10 Tips to Run a Webinar Successfully
Running a webinar is an excellent way of showing off your products. It offers you tips and ways of demonstrating your expertise on various topics to your online audience. This is a great way of making contact with people and showing your commitment to offering advice and help. If you have attended webinars, then you are familiar with how the system works.
You may want to take the next step in your marketing strategy by running a webinar to use to convince clients to sign up. A lot of preparations are necessary to pull off a hiccup-free webinar and get the best outcome. Below are ten useful tips and tricks that tells you how to run a webinar easily.
Carefully Select the Right Webinar Tool
Having the right tool to host your webinar is a challenge because of the pros and cons of every tool. This depends on the type and number of attendees you can host. If you want a powerful and cost-effective webinar tool, you can use ezTalks Meetings which is one of the best webinar software.
ezTalks Meetings offers a free version with rich useful featues, like easy screen sharing and online whiteboard, group and private chat, webinar scheduling, recording webinar for the future use, and has a pro version which is budget friendly and suits your preferences and needs. You can try out doing some internal tests to figure out how to run the webinar software to your advantage.
Choose the Best Format
Once you have a webinar tool, turn your attention to the things you will be presenting. Are you planning to present an interactive panel, lecture or product demonstration? Decide on the topic and the time allocation to the webinar. The best time allocation is 30-40 minutes, but you can still stretch it to two hours.
To run a webinar easily and successfully, always remember to keep your content interesting. You can vary the format. Therefore, write your agenda and allocate time for questions from your audience. Take into consideration the size of the audience you want for the event. This enables you to choose whether to include more speakers, a moderator or interviewer to assist with technical problems and monitor social media engagements.
Plan Your Visuals/Slides
Have an excellent slideshow for your webinars. This will curb boredom from the monopoly of the event which can make your audience to log off or fall asleep. Put together slides on Keynote or PowerPoint for each sub-topic and share images, graphs or screenshots to illustrate your point.
Schedule a Practice Session
Practice makes perfect, especially in public speaking. To run a webinar successfully, you'd better hold a dry run of your event and go through the motions like it is the actual event. Take notes of the practice to enable you to remember the things to do in the event. Host webinars more than once to perfect your marketing strategy.
Have a Registration Page
Set up your technical stuff and create a landing page on your company website to direct people to register. There are many tools you can use, like Hubspot, Unbounce, Landerapp, and Formstack among others to help you create a link to the traffic source. This will create a good campaign for the Google Analytics to enable you to measure the best method of publicizing your event.
Publicize the Webinar
To run a webinar, you should get the word out and convince people to register. Let people know about your webinar using different methods like social media channels, newsletters, email campaigns, your blog and your website. Ensure the call to action is compelling and the time zone, time and date cannot be missed.
Make a Special Offer
Incentives work best in inspiring people to sign up or register for the webinar. Incentives also increase conversion rate. Offer value to your attendees and consider offering them an exclusive discount or package when doing a product launch.
Announce Your Hashtag
If your audience is online, use Twitter hashtag to keep the conversation going and engage more people. Suggest something about the company name to make the conversation unique and easy to follow on twitter.
Record Webinars and Upload Them
Never forget to record webinars as soon as you start to run a webinar. Do not wait until it halfway, then you remember you have not been recording the webinars. You can always edit the webinar video and upload it on YouTube if necessary and on your website for people who missed it.
Stay in Touch
Do not forget the last step, adding new email addresses to your database and stay in touch with the people always. Send the people a follow-up email with a link to the video recording. Follow through on special offers that you earlier promised your audience. Relax a bit. You can take a light hearted fun activity with your audience and exchange some ideas and knowledge that came out on the webinar.
Webinars are an effective marketing strategy that can give your business the publicity you desire. When you run a webinar effectively, it can generate thousands of leads back to your business website and increase your product sales and earnings. Learn the webinar tools and use them effectively to make your webinar effective to achieve the best outcome you want.