From lead generating industry talks to brand growth, webinars can be a great channel for supporting lead generation. 

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Webinars are a value creating, and money saving, opportunity to expand your company's customer base, increase your brand awareness, strengthen your brand's position in the market and to create meaningful engagement with your existing clientele. In other words, webinars are one of the best tools to have in your marketing strategy! 

To get you going on your own webinar journey, we’ve created a quick outline of webinar best practices. In this article we’ll go over how to (1) prepare and plan your webinar, (2) drive registration and (3) how to equip yourself for success. 

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1. Prepare & Plan

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Set your goals

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Before you can reap the many benefits of a webinar, you need to narrow down exactly what you want and who you want it from. You should be asking yourself, where is my audience in the buying cycle? Within the marketing funnel, where do they sit right now?

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A webinar for a top of the funnel audience should focus on raising your brand awareness and thought leadership positioning through expert led content/ and lead generation. A webinar for a mid-funnel audience will likely be more about lead generation kicking off slowly, continuing to build your positioning and helping to nurture leads down the funnel. The bottom funnel is where your webinar focuses on demonstrating value (and helping send your audience over to sales and close deals!). 

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Schedule smart

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Part of knowing your audience is knowing when they are most likely to attend your webinar. The best time of day for webinar is midday, around 11 am on Wednesdays and Thursday. Mid-week and mid-day have been shown to have the most attendance compared to any other day or time, according to industry data. 

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Webinars should be roughly up to hour, just long enough to keep people engaged and tuned in, without feeling too long. We get into more detail about exactly how long your webinar should be and why in our article here, but a general webinar schedule would look something like this:

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• 5-7 minutes for welcomes and introductions 
• 30-45 minutes for the presentation or lecture
• 10-15 minutes for questions and answers

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Choose the right platform

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When hosting your webinar, you want to maximise all the potential leads, brand growth and engagement you can get. This makes it important to choose a webinar hosting platform that can do all that - and more.

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Key features to look out for in a webinar platform include:

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1. Customisable landing webinar page

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Your webinar landing page is where people will go to RSVP for your event, and where they will land the day of the event. This makes it the beginning, middle, and end of your webinar story - so make it count. 

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One feature of any quality webinar platform is the ability to brand your event, including the landing page. From landing page to stage, you should focus on creating a cohesive and branded experience to grow brand recognition and create unified webinar events. 

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2. Brandability 

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Like we just mentioned, branding is one of the most important features of any webinar. Webinars are an incredible lead generation tool, but only if attendees and potential leads are able to connect what their valuable learnings to the brand or company they learned it from. 

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This means any platform you choose should have as many features as possible to brand your webinar - this includes brand colours, logo, personalised background etc.

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3. Engagement features & tracking

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You want your webinar to have basic engagement features such as chat and Q&A - but more importantly you want to know how and where attendees are engaged. Choosing a platform that offers you this insight gives you the opportunity to grow and improve your webinars. 

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2. Drive Registration

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Start early 

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Across the webinar industry, the consensus is that you should start sending your promotional emails 3-4 weeks before your webinar. During these weeks you continue to hype up your webinar by sending incentivized email register reminders, information about the speakers, as well as reminders about the event schedule. 

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A top tip from us to remember: give your webinar a great title and an even better description. Your title should be fun and peak people's interest, while also clearly informing them of the event topic. Your webinar description should be packed full of CTAs and information on all the wonderful things your webinar has to offer. This is your hook, your name and event description are the first way to catch people’s attention and give you the best shot at making them into future attendees.

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If you want to learn more about promoting your webinar, why not head on over to check out our article ‘how to promote your webinar’, where we give more tips not only how to get people to register for your webinar, but how to get the right people in the audience. 

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3. Equip Yourself for Success 

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Set the Stage

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Like we’ve mentioned before, it's important to choose a good quality platform. That's because not all webinars offer high quality video, live video streaming or accessibility on mobile tablet and multi browser. 

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Another thing to think about is that you want all your attendees to have stable and reliable access to your webinar, after all none likes a webinar full of pauses and interruptions due to technical issues. We’re all way past that when it comes to virtual engagement!

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You also want to make sure the background of all your hosts are clean, professional and alike. With all the many ways to brand and personalise a webinar, you don't want the video background to distract or take away from all your great marketing work.

