9 webinar best practices for captivating audiences

User engagement is one of the most critical metrics to nail when measuring the success of a virtual event.

After all, according to data reported by True List, 49% of marketers believe that user engagement is the best indicator of a virtual event’s success. Added to that, 99% of marketers believe that webinars are an integral part of their company’s success. In fact, Thrive My Way has shared data saying that 89% of marketers believe webinars are the channel that brings in the most qualified leads.

Your goal is to ensure that you offer a seamless, modern video cloud experience that keeps your users wanting more while also putting your brand at the forefront of your marketing efforts.

In this article, we discuss the best webinar practices out there to help you engage, nurture, and inspire your audience.

Let’s dive right in.

Successful webinar explained

The key to a successful webinar lies in engaging your audience.

Webinars are seminars conducted online. Because these events are virtual, the likelihood of someone losing interest is higher than what you’d normally see in an in-person event. The last thing you want is to see a sharp increase in the number of customers logging off in your webinar, or worse yet, a low sign-up rate. To avoid situations like these from taking place, you must invest in building a cohesive strategy around your webinar. That strategy must be framed around best practices at every stage during the webinar funnel as well as tactics that help maximize the impact of your efforts at each stage.

The most effective way to run a webinar: the before, during, and after

The best practices associated with running a successful webinar can broken down into four main groups: the planning, the promotion, the execution, and the follow-up phases respectively.

Here is a look at what each of these phases entails:

• Planning: This involves laying the foundation for the underlying strategy that frames your webinar. The planning phase involves determining the fundamentals of your webinar such as the time, channel, software to be used, and more.

• Promotion: The promotion stage involves developing and rolling out an effective marketing engine to advertise your webinar and secure strong sign-up numbers.

• Execution: The execution phase entails ensuring that you deliver a successful webinar in real-time. This means putting into practice all the engagement tactics you came up with during the planning phase to guarantee the success of your virtual event.

• Follow-up: This stage looks at all of the outreach you do once the webinar has been completed. This outreach can serve to further engage registrants, nurture them into possible customers, and more.

9 webinar best practices

Let’s take a look at some of the best webinar practices you should bear in mind when you gear up for your next webinar.

Know your audience

Knowing your audience is the basis of best webinar invitation practices. To invite someone to a webinar, you must have a deep understanding of who they are.

This kind of approach should form the crux of the strategic planning phase of your webinar. Here, you should have a clear profile of the kind of person you’d like to attract to your virtual event. Then, do some research into the kinds of channels that that person would be more likely to frequent in order to see advertisements about your webinar.

Give your webinar an engaging title

Once you have a solid understanding of your audience, the next step is to choose a title for your webinar. This is a critical step in the process since it shapes the content your audience can expect from your webinar. Ensure that your title is punchy, engaging, and resonates with the kind of topics or pain points of your audience.

Craft a compelling webinar storyline

Before we can jump into webinar marketing best practices, it’s crucial to come up with an engaging webinar storyline that will hook your target audience from start to finish. Think about the kind of things you’d like to touch on in your webinar and structure it in such a way that it sounds like the kind of engaging story that would resonate with future registrants.

Promote your webinar

Now that you have chosen a title and story to best resonate with your audience, the next phase is to ensure that you have a comprehensive go-to-market strategy to promote your webinar to the fullest. On one hand, this involves ensuring you have a robust content strategy comprising the different types of content formats needed to engage with your target audience and help you reach the target number of registrants you’ve set up. On the other hand, it also touches on the need to know the right channels to get your message across as well as other incentives such as discounts that may entice your target audience to sign up.

Master your presentation skills

A huge webinar marketing best practice is mastering your presentation skills. Your presentation skills do not only have to do with the way you as a speaker deliver the contents of your webinar. It also has to do with ensuring that the kind of webinar collateral you present is visually appealing and a reflection of your brand image.

Utilize interactive elements

One common webinar marketing best practice is to incorporate as many interactive elements as possible in your marketing and promotional material. This is especially true in this modern age where you need to stand out and catch the eye of your target audience in a crowded market.

Prepare for a successful webinar

Preparing a successful webinar isn’t hard when you have a structure in place of best practices to follow.

Let’s take a look at some critical stages you need to make sure you have down if you want your webinar to be successful.

Create interesting content

You cannot expect to deliver an amazing webinar experience if you don’t have the visually and aesthetically appealing content to support it. Ensure that the video software you use to conduct your webinar supports branded experiences and delivers spectacularly designed slide presentations that help elevate your brand to new heights.

Engage with visuals

Ensure that every aspect of your webinar has some sort of visually engaging content to draw the attention of your registrants and keep them hooked as your webinar is executed.

Plan and promote your webinar

Come up with a solid advertising strategy to promote your webinar. Ensure that you have a visually branded and attractive landing page that will make registrants want to sign up for your webinar and not miss it the event.

Test and optimize technical aspects

Ensure that the webinar software you use has the built-in technical features needed to ensure a smoothly-held webinar. This entails ensuring that all of the effects and animations you’ve added to the webinar display work correctly.

Follow up and engage after the webinar

Ensure that you have the right software in place to easily send out automated communications to your registrants once the webinar is complete to keep engagement high and your attendees coming back for more.

There’s one software that does it all for you – it’s Kaltura.

Meet Kaltura – your #1 webinar platform

Kaltura Webinars makes it easy for organizations to deliver amazing branded ROI-positive webinar experiences.

With Kaltura, you have access to everything you need to build a successful webinar and ensure a spectacular workflow from planning to follow-up:

• Automatically generated beautifully branded landing pages to attract registrants
• Fun user engagement tools such as live attendee polls and quizzes
• Marketing automation integration to Hubspot and other platforms
• Engaging bring-to-stage feature to invite attendees to the live discussion

Learn more about how Kaltura can help you deliver the amazing webinar video experience your company needs to stay ahead of the crowd.

Summary

Hosting a successful webinar requires a combination of solid planning, extensive promotion, solid execution, and careful follow-up.

Kaltura Webinars is the all-in-one webinar solution that will help you deliver stellar experiences every step of the way for a stress-free and high-ROI webinar.