7 Tips to Help You Develop a Stellar Marketing Webinar

A marketing webinar is a great source for educating prospects and leads.

Companies typically organize webinars to educate existing and potential customers, lead generation and maintaining customer retention.

Hundreds if not thousands of people sign up for a webinar every month. Unfortunately, less than half will watch your webinar live.

There is a variety of reasons why you aren't drawing a larger audience, it could be how you promoted the webinar or it could be that those who registered simply forgot.

To ensure that your next webinar is successful, here are 7 tips to help you develop a stellar marketing webinar.

Tips for Developing a Successful Marketing Webinar

1.  Develop an Eye-Catching Landing Page

Your landing page should answer the questions of who, what, where, when and why.

A successful landing page will draw people in, making thousands of leads and prospects register. To ensure that people are registering for your marketing webinar, make sure your landing page includes the following elements before you make your landing page live.

Your landing page should include:

• limited navigation

• Quick scan of webinar details: time, date, title, duration, presenters, who should view, technical requirements

• Lead capture form

• Description of webinar

• Social sharing links

• An image

Who, what, where, when and why might seem pretty obvious, but they're pretty common elements many forget to include. A great way to promote your webinar is by identify the presenters of the webinar. On your landing page you will want to introduce the presenters and provide a brief bio that explains who they are. Why will you benefit from the webinar with John Doe?

Remember to include an explanation of what the webinar is about, key points the presenters are going to touch on. You won't have a high number of registrants if you forget to include the date and time the webinar will take place. Provide your registrants with the date so they can mark their calendars.

2. Timing of Webinar

Not only should you include the time of the webinar on your landing page, but before you do that. You need to identify the most convenient date and time. You don't want to look at a calendar for May, close your eyes and then pick a day. You should pick a day and time that is convenient for the majority of your audience.

Consider your audiences:

• Time zone

• Slowest business hours

Not sure what time or day works well for your audience, consider adding a field to your lead capture form, asking those registering to confirm the best time slot that works for them. Pick the time that the majority of registrants selected.

Best time for a webinar is between 12pm and 3pm on:

• Tuesdays

• Wednesdays

• Thursdays

3. Promote Your Webinar

Don't forget to promote your webinar through email marketing, social media, your website and on your blog. You developed that awesome landing page, setup a thank you page and auto-responder emails to remind registrants. It's important to not only promote your webinar but to remind registrants. With all of their day to day tasks and meetings, it's easy for a webinar to slip their mind.

Not only should you send an email once someone registers, consider sending emails 1 day before and 1 hour before. You want to ensure the maximum number of people are attending your webinar.

Social media is a great tool. There's a really good chance that a significant number of your email audience is also following and engaging with you on social media. So don't miss the opportunity to promote your webinar and remind your contacts to register. Posting just one update about the webinar won't generate a significant amount of registrants. Increase the number of updates as the date approaches, particularly the day before and the day of.

4. Incorporate Engaging Guest Presenters

Maybe your audience doesn't know the presenter. Incorporate an engaging guest presenter to draw the attention of additional fans and followers. Think of it almost like a guest blogger. Often times webinars can become monotonous when one person is doing all the talking. With a guest presenter you will add additional viewpoints, opinions, and experiences to create a more valuable webinar experience for your attendees.

5. Keep it Conversational

Don't just talk for the entire duration of the webinar. You want to keep it conversational by experimenting with different formats that will appeal to your audience such as Q&A's, roundtable discussion, or a live debate.

6. Foster Peer Interaction and Learning

Your webinar shouldn't just be a place where attendees listen to you talk. You want to enable collaboration and learning between those individuals attending your webinar. At the end of your webinar, use that time to allow your attendees to discuss topics and share any ideas or experiences they might have. Unfortunately, this is one element missing in many webinars today.

One of the easiest ways to stimulate engagement and interaction between the presenter and the attendees is hashtags. Develop a unique hashtag that will allow attendees to communicate and engage in conversation about the content on Twitter.

Consider:

• Ask questions (use your webinar platforms chat function)

• Send out polls and quizzes

• Use social media, develop a #hashtag for your webinar

• Publish a blog article after the webinar, highlighting the main points

• Create a list of references and links

These are great elements to keep your webinar conversational while educating and gaining feedback from your attendees.

7. Upload Recording and Slides

Not everyone is going to make it to your marketing webinar. It's important to provide the recording and slides to leads and prospects on your website. Give those individuals the opportunity to view your webinar.

If your webinar has passed, consider adding them to your resources page. Allowing leads and prospects to access your webinar at any time. Don't forget to place your webinar behind a lead capture form and add your video and slides to the thank you page.