7 Webinar Best Practices To Captivate Your Audience

Use These Tips To Host A Webinar Your Attendees Will Talk About 

Live events may be within your comfort zone, but you cannot discount the convenience, cost-effectiveness, and power of a good webinar. 

Webinars are an effective way to expand your company’s reach, target more people consistently, and offer compelling, branded content. 

For a webinar to be considered successful, it must offer value to your attendees, be engaging, and offer actionable and relevant takeaways. 

Much like a live event, hosting a virtual event, like webinars, involves many moving parts. There is so much to consider and a lot of tasks to complete. Webinar hosts like you must adapt to the demands and challenges of virtual events. 

Seven Best Practices For Hosting Great Webinar 

Because webinars are an engaging tool that can improve lead generation and attract new clients, you’ll need to be willing to apply new techniques and adjust your approach to meet the demands of your target audience. 

If you want to get the most out of your webinar and hit all your virtual event goals, you’ll need to follow webinar best practices to ensure your audience is engaged before, during, and after your webinar. 

Here are seven best practices that will help you host an engaging, successful webinar. 

1. Set The Tone With Compelling Webinar Invites

Event invitations can make or break out registration numbers. This is true for webinars, where potential attendees evaluate whether or not your event will benefit them based on an email invite or flyer. 

Here are some ways you can ensure your webinar invites are engaging and eye-catching. 

• Create Solid Headers That Define Your Value Proposition. 

• Direct Registrants To The Event’s Social Media Pages. 

• Offer An In-Depth Description Of The Webinar’s Content. 

• Include A CTA Button That Will Capture Potential Attendee’s Attention. 

• Communicate The Webinar’s Date, Time, And Subject Matter. 

Remember to choose colors and images that represent your brand and the event’s intended message. Eye-catching colors and simple designs on your invites are best for attracting an audience and should match the theme of your event landing page. 

2. Choose The Right Webinar Platform

Your webinar platform can amplify or weaken your online event. Partner with a webinar hosting platform that offers extensive features will enhance your webinar before, during, and after the event. 

Look for features like an event lobby, multi-track agendas, and phone dial-in access to increase engagement and access for your participants. 

Media library capabilities, a 24/7 Help Desk, and hosted eCommerce will help webinar hosts manage their event by taking items off their event checklist, freeing up time for other tasks. 

3. Step Up Your Webinar Marketing For Success

Because your webinar is taking place online, your marketing strategy should center around virtual methods. Marketers know that the internet is a powerful tool that will help your event gain exposure to the right people and even capture the attention of new audiences. 

Social media platforms, like LinkedIn, are great for marketing your webinar to the right people. Create an event hashtag and use it across all of your marketing content. You can even launch contests for attendees using the hashtag, which offers user-generated content that you can use during and after your webinar in your content marketing strategy. 

Tried and true digital marketing tools, like press releases, pop-up windows on web pages, and emails are also great opportunities to build excitement for your webinar. 

4. Optimize Your Webinar Content 

Engaging webinar content is the best way to prevent attendees from becoming distracted. Offer various media, including a live component, to ensure audiences remain glued to the screen. 

Here are some examples of content you’ll want to include in your webinar to hold your audience's attention. 

• Bullet Points: When using a Powerpoint presentation, don’t overload your audience’s computer screen with words. Use bullet points on your slide deck to present critical concepts. 

• Infographics: These visuals offer essential information in an easily digestible format. 

• Poll Questions: Embed poll questions within your content and use the webinar live polling feature offered by your webinar platform to engage your attendees. 

• Sound Quality: Remind your presenters to use a headset and check their internist connection to ensure high-quality audio. 

Take the time to ensure your content is optimized for your webinar attendees. If your content doesn’t align with the webinar topic, you will find your audience losing interest quickly. 

5. Prioritize Audience Participation

Your audience needs to engage with your content from the moment they join the event. Start with a slide that contains a relevant, exciting fact or brief anecdote, as well as interesting visuals.

Once you’ve welcomed your attendees, launch your prepared interactive features. Live screen sharing, live polling, and quizzes are great ways to capture your audience’s attention and offer opportunities for them to engage with your webinar.

Make time for a Q&A session at the end of your webinar. This offers an opportunity for participants to engage with guest speakers on the event’s subject matter. 

6. Record Your Live Webinar For On-Demand Viewing 

The best part of hosting a webinar is the ability to reuse the content post-event. Your webinar platform should offer event recording, as well as content cataloging capabilities. 

This will allow participants who cannot view the event in real-time due to time zone issues to consume your content on-demand. 

You can also reuse the recordings for future webinar marketing and transcribe the audio to allow your webinar to convert to written data and be referred to in the future. 

7. Follow Up With Your Attendees To Seal The Deal 

Once your event concludes, leave your audience wanting more and ensure they know what to do next. End with actionable advice and provide contact information for all speakers and key contacts within your company. 

Send out a post-event survey to gather important feedback on how your webinar was perceived. Keep a record of what worked and what did not to use when planning your next webinar. 

Finally, provide all registrants with materials you offered during the webinar, like slide decks, whitepapers, or even the event recording. Don’t leave out no-shows: remind them that they missed the event and let them know you hope to see them at your next webinar. 

Host A Webinar Your Target Audience Will Love 

Following best practices when planning and executing your next webinar will allow you to maximize your investment. They allow you to conduct engaging webinars and generate leads to improve your campaign efforts. 

When you are ready to begin planning your next webinar, you will need a webinar platform to help you start to finish. 

The experts at BeaconLive have over 20 years of experience in planning and hosting virtual events. Our platform will ensure your webinar is professionally executed and offers a seamless experience for both event hosts and webinar attendees.