Webinar is an online seminar that people can take part in from any corner of the world via the Internet.
It mostly takes place live, so participants can ask their questions to the presenter or an invited guest after the presentation. hose who could not make it on time can watch the recording later.
The webinar format became especially popular in 2020, when the coronavirus made organizing physical meetings difficult or even impossible. In order not to lose contact with the audience, many events moved to the Internet, and the participants also discovered that participating from the couch at home is not as bad an idea as they had previously thought. This is also shown by the fact that webcasts are still popular, even though other life has more or less recovered.
One of the ventures born out of the need to move to the Internet is the Marketing Laboratory created by Timo Porval. To date, Timo has spent hundreds of hours in the Marathon studio, broadcasting live and creating various forms of recorded video content. So Timo is our most experienced webmaster. We asked him for tips on how to prepare for the webinar and how to conduct it well.
1. Why webinar?
There are many different ways to reach your target audience, but webcasting has several clear advantages over others:
- Live streaming allows you to interact and build relationships with your audience.
- People from all over the world can participate.
- Monthly useful videos keep you in the picture and develop your (personal) brand.
- You can collect registrants’ email addresses for further communication with them.
- Useful and educational content brings more paying customers.
- It’s a good way to build relationships with guest speakers on your webinars.
- The saved material can be distributed and reused later.
- It is possible to extract interesting sections from the recording for marketing materials.
- The number of participants is limited only by the ability of your technical partner to broadcast live. The cost of renting your space does not increase if there are 200 participants instead of 20.
2. How to plan the content of the webinar?
Choose the right format (the possibilities are endless!)
Some examples from the Marketing Lab (Turunduslabor):
- hourly educational events with a guest;
- Q&A talks (questions and answers with or without a guest);
- Marketing Lab’s “Get Sh!t Done” Online Collaboration Day.
One of the most important features of live webinars is the interaction with the audience. If you give participants a chance to ask questions or ask them something themselves, they will be more engaged and get more out of the whole event.
Think in advance how you will involve people. For example, draw a prize (related to your product or service) to the most active questioner. But, of course, you have to be prepared for the fact that the award will not make anyone ask. For such an occasion, prepare a few additional questions for the guest yourself.
Think through the content
As with everything else you do for your (potential) customers, the content has to have SUBSTANCE. