Over the last few years, webinars have become an increasingly important and popular component of overall event and marketing strategies. With the ability to be cost-effective, highly interactive, and accessible to attendees, webinars offer companies an effective way to establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry and connect with their audiences in a meaningful way.
Research shows that B2B marketers watch webinars at least once per week, which means your webinar should be on their radar. Below, we’ll explore the best practices in order to keep attendees engaged and coming back for future events.
1. Define Your Target Audience
When it comes to planning and hosting a webinar, defining your audience is a crucial step. Get specific about who you want to join and then evaluate the demographics of your audience—including where they are located, what language they speak, if they’re a current customer, follower, or prospect, and how they currently engage with your company. All these details will help you to tailor the webinar experience to your attendees and what they need from the webinar.
2. Create a Captivating Topic
After you have done your audience deep dive and know more about who will benefit from your webinar, you will need to select a topic that will captivate and engage your audience. The topic is what attracts your audience to attend your webinar, so it needs to be relevant and spark conversation. The best topics are ones that you have expertise on and can help to establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Topics that are unique and not overly promotional will show attendees that your webinars provide valuable information.
3. Establish Goals
As you’re planning your webinar, it is important to establish what you are hoping to achieve in order to accurately measure the success of your webinar once it’s over. Setting specific goals such as number of registrants, new followers & leads, and follow up conversations will help you to keep your overall webinar objective in mind while sourcing speakers, drafting topics, and creating audience polls. Once you’ve established these goals, you can tailor your webinar to not only fulfill the needs of your audience but to also accomplish your event goals as well. If you plan to continue hosting webinars in the future, creating goals will also help in improving future webinars for your audience.
4. Invite Engaging Speakers
The choice of speaker for your webinar is crucial to building credibility and making the topic more compelling for your audience. An engaging speaker who is an expert on the chosen topic can effectively engage the attendees while encouraging them to participate and spark conversation around the topic. One way to achieve this interaction is by adding a Q&A portion to your webinar. A Q&A component helps to make the webinar feel more personal to attendees and can help create stronger connections between your audience and the speaker. Allowing your audience to ask questions also enhances their learning experience from the webinar and will ultimately make the experience more valuable.
5. Be Consistent
Consistency is key to most things in life, but especially with building brand awareness. Hosting webinars on a weekly or monthly basis helps establish yourself as a go-to choice for attendees when selecting webinars. It also allows you to build relationships with your audience so you can understand their needs and what content they’d like to see in a webinar series.
Bonus tip: record your webinars so you have evergreen content to post and drive web traffic.
Webinars will continue to be a valuable tool for companies to utilize in 2023 and beyond. They’re an effective and generally low-budget way to generate new leads in your pipeline, establish your reputation as an industry thought leader, and create reusable content. Companies that leverage webinars efficiently will be able to build trust with their audience while ultimately driving business growth.
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