How to run the perfect webinar: a step-by-step guide 

In today’s new, more digitally connected world, knowing how to run the perfect webinar is a highly useful skill set. Why? Because webinars offer unique benefits and opportunities to connect with audiences, colleagues, and clients. If you’re ready to learn how to run a perfect webinar and are looking for practical and actionable advice, we’ll lay it out for you in this article.

The benefits of webinars

The main benefit of running webinars is that they’re an excellent way to connect with an audience! Webinars can deliver real value, whether you’re looking for opportunities to build relationships and bonds with an audience, generate audience and customer data, demonstrate expertise and/or build authority in your field, or deliver high-quality content that will delight and/or share your expertise with attendees. Webinars are powerful tools for promoting and strengthening your business or organization.

Best practices for running a webinar

There are a few best practices that are becoming industry-standard that will help your webinar succeed.

1. Plan: At best, make enough time to plan all aspects of the webinar ahead and even delegate tasks among a team. At a minimum, leave enough room for your promotional campaign and preregistration.

2. Create a webinar strategy: Understand exactly how running webinars fits in with your business or organization, from a tool for education or onboarding to a part of an event marketing strategy.

3. Use templates: The first time out will require the biggest effort –but why repeat it if you don’t have to? Save time and effort with templates and adjust as needed when you learn what works best for your audience.

4. Understand your audience: Make sure you’re attracting the right attendees. Use any audience/customer insights you might already have gathered and target your ads and outreach as you send them out into the online world. Tailor your title, description, and marketing to connect with the right people.

5. Choose an excellent platform: A great event management platform can help you make your webinar a unique experience with maximum engagement and integrations. Explore platform options, don’t just assume a large video call will do the trick.

6. Provide definite value: The perfect webinar is going to provide attendees exactly what they came for. This could be content, expertise in a specific area, or useful takeaways.

A step-by-step guide to running the perfect webinar

You may be sticking to best practices, but to run the perfect webinar, here’s a more specific checklist to follow through each step of the process.

Pre-production

As someone else put it, “great webinars are not made in a day, a week, or even a month.” Don’t slap an event together and try to fly by the seat of your pants! Know what you’re doing. Pre-preparation and even practice beforehand are the best way to put together a memorable event. Make sure you start early and give yourself the needed runway to plan and perfect your webinar event.

●     Focus your goals

Step one, it will always be beneficial for you to focus on a specific topic or issue and use your webinar as a deep dive into that particular area. Keep it tight!

Second, define specific goals to be tracked, not just a financial “return on investment.” Consider using the SMART goal technique, that is, “Simple, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound”

●     Plan, script, and rehearse

Next on the list, you want to shore up your foundation. Transfer your focused topic and specified goals into a step-by-step plan and schedule.

A script is strongly encouraged–that is, a detailed document organizing your event scenario and noting your event pitch, the schedule, and main points so you don’t stray off track or repeat information.

Once you have a script, that also allows you to rehearse as much of your event as possible beforehand. Practice speeches and presentations (more than once, if you can) so you’re comfortable when it’s live. Similarly, get the appropriate hardware and software ready, and test the equipment.

●     Promote

The final step before the actual event is to spread the word! As part of your pre-planning, create a promotion campaign targeting your ideal audience as per best practices. Reach out via email and social media. Sooner is also better–make sure you’re promoting at least two weeks ahead of the event. If possible, create a user-friendly landing page for your webinar allowing easy sign-ups.

At the event

“On the day” all of this planning and practice will be coming together; hopefully your launchpad is your flawless presentation. But here are two more key steps to keep in mind:

●     Technical aspects

While ideally, you have already tested your equipment, things can happen beyond our control. Make a plan to be ready in the event of needing technical support–maybe you have a tech support plan or team in place, or there is one connected to your platform. If not, it can be helpful to have a designated assistant to handle technical issues and emergencies.

●     Engage

Remember, the main reason to utilize a webinar over some other type of content delivery is engagement. Interact with your audience, opt for slides over PowerPoint presentations. Include polling questions. You want to hold the audience’s attention throughout the event!

Post-event

It’s not over yet–the final step is your follow-ups, which is where you’ll see the true ROI of your event.

●     Follow up

This can mean different things for different webinars, but whether the purpose is data analysis or directly contacting attendees, we can’t stress follow-ups enough. Reach out to attendees for feedback as to whether the webinar content was useful. Reward them with coupons, eBooks, or other swag. Make a recording of the event available for future engagement. This is where you’ll find the real ROI for your virtual event.

How to measure the success of a webinar

As we mention above, setting your goals in advance will give you metrics to determine your success. For instance, having a goal of “add 3000 subscribers to your mailing list” is something that can be quantified and tracked. Prepare a tracking strategy in advance and be sure you’re looping in tools and teams that will be relevant, such as databases and sales and marketing teams.

Tips for maximizing the impact of a webinar

While there are many ways to maximize your impact (see also “best practices”), the following points can improve your overall delivery.

• • • Use a high-energy opening: Use music or prerecorded content to kick things off. Personalize your welcomes as much as possible to connect with individual audience members.

• • • Create an engaging atmosphere: As mentioned, keep focused on your main theme. Make sure to have a clear structure to deliver your content, incorporate storytelling techniques to hold attention, and engage your attendees directly.

• • • Present content boldly: Concisely deliver valuable information. Use strong action verbs and incorporate statistics, numbers, and specific results when possible, to quantify the benefits your webinar content can deliver.

FAQs

What tools are needed to create the perfect webinar?

To present a webinar you really only need a few things: a high-quality webcam, a high-quality microphone, an internet-connected device, and a quiet, well-lit environment to present from. Finally, webinar platform software will enable you to connect to your audience.

What is the ideal length for the perfect webinar?

There are exceptions to the rule, but it’s generally accepted about 60 minutes is enough to present material without overwhelming (or boring) the audience. Depending on the content to cover, whether it’s part of a larger virtual event, and other factors may influence your run time longer or shorter. But if nothing else, make sure to take a break after 90 minutes.

How do you promote webinars?

This is a topic worthy of its own post, but the most obvious answer is using email and social media–if you’ve paid attention to the steps above, you’ll already have a sense of how you need to target your promotions. Another great way to expand your attendance is to ally with guests or possible sponsors to bring their audience to your event.

Meet Kaltura – the #1 webinar platform

We’ve mentioned that running the perfect webinar requires an excellent webinar platform–and we’d like you to introduce you to our Kaltura webinar hosting platform, which we’re confident can cover all your webinar needs.

With Kaltura Webinars you can tackle branding, landing pages, interactivity and engagement, and video-on-demand. Our mission is to empower you to create a webinar that’s a long-lasting, on-brand experience that will drive revenue.

All our products are built with a foundation of best-in-class streaming video and powerful data tools that give you both great looking content and valuable, actionable insights. We also invite you to take a free trial and see what Kaltura webinars can do for you firsthand.

Summary

While this is only the tip of the iceberg, we hope that this has been enough of an insider’s view of creating and running the perfect webinar and that we’ve provided a solid foundation. From here we encourage you to explore the topic further and wish you success in creating the perfect webinar!