How to Plan a Successful Webinar: Step by Step Guide
Webinars have become especially relevant nowadays. While trying to navigate the new reality, marketers everywhere have learned how to accommodate the right information into a new dynamic format. Learn how to plan and execute engaging webinars for your target audience with a truly functional webinar planning template.
If you're an agency, a consultant, a marketing manager, or a project manager, your customers (or prospects) can benefit from your expertise. And sometimes, a webinar is the perfect opportunity to share your valuable knowledge and engage with your audience.
A webinar can be defined as a type of online conferencing. It’s an event that can be held virtually, which means that is attended exclusively by an online audience. Other terms used as alternatives for webinars are web events, webcasts, online seminars, web lectures, and virtual events.
One of the reasons webinars have become so popular is that they allow speakers to connect with their participants. When planned and executed well, interaction during a webinar can be very powerful. And especially when your audience is large, you can use several methods of interaction such as chat, poll, survey, or dynamic questions.
Why Are Webinars So Effective
With the surge of covid cases and the rise of the working-from-home era, webinars have seen a resurgence in usage everywhere. And the reason they work so well is that they’re an excellent form of communication where attendees and speakers share information, in real-time. Webinars can accommodate virtually any type of business: education, science, legal industry, marketing, and health industry.
What Are the Benefits of Planning Webinars
These virtual events allow presenters to share documents, ideas, notes, videos, or presentations with their attendees. Attendees can vary from potential customers to students, to industry peers, or clients. But the most important opportunity that webinars give, is that they allow you to educate and engage with your audience. Webinars can also help to:
Generate new leads.
Educate an audience about a specific business.
Promote awareness and build authority in your industry.
Train new employees.
Demonstrate your product to potential customers.
Onboard new customers to your product or service.
How to Plan a Webinar - Step By Step Guide
Like any project, the glue that holds every aspect of a successful outcome is great planning. Luckily, there are steps that you can plan, monitor, and execute during a webinar life cycle which will help you guarantee a good outcome. Let’s dive into the steps you need to follow to make your next webinar a big hit.
Choose the topic and set your objectives. Before anything else, you need to find a topic that connects with your audience. Once you have a find a suitable topic, select your main objective and focus on that idea. For instance, generating new leads.
Recruit speakers for your webinar. Depending on your topic, you now need to select your speaker, one of the key elements of your webinar. This person should be an expert on your topic and ideally should be able to prepare and deliver an engaging presentation.
Select an organizer/facilitator. This person is responsible for developing the topic, market the event, manage the registration list, moderating audience questions, troubleshoot problems, and execute the webinar during its entire life cycle.
Determine the format for the webinar. There are several formats you can choose from. The most common format is the single presenter, where one person speaks, demonstrates, and answers questions from the audience. There is also the popular moderated panel discussion, where there are multiple speakers with a moderator facilitating the discussion. Or, the interview-style webinar, where an interviewer asks a set of predetermined questions selected by the organizer.
Plan the visuals. Audio and visuals are crucial elements of your webinar, they help to get the message across. When working on your presentation, you should always consider adding: an introductory slide reminding your audience of the topic and what time the webinar will begin, a slide introducing each presenter, including job title, and organization, and a quick overview of the webinar agenda and the topics that will be covered.
Choose a webinar tool. Zoom has become one of the most popular webinars and virtual event tools out there, but many different tools can help you. You need to consider a few aspects such as how many people will be attending, the cost, the features you will need, and the possibility to record the event.
Set up a practice session. It’s always a good idea to schedule a practice session a few days before your webinar. The goal is to do a run-through with all participants to work out any unresolved questions or any technical issues. Make sure everyone is on the same page, and perform equipment and visual check.
Build Your Webinar Checklist With Instagantt
Because webinars rely on many different tasks, it’s important to manage the information the right way. Creating a list of tasks, and following up on them, is crucial to the success of your webinar. And if you want this process to be truly effective, you need to use the right tools. The good news is that you can plan and organize your webinars with Instagantt, an online Gantt chart software for project management that helps teams all around the world plan, coordinate, schedule, and execute their projects, beginning to end.
Teams can rely on Instagantt to create professional-looking Gantt charts in a matter of minutes. By visualizing what’s important, teams can easily manage their work and have a bird’s-eye view of tasks, deadlines, resources, budget, and more, in a single, centralized location.