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Merge with your marketing tools 

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Set yourself up to maximise all those data-rich insights you’re about to get from your webinar! This includes all the analytics on attendee interaction, as well as organised results from surveys and polls.

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Of course, let's not forget that one of the most important marketing tools is in fact hosting the webinar itself. Make sure you’re set up to record and store the entire webinar so you can reuse it for on-demand webinar purposes. A good quality recording makes attendees feel part of the event, even after it's happened and gives those who may have signed up but couldn’t make it on the day (we’ve all been there!) able to catch up - if this is appropriate for your audience, of course!

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On-demand storage and access is super important for any webinar because polls show that 40% of webinar attendees only sign up for on-demand webinar access. So you can see how webinars continue to grow in value by creating quality leads, increasing brandawreness and driving counter engagement even after the event has happened! 

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The (best) Bells and Whistles

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You’ve created an event with your unique insights, you’ve got great speakers and you've curated an audience - now you want to make sure your message is heard, nice and clearly for those in the back. 

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Microphones can make a huge difference in the tone and feel of a webinar. None wants to sit around asking “what did they say?” for an hour, and as a host you definitely don’t want to spend your time repeating yourself.

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To avoid that, let's go over the best microphones for webinars, and how to choose one for your specific needs. 

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Depending on your budget and the frequency of webinars you host there are a wide variety of microphones to check out. For the more casual webinar host a “dynamic microphone” may be the best option. It's lower in cost and is not very sensitive to surrounding noise, but doesn't produce as rich a sound as a “condenser” microphone. 

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A “dynamic microphone” will deliver clear sound (far superior than your computer's microphone), but it also won't break the bank - which can happen quickly if you need more than one microphone. If your company doesn't plan on hosting many webinars this may be the best option.

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A “condenser” microphone, on the other hand, is more sensitive to noise and is often used by people who need to record music. This microphone is great for webinars or webinar series that draw large audiences and want to have a more professional feel. But the sensitivity of the microphone, that makes its sound so great, also has a drawback, users have to be in a secure area with little to no background noise in order to use it. 

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“Condenser” microphones will give you clear, richer sound that will definitely up the production quality of your webinar, but with a higher price tag these microphones are definitely an investment. 

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Companies looking to host webinar series, combined with other content production like podcasting or videos would benefit most from these high end microphones. We recommend checking out Big Markers Medium article “The 11 Best Web Microphones for Webinar Hosting” to get more sight and metals on the differences between specific microphones.

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Now onto cameras. Because while attendees may come to hear what we have to say, that doesn't mean we don’t have to look good too. 

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Every year, it seems like we get another camera added to our phone. It’s no coincidence that as the selfie took over social media, our cameras improved, and doubled, and tripled. This is because a good camera can have a huge effect both on how we perceive ourselves, and how others perceive us. 

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A good webinar webcam signals to attendees a level of professionalism and trust which allows hosts to build connections with their viewers. Building trust is the first way to interact with viewers and grow your company's brand and influence customer action. So without further ado, how do you make sure you get your best face forward? 

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“Integrated cameras”, those built into your laptop, are great for smaller, fast paced webinars where there is no need for modification of the video. These are okay for the casual webinar, but should be avoided for hosting any larger-scale webinar events. 

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The most common type of webcam is a “dedicated external webcam” that is attached to your desktop or laptop. But choose wisely before you invest in an external camera. While many may offer great video quality, not all can record and stream high definition video - a major need for any webinar.  To find out more about what specific cameras will fit your webinar needs check out this article, The 11 Best Webcams for Video Conferencing, by BigMarker.

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As you can see from all that info you've just taken in, hosting a webinar is no easy feat. Webinars require managing a bunch of different components, both virtually and physically.

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But the wonderful part about a webinar is, that once you invest in a solid platform that maximises your goals, in equipment that elevates your information, and in a solid marketing plan that boosts your registration - you can produce powerful leads generating value and brand awareness, again and again! Plus, with access to attend data and webinar analytics there is always opportunity to improve your webinar skills. 

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We’d love to help get you started on your own webinar journey. Here at Tame, we offer free demos tailored to your webinar needs and personalised support so you won’t have to dive into this alone. Reach out to us and we’ll help you every step of the way.

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References:

1. On24: “ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report 2020”
2. On24: “ON24 Webinar Benchmarks 2021”
3. BigMarker: “The 11 Best Web Microphones for Webinar Hosting”
4. BigMarker: “The 11 Best Webcams for Video Conferencing”