The Bracken Blog 

When it comes to reaching and growing your audience, webinars are one of the most powerful tools available to businesses. In fact, 73% of B2B marketing and sales leaders say webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads.

Webinars provide a fresh alternative to text-based content like blog posts and emails, and it’s well worth learning to create them.

In this article, we’ll show you how to build a webinar that connects with your audience and captures their attention.

Consider your Audience

When designing an effective webinar, it’s important to think about who is watching. The tone you use, the topics you cover, and the level of detail you go into will all depend heavily on your audience.

Some of the best webinars focus on a topic that hits on a real source of frustration for your viewers, like a common operational challenge or something a lot of your customers have raised as an issue. The webinar will address this problem and offer valuable, concrete takeaway solutions that viewers can start putting into practice straight away.

It will build the authority of your brand and present you as an organization that knows what it’s doing and can help viewers do the same.

Understanding your audience closely will allow you to create webinar content that they find genuinely useful and interesting. You can do this by:

• Paying attention to customer feedback, for example via forms or social media comments
• Using questionnaires and surveys, which could be shared with your email subscribers, to pinpoint the challenges your audience is facing and what they’d like to learn more about
• Look at what your competitors are addressing in their content, and what seems to be working for them

Choose the Right Platform

When it comes to hosting webinars, there’s a whole host of excellent platforms to choose from. The one you opt for will depend on several factors, like your audience, style, and what you hope to achieve with your webinar.

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular software out there.

Zoom

Zoom is a robust and reliable webinar platform. It’s extremely user-friendly, making it easy to invite attendees and manage the webinar. Zoom is especially well-suited for team meetings and smaller groups, and is a great all-rounder.

WebinarJam

WebinarJam is an excellent choice for teams that are more marketing-oriented. It integrates well with CRMs and is a good choice for professional marketing webinars that draw on lots of data. It isn’t the best choice for more casual chats or meetings.

GoToWebinar

Built for Q&A sessions and presentations, GoToWebinar has a more corporate feel than the other options. It’s the perfect choice for a presentation, and is well-designed for taking questions in a formal format, while being less well-suited for dynamic, quick-fire group chats.

Once you’ve settled on the right platform, it’s time to get to work on putting your webinar together.

Build the Webinar

If you’ve taken the right steps to understand your audience and their desires, developing the content of your webinar should be a fairly straightforward task. Again, it’s crucial here to know your attendees and clearly understand their pain points, challenges, and preferred communication style.

Here are some tips on building an effective webinar:

• Use the right equipment. Make sure your recording equipment is fully functional and ready to go. Have spare batteries on hand and test everything before you begin.
• Use lots of images and make your webinar visually appealing. Keep your audience engaged by breaking up your webinar text with lots of interesting graphics.
• Pick a good speaker and practice. Run through your webinar several times before you record it, and try to use a presenter with a knack for public speaking.
• Consider the length. Longer is better when it comes to webinars, to an extent. Most attendees stick around for an average of 61 minutes, so don’t be afraid to add more content if needed.
• Build a landing page for your webinar so attendees can easily sign up
• Prepare for a Q&A at the end, and be ready for a wide range of questions
• Optimize your webinar for mobile. Today, half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. If you don’t make your webinar accessible for mobile users, you could be missing out on a big chunk of viewers.

Promote Your Webinar

Even if you’ve created the best webinar in the world, your hard work will mean nothing if nobody attends. That’s why it’s incredibly important to promote your webinar as much as possible and spread the word to your audience.

Here are some ways to do that:

• Use social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to inform your followers about the upcoming webinar
• Email is your friend. Email drives a massive 57% of webinar registrations, so make the most of it. Inform your subscribers in advance and remember to confirm their registration and remind them with follow-ups.
• Advertise your webinar clearly on your company’s website
• Spread the word in person at conferences and events
• Work hard on Tuesdays. For whatever reason, the data shows that Tuesday is the most effective day to promote your webinar, and it’s also best to promote early in the day.
• Use add-to-calendar links when promoting your webinar so attendees can easily make a note and set a reminder

Record the Webinar

Just because some of your audience missed out on your webinar doesn’t mean it can’t still be useful for you and them. Make sure to record the webinar so you can share it later with those who couldn’t make it. This is also useful for people who did attend but would like to refer back to the webinar.

After the webinar has already taken place, change the copy on your landing page to promote an ‘on-demand’ webinar instead of a live event, allowing visitors to access the recorded version. This can also be used as a lead magnet to grow your email list.

Repurpose the Slides

Your webinar likely contains a lot of useful content, and that content can be repurposed fairly easily into lots of different channels. Some simple ways to do this are:

• Make the webinar into a slideshare and add it to the thank you page as a downloadable file
• Send a follow-up email sequence to your list containing key points from the webinar
• Use the webinar content as an attachment for sales outreach
• Create blog posts or infographics from the webinar and share these on your website and social media pages