How To Get Started With Webinars 1 How To Get Started With Webinars 3 What’s a webinar? 3 Why webinars 3 How to prepare webinars 4 How to promote your webinars 6 Giving a great presentation (7 days after) 7 How and when to host webinars 10 How to activate after the webinars 11 How to measure your performance 11 How to find the right tool 12 2 Another characteristic is that, while the How To Get presenters are speaking they can share their screen, their webcam or even Started With documents to the audience. Webinars Why webinars Let me show you how to do webinars to maximize your ROI. What’s a webinar? Not every company, small or big, are doing The term webinar is short for web-based webinars. And that’s a shame. Here at seminar. Livestorm, we believe that live streaming events (webcasts, webinars, etc.) can have A webinar can be a presentation, lecture, a huge impact on a company’s revenue, workshop or seminar. There are several marketing and visibility. ways to call it but, at the end of the day, it consists in transmitting a video conference Yet, it is true that hosting webinars can be over the Web. tough: A key feature of a Webinar is its interactive It’s time consuming, you have to engage a elements: the ability to give, receive and lot of effort to find a topic, a guest, etc. discuss information in real-time from a Finding great content, something worth small group of presenters (often one or talking about, can lead to serious two) to a large audience (up to thousands). headaches. Without mentioning that you have to create that content afterward (slides, emails, etc). Webinar promotion may not be efficient enough. Which can impact your registration volume and your conversion rate. Hosting a presentation is not something everyone is confortable with. Being confortable talking in front of a webcam is hard. But those aspects can be balanced by other positive effects. Webinars are a great mean to get more leads and/or visibility. Consider the following: 3 People actually agree to signup (that is • Activating your audience afterwards leaving some of their information). They Measuring your performance want to watch you talk about your • expertise or your product. It means that • Finding the right webinar tool you already engaged them on a conversion path. If you would like some feedback on your webinar process, send me an email about You have a tribune and people paying it, and I’ll share our thoughts! attention to whatever you have to say. You can speak about whatever topic you find How to prepare webinars relevant for you. First, get your business objectives right. By reaching out to several people at once you may get a serious gain in time and Define your goals. What do you expect productivity. You can make more your from this webinar? This will help you sales at once. You can avoid doing long define what kind of presentation you want painful one-on-one interviews. to give. It will drive the whole content creation process and even the tool you Webinars are super easy to scale for small want to use. companies. It does not matter if you have a one-person sales team, you’ll still be able Webinars are great for many purposes and to reach out to 100, 500, 1000 people at not only lead generation. I think you could once. narrow it down to 3 main use cases: They are a great way to gather more data • Sales webinar and qualify your leads. Indeed polls, • Content webinar on your expertise questions, behavioural data are great for getting to know your audience. • Customer training Webinars are great for engaging prospects, Each case has specific requirements for generating leads, driving sales and doing great webinars. delivering content. All at the same time. Which is a huge gain in productivity. 1. Spend time on your headline. This will be the first attribution factor of Good news is that I will walk you through conversion in registration process. Great every item mentioned above. That way you headlines make people want to hear what will get more done in less time. Webinars you have to say and maybe even join the should not be a pain. conversation. In this guide we will dive into the Specificity: Is it specific enough to be essentials: addressed in 30 minutes? • Organising webinars Clarity: Is it clear enough for everyone? • Giving great presentations People come to learn something. Often 4 their initial state is basic knowledge on the The promoter will be doing all the topic. promotion heavy-lifting (images, emails, social media, etc.). Value: According to this headline, will I get any value from this webinar? (my time The host will be in charge of organizing is precious, don’t waste it). and presenting the webinar. 2. Define success metrics. The moderator will be in charge of moderating your audience while you How are you going to measure that your speak. webinar was successful or not? You could do the first two or even the three Unfortunately, registrants/attendees is not of them without spending some extra-time. enough. If you’re lucky enough to have a good Be specific. You want something from this tool ;) event, otherwise you would not spend so much time on this. Find actionable 5. Have guests metrics. Here are a few examples: In every use case it is always great to have guests for many reasons: • Signups Shows legitimacy (if the guest is a happy Shares / Visibility / Referrals • customer) • Upgrades Shows expertise (if the guest is a well- • Promocode activation known expert on the topic) • Registrations to an event Everything becomes more dynamic, it pushes toward focus and interactions with • Free trial extension your audience. • … Even if it’s a team member, let’s say a technical profile, it will add value to the 4. Build up a webinar team conversation. I believe there’s a correlation between the size of that team and the webinar tool Two guests max. I found that having you’re using. The better the tool the less more than 2 guests will have negative people you’ll need. effects such as: Either way, you could narrow down your • Lack of clarity team to those people: • Potential digressions • The promoter • The audience becomes inactive, passive • The host which impact the focus rate. • The moderator Pick a tool that allows many presenters. 5 As for the process, it depends on the tool, Here are a few more ideas outside your this is how it goes for Livestorm: own network: Go to “Create webinar" fill the basic • Linkedin groups (but don’t be too information (title, description, date, “salesy”, try to bring value to the speakers etc.) community) If you want you can customize the • Slack channels registration page, emails reminders but Forums or FB groups depending on your note that we can cover that part ;) • industry Voilà ! Your landing page is ready and your emails are ready. • Growthhackers.com Inbound.org (but don’t be too “salesy”, try to bring value to the community) How to promote your webinars You can also apply those principles to your Before the webinar guest audience (if you have a guest). One simple way to promote your webinar is to use your attendees network. Use Also try to bring something exclusive to increase conversion (promocode, access to social shares during registration or during a feature…). your webinar. You can also suggest email forwards. Pro tip: emails are the best way to drive traffic to your registration page. In your network: You can go with hand designed HTML • Related blog post with a “learn more emails consistent with your registration during our webinar” conclusion page. Also, you could do plain text emails. But then, personalize your Blog widget/link/image in a sidebar/ • emails (template logics to parse your bottom of posts customer data). • Promote it on your homepage (section, During the webinar top bar, popup…) This one is simple. Just give a great • Related Linkedin post with a “learn more presentation and interact as much as you during our webinar” conclusion can with your guest and audience. Here • Build a twitter list you find relevant your best promotion lever is your own beforehand and then reach out to them webinar. • Twitter cards with one click signup (no If you’re using a webinar hashtag on friction, more conversion) Twitter, ask your team to repost your answers or polls on Twitter. • Own email database Try to engage on Twitter at the same time Outside your network to extend your visibility and bring more people in. 6 After the webinar Giving a great presentation (7 Try to deliver a special attention to days after) those people at the end of the webinar. There’s no recipe for doing successful Send the video, the slides, a transcript of webinars every single time. Yet, there are the questions, maybe even some data. This best practices: way, you ensure more visibility and a • Keep your slide deck clean, simple, and better conversion next time. easy to read And pick a tool that handle post-webinar • Avoid jargon, be didactic emailing for non-attendees ;) • Keep text ratio low, use lots of (beautiful, Pro tips: high-res) images Also, consider republishing your • One slide, one idea, restrain the use of webinar to the replay page or your bullet points. Youtube footage. • Test your equipment. Make sure your Don’t hesitate to republish your content have a good microphone and that your on Slideshare, blog posts or even video quality is not limited by your tweetstorms.