Tips for Running a Successful Webinar

The pandemic has highlighted that webinars aren’t just a substitute for live events – they have their own benefits when it comes to branding, customer engagement and quality lead generation.

If you’re thinking about reaching potential customers with a webinar, here are five tips to help you better connect with your audience and for your event to run as smoothly as possible behind the scenes.

1. Audience: Are You Reaching Your Target Market?

The main purpose of any webinar or Virtual Conference is to provide information to your target market – the people you want to engage with your product or service. So the first thing you need to decide is whether you will be talking to your existing audience or if you want to reach new people.

If you’re targeting your existing audience you can directly promote your webinar to them and offer educational and/or interesting content.

If you want to reach a new market, the best way to find the most relevant people is through external marketing. This could include social media promotion or other channels like advertising in industry newsletters, allowing you to precisely track how many registrations it drives. Using social platforms like LinkedIn also allows you to identify a new audience based on factors such as job title and location, so you can find exactly who you want to attend your webinar.

Monkey Media Managing Editor, Laura Harvey, said virtual events also tend to attract a lot more people than a live event. Monkey Media has run several Virtual Conferences in 2020, including Digital Utilities, Disaster Management, Asset Management for Critical Infrastructure, Flow Technology, and Smart Cities.

“For example, at our Smart Cities Conference, we’d normally get around 300 people for a live event, but by making it a Virtual Conference, we had more than 1,000 people registering,” Laura said.

Once you’ve decided who your target audience is, it’s important to engage with them before and after the event to foster the relationships. Before the webinar, think about setting up an automated newsletter that sends them useful information on the topic. During the webinar ensure they can participate in the conversation using Q&A chat functions to send questions to speakers, or through poll questions.

2. Content: What Value Is It Offering?

The content of the webinar or Virtual Conference is what will get people to register, so you need to be offering high-quality information and engaging speakers. Think about what your identified target audience and potential customers would want to learn about and create a program around their interests and pain points.

Laura creates the programs for Monkey Media’s Virtual Conferences and said the choice of speakers can play a big part in the success.

“You need to decide if you will use an internal speaker from your own company, external experts, or both. A mix is often good as it provides broader program appeal and can look less promotional,” she said.

“The key with speaker selection is to first define the topics you want to address in your webinar, and then choose the speakers who are well-regarded and best placed to address these topics, internally or externally.

“Speakers who have a high public profile, and who have their own broad networks that they can leverage to attract more delegates to your event are also beneficial.”

There’s been a huge number of new webinars popping up lately, so like anything else there are good and bad ones. You want to make sure you’re not contributing to ‘webinar spam’. Don’t just do a webinar because everyone else is. You still need to have something useful to say.

3. Format: Make It Fit-For-Purpose

There is no set rule for how long a webinar or Virtual Conference should be, as the length of time should fit the content. If you’re turning a previously live event into a webinar, it’s important to not try to just jam in the existing content. For an event that was previously a one or two day conference, this could be compressed into a 3-4 hour webinar.

This is what happened with Monkey Media’s Digital Utilities 2020 Conference, as the COVID-19 lockdown and travel restrictions began less than a week out from the event.

Monkey Media Managing Director, Chris Bland, said the decision was made to move it online on Friday, with the event starting the following Thursday.

“This gave the production team only three work days to transform it into a completely Virtual Conference, including finding the best platform, and rejigging the program to work better in an online format, including working with all the speakers to ensure their presentations still had the same impact when delivered online,” he said.

“It was a steep learning curve and while it wasn’t perfect, we made sure to take the audience into account in terms of how they would be receiving the information presented.”

Most people also have short attention spans so Laura said that generally webinars should go for a few hours, or if there are only one or two speakers presenting on a niche topic, keep it down to 45 minutes to one hour.

Take different time zones into account when choosing the optimal time, and make sure your speakers stick to their allocated times. Also, consider breaking up the event with a variety of presentation styles including panels and audience participation through Q&A sessions. Also, don’t forget to keep it visual – having powerpoint slides with illustrations or short videos is more interesting for viewers.

4. Technology: Get It Right

People are forgiving when there are technical issues, but it only takes a minute or two of dead air before you lose someone’s attention, so it’s important to get the technical basics locked down.

There are a number of webinar platform options available including GoToWebinar, On24, ClickMeeting and Zoom, with the choice depending on a number of factors, including price and the specific features needed.

Regardless of the platform, the key is to fine tune communication between the production team, speakers and the host/MC to ensure that everything is seamless on screen, said Monkey Media’s Marketing Account Manager, Harry Johnston.

Harry manages the technical components of all Monkey Media webinars through programs including the Zoom webinar platform and OBS Studio streaming software.

“We have set up websites through Zapier that allows people to automatically download Zoom when they register for a Virtual Conference, and also have several add-on programs such as a virtual camera attachment, so we’re not just using the one program,” Harry said.

“Since Digital Utilities, we’ve stepped up our production quality by using Adobe AfterEffects to custom-make our own graphics and animations to show who’s currently speaking and what’s coming up.”

While the webinar is running, it’s best to have a production team set up with different people managing different aspects, including one person to coordinate with the speakers and answer delegate questions that come through, and another to focus on the visuals and audio to ensure everything on screen is running smoothly.

“There’s a lot of dialogue behind the scenes, so my best piece of advice for all webinars is to do a practice run at least the day before to troubleshoot any problems. This ensures the speakers are comfortable and know what they need to do, and allows you to test the sound quality, backgrounds, and that slides or visual aids work,” Harry said.

Polls are also a great addition to a webinar or Virtual Conference as they keep people engaged but can also be used as lead generation, where people can opt in to receive more information on certain companies presented.

5. Follow Up: Keep The Conversation Going

Some companies produce their own webinars, while others work with an agency or publisher to run something more hybrid, either under their own brand, or co-branded.

Sponsoring webinars and Virtual Conferences is another option and can include brand recognition through logos in event promotion, speaking slots or video presentations in the program, information sent directly to these lists before or after the event, and more.

These new contacts can opt in to receive more information about your product or service and if it’s a high-quality webinar, you will be associated with it and seen as an authority in the space.

If you’re hosting your own webinar, you will already have the leads, but it’s critical to continue to keep in touch with them in a useful way and provide them with continued value. This could be in the form of adding these contacts to an automated nurture track so they can be sent related information. It’s this ongoing engagement that allows you to get the most out of the webinars, long after they are over.

“Our conferences remain online after the live virtual event has concluded, so we continue to have people registering to watch our previous events on-demand, which extends the life of the webinar content we create,” Laura said.

If you’d like more information about Monkey Media running a webinar for your businesses, or sponsoring a future Virtual Conference, get in touch at events@monkeymedia.com.au.