How to create & host a great webinar: 7 strategies for success | #customersupport #supporticket

If you need some quick tips to help you create a webinar, you aren’t alone! In fact, the use of webinars has grown dramatically in recent years, with 64% of B2B marketers creating webinars in 2022. Why?

These statistics provide the answer:

• 91% of B2B pros list webinars as their favorite type of content.
• 54% of B2B pros engage with webinar content on a weekly or daily basis.
• 73% of marketers consider webinars as a great source of quality leads.

Creating a good webinar takes time, and it can seem overwhelming at first. From choosing how you record the webinar to how you will present it, there are a lot of decisions to make and information to gather.

Let’s look at how to create an interesting and engaging webinar that leads to conversions.

7 tips to create a winning webinar

1. Determine the topic and audience of your webinar

A serious senior businesswoman gestures as she facilitates a staff meeting while working from home. She is talking with her colleagues during a video conference.

Your audience wants to see compelling value in the information, format, and presenters involved in your webinar.

Identify a relevant topic or series of topics. Surveys of your audience may help determine what topics are most important and of greatest learning interest. Segmenting your audience is a way to make each webinar more useful and relevant to a specific group of people.

There are many different types of webinars, so choose the one that works best for you.

2. Choose a reliable platform to host your webinar

To keep people interested in a webinar, you need a technology platform that optimizes the experience. Connection disruptions, difficulty joining the webinar, poor audio/video capabilities, and limited features all diminish the likelihood of retention.

Web conferencing platforms advanced greatly over the last few years in response to increased need during the pandemic. Top solutions like RingCentral Webinar offer numerous capabilities for conducting effective webinars.

Key advantages of RingCentral include:

• Affordability. With a price tag that’s about 50% cheaper than the leading competitor, you can run professional, interactive webinars that don’t break the bank.
• Expanded reach. Invite up to 10,000 attendees and 100 panelists who can join from a desktop or mobile browser (no download required).
• Rich analytics. Access to comprehensive, in-depth post-event engagement data to help you fine-tune performance.
• Ease of use. Intuitive platform that allows for fast setup and hosting practice.
• Thorough integration. Integrate your web conferencing solution with many other popular apps for an all-in-one communications system.
• Advanced security. Ensure the only people that access your events are those you invite or want to attend.

3. Promote your webinar

If you put time and effort into developing great webinars, you want people to attend. Promoting your events is as important as developing them.

If your webinar is for existing contacts or customers, email lists, social media, text messaging, and other existing forms of communication are valuable. When targeting new contacts or prospects, you might need to pay for digital ads, leverage social media, and push for referrals. If you have panelists, they can also share the event with their followers or contacts.

You may consider having a registration page to effectively promote your webinar and capture leads. With RingCentral Webinar, we make this extremely easy to do. Without creative or web resourcing, the webinar host can utilize drag-and-drop functionality to create beautiful looking branded registration pages within the RC app in just a few clicks

It’s also important to maximize attendance by making sure people who sign up remember about the event! With RingCentral Webinar, automated emails are sent out both before and after the webinar to remind attendees and get feedback. 

4. Create content for your webinar

Preparing materials for your webinar can seem overwhelming. There are many formatting options based on the technology and topic.

You can prepare some presentation materials in advance, including slides, images, videos, and any other relevant items. A panel of presenters is a great alternative to single-presenter webinars, especially in longer sessions. Panelists with diverse insights, backgrounds, and experiences are typically more interesting to your audience.

💡 Pro tip: Use this webinar template to help build and structure your presentation.

5. Practice your presentation

A successful webinar leaves the audience feeling like they received value and wanting more. To achieve these results, you need to practice your presentation so that it comes through as polished and professional. 

RingCentral offers practice hosting sessions so you can navigate your entire webinar process in advance. By doing so, you become familiar with presenter switches, tech integrations, and other transitions.

6. Host your webinar

With advanced preparation, it is now time to execute a great webinar. Remember a number of basic tenets of good hosting, including:

• Introduce yourself, panelists (if applicable) and topic(s)
• Deliver a professional, well-formatted presentation
• Engage with the audience through question-and-answer, polls, group interactions, and more

7. Follow up after the webinar

Lead generation, client engagement, and retention are common purposes of webinars. With any of these objectives, it is critical to take the right “next steps” following the event.

Send follow-up emails thanking your attendees for attending, provide a link to your webinar recording, and collect feedback. These actions allow you to further leverage the event, address areas for improvement, and continue engagement.

What are the benefits of hosting a webinar?

The data is clear that there are many benefits of webinars. The following are just some of the opportunities your organization has with great events:

• Build brand awareness
• Reach potential customers
• Nurture quality leads
• Position yourself as a thought leader
• Repurpose and create content around the webinar

As long as you follow best practices for webinars, you can reap the benefits that hosting a webinar can produce. See RingCentral webinar solutions to find out how our platform can boost your webinar results.

Originally published Jul 14, 2023