in touch via email or your website.

There’s no doubt that webinars can bring tremendous value to a company. It’s also true they aren’t the easiest thing to do. However, if you follow our tips and focus on what’s most important, you’ll be profiting from your webinars in no time.