What Is a Webinar? How to Create Effective Webinars

What is a webinar? This is a common question now since webinars have become quite popular, especially in a pandemic when people are asked to stay home. To keep jobs and businesses running, they resort to work-from-home platforms.

If you ask how to host a webinar then let me tell you. It can be really tiring and worrisome.

However, you can plan and do a dry run to ensure that everything, from your webinar tools to your webinar content, goes smoothly. In this article, we answer your concerns about how to hold a webinar without too much trouble. We also provide you with everything you need to know about online webinars. For more data info, you should check this page on webinar statistics.

Let’s get right into it!

5-Step Webinar Creation

What Is a Webinar?

The term webinar comes from the words “web” or a series of internet networks and “seminar” about a discussion or conference. A webinar is an act of conducting an online seminar,  online meeting, or virtual event with goals to either educate or sell. 

You can do various webinars: employee training, online classes, user onboarding webinar, among many others. Webinars are the best way to engage with your mentors from across the globe.

When holding webinars, hosts either offer products or attempt to educate and answer students’ or customers’ concerns using various webinar tools and webinar presentations. Most webinars are free, but there are, of course, paid sessions. For more data info, you should check our page on webinar statistics.

Features of Webinars

The webinar tools available to you could be flexible enough to provide features to keep your audience engaged. 

Here are some features that most webinar tools provide.

Text Chat

A chat would be the simplest method to engage your audience, who can ask you questions or answer your questions. Naturally, since you are online and not in the same room, it is not easy to ask presenters questions without text chat. Answering their questions helps you build your trustworthiness and authority as well.

Slide Decks 

Maintain engagement is challenging, so a slide deck would help you present to your audience as you talk through it. You get to provide a clear plan for your participants to see and encourage engagement, not to mention giving them something to bring with them after the session.

Recording

A majority of webinars would be live so that the audience can ask questions and get answers in real-time. Besides, a pre-recorded webinar may be less engaging. Still, the information it carries can be viewed by those who missed the live session. Those who attended can also review the content, making recordings valuable.

Screen Sharing

Use this feature to do a demonstration during the webinar. Your audience will see what actions you’re doing on your screen, making it easier for them to understand a process.

Screen sharing can be useful in sharing a video or presentation in a non-traditional way. It is also useful when demonstrating more than one processor using various tools or files.

Whiteboard

This feature is ideal when explaining complex topics live. It allows you to take notes, draw ideas, or point arrows to show a process.

The whiteboard feature also gives your audience the feeling that they are with you in the classroom.

Surveys and Polls

Having only a text chat may eventually make information disorganized, especially when you have many attendees.

A poll during your webinar helps you provide set options from which your audience can choose while keeping their responses in one place. Polls and surveys also make it easier for your audience to engage.

A poll during your webinar helps you provide set options from which your audience can choose while keeping their responses in one place. Polls and surveys also make it easier for your audience to engage. Or a short quiz with pre-made answers so that they can just tick their choice – you can use an online quiz maker for that.

Different Types of Webinars

If you’re wondering what kind of seminar you should do, the different types of webinars are often conducted. 

Marketing, Lead Generation, and Partnership Webinars

You can create in-depth white papers, publish case studies to promote your products, and design ebooks that you will offer as lead magnets. Do this if you hope to do a lead generation webinar. Many companies have created webinars to scale their lead generation and increase revenue. 

You can even conduct joint webinars and partner with other companies so that you get access to their audience. Besides, collaborations with companies add credibility and authority to you and your content, making people perceive you as credible.

If your audience sees the value in your webinar, you won’t need to promote your product so much. Webinars are useful marketing tools to entice participants to buy.

Webinars for Education

In the past few years, even academic institutions are using webinars to educate students. It has become one of the best ways to reach and engage students since students can learn in their homes’ comfort.

The pandemic even compelled colleges and universities to transition to distance learning, making webinars ever more popular.

You can even invite other educators to join you for a more engaging webinar.

Webinars for Product Demos

Webinars have become popular among companies to conduct product demos to help sell their products and build relationships with their prospective customers.

Product demo webinars are your opportunity to improve your interactions with customers and showcase your case studies to prove your products’ value to your prospective customers. You can show your audience who benefited from your product and how they, too, can benefit from it.

With a product demo webinar, you can collect critical customer feedback to make your products even better.

Webinars for Employee Training

You can also use webinars for training new and existing employees.

It is handy when working with a remote team or a team too huge to fit in a room.

You can include webinars in your onboarding materials or orientation where you may outline your company’s expectations, vision, and mission, while also addressing questions to close the performance gap.

You can rely on freelancers to make videos or slides for your webinars, just make sure to properly agree on their preferred payment methods so there will be no unexpected delays. For example, if they’re using crypto and are interested in Binance exchange, for example, you might consider that as well.

Use webinars to highlight the corporate culture and its value.

Anything that you want to teach your employees could be conveyed through webinars.

Webinars for User Onboarding and Retention

The bottom line of software as a service (SaaS) companies’ business would be on-boarding new clients and retention, making webinars valuable.

It’s always best to explain to customers, especially new ones, how your product works, and how best to do it but with webinars.

When doing an onboarding webinar, make sure you have all the essential points about your product covered. Maintain a low learning curve and encourage users to ask questions while you’re presenting.

Use onboarding emails, push notifications, or webinars to retain your customers to upgrade their plans and spread the word.

How to Have A Successful Webinar Software?

There are things that you should maintain to achieve a successful Webinar. Below are the ten significant points to remember:

Reputable Webinar Platforms

A reputable webinar platform is something that can help you with attracting participants, and you have many options. However, consider something available on many devices, such as phones and tablets, and not only on computers. It also has to have a friendly user interface to accommodate users who are not adept with technology and have a long learning curve.  

Many people also find advertisements to be annoying. Also, most free webinar software contains advertisements with a limited number of allowed attendees.

A Good Webinar Schedule

It is vital to know the right time to conduct a webinar. Choose the time and day when you can hit the number of attendees.

You need to consider the location of your prospective participants. So if Wednesdays are not a busy day for them, then you can pick this day. If you were in Asia, but your target audience is in America, you need to adjust to their time zone.

Webinars Right Tools

Is your computer working perfectly fine? How about your headset? Do a test on your microphone at least three days before the webinar to address and avoid technical issues.

Do you have a stable internet connection? You need to have a back-up.

So the device should be something that you can rely upon. It is suggested that you have different devices. It is always best to anticipate things rather than cram in the middle of your speech.

Early Promotion

To get the best result in terms of the number of attendees, you need to do an early promotion.

You should have defined your webinar target market and understand what they like. Make notes about your current customers or potential customers so that you can design your content and promotion strategy accordingly. You can know more about them by creating polls or surveys.

Two months before the target date is reasonable: it is not too early, yet not too late to reach your target audience. Explore various channels to reach a wider audience.

Make Noise

You need to catch the attention of your target audience. You can also start with webinar marketing strategies: create a page that features the date and time, the topics (and/or about your product/service), the speakers, then end it by encouraging users to sign up. The target is demand generation, if not conversion. 

You don’t really need to spend a lot of money on promotion. Use your social media accounts, like Facebook. Get the people involved by creating an exciting hashtag, perhaps make a short sneak peek video or an excerpt of pre-recorded sessions that you can show on YouTube. Others write blogs or content to add credibility to the webinar.

Lastly, you can send email invitations. Make sure you include the direct link to the registration of the said event.

Be Responsive

Expect that there would be a lot of inquiries from webinar registration to webinar features. You will find them in the comment section of your post, through your chat platform, your email, or through a text message or a phone call should you decide to provide your contact information. Build a personal relationship with your target. 

A Good Follow Up

A few days before the event, you can post some reminders or send messages to your email list of webinar attendees to confirm attendance.

An Interesting Webinar Topic

A profitable webinar starts with a good topic since it is what your audience will consider first. It has to be something that would interest them or something they would want to know and learn. 

It doesn’t matter what you want to talk about: you can do a product webinar or product launch, discuss complex topics, or you can even cover an evergreen topic in a traditional webinar format, or you can do different types of online webinars: employee training and online education. 

Your goal in mind should be to make your participants feel that your webinar has valuable content that will not waste their time. Check how to cite a webinar on Webinar Care.

You can use various content types like photos, video content, or video presentation.  This will help you create an engaging presentation. 

Lots of Practice for Your Content

Don’t be too confident. You need to be fully prepared before you host your webinar. Even experienced hosts practice their webinar presentations, so should you. In this way, you can anticipate any unexpected questions. You can also make sure your conferencing tool or other equipment is all working well. Before making the decision whether to use a webinar or not, seek first a self-evaluation.

Self-Evaluation

You’re all set! Now, it’s time to get some feedback and check what you have done correctly. You should also consider your areas for improvement.

Why Are Webinars Effective?

Webinars are more effective than physical events or workshops because you, as the webinar host, do not need to rent a space to conduct your seminar. You are also freed of complex logistics that come with preparing and hosting an in-person event.

In 2020, apart from the fact that there was a pandemic, the countless pros of webinars against physical events doubled the number of organizations that host virtual events. Among the benefits experienced by organizations are rich feature sets, support for multiple content types, and endless possibilities.

Challenges in Webinars

There are many benefits from hosting a webinar, but these always come with challenges.

Here are some challenges that you might face when conducting webinars.

Technical Issues

Perhaps this is the most universal of challenges in webinars across industries, activities, and people worldwide. This challenge would involve a wide range of issues from internet connection to the operating software. 

Preparation is the best solution to this challenge. Check the following at least a day before.

1. Your environment: camera, lighting, internet connection, and audio
2. Webinar tools: ease of use, screen sharing, chat options, poll and survey features, and slide decks
3. Audience: their understanding of the use of each functionality required

Promotion

Naturally, you must make sure you will have attendees to your webinar; otherwise, it would mean nothing. Generally, the success of webinars come from promotions.

Of course, you must promote at the right time on the right channels to get high-quality leads; otherwise, you might not get an audience. 

The best solution is, of course, to promote your webinar. Here are some promotion strategies.

1. Paid banner ads if a webinar is generic thought leadership.
2. Email campaigns for a live demo of your latest product launch; do this four weeks before broadcasting.
3. Share on social media for any type of webinar. It’s free, easy, and an excellent way to reach a wider audience. 

Remember to send your registrants a reminder the day or an hour before your actual webinar presentation.

Audience Engagement

Our attention span is typically short; we easily get distracted. On the same note, keeping someone’s attention, especially in a virtual setting, would be quite tricky.

The best solution is to include your audience in your conversation. Allow your audience an opportunity to participate.

1. Include hand raising, Q&A, or polls into your presentation as much as possible.
2. Make an aesthetically appealing and exciting webinar by using GIFs, images, or videos.
3. Speak directly to your audience and keep your webinar light-hearted to make them feel included.
4. Use a webcam; not seeing a speaker would be awkward for an audience. Show yourself to make real connections.

Measuring Success 

The majority of webinars are free, and not all offer direct sales. What is success for your webinar if you do not make money during or immediately after your webinar? 

The best solution is to set a goal. Consider the following: 

1. What do you hope to achieve from your webinar? It could range from brand awareness to generating revenue. While you can use a logo maker and a slogan generator as part of branding, webinars are another great way of business promotion.
2. Whatever question you want to answer, make sure you have a key performance indicator (KPI) for it that you settle far before your webinar launches.
3. Typical KPIs would include how much attendance rate, increased traffic to your site, total qualified leads, or pipeline you generate.

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When you are planning to host a webinar, it is important to think about the type of content you’ll be presenting. Depending on your audience, webinars can be informative, promotional, or both. If you’re creating a webinar for your business, you can use any content you have, such as articles, videos, online podcasts, and images. It’s also important to make sure the venue you select is comfortable for the intended audience.

Now, you are all set! In this ever-changing world of technology, it is essential to keep up with the latest trend. When done the right way, hosting webinars can open many doors of opportunity for you and for your business. 

F.A.Qs

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed what a Webinar is. We have talked about the advantages of webinars, and we have given a webinar outline on making your training events or any employee engagement programs successful.

Want to pitch in some ideas? Please feel free to leave a comment on the boxes provided below.

Thanks for reading this article, Webinar Care team has worked very hard to produce this page, please share your opinion in the comment section, we are constantly trying to improve our content. Have a great day 🙂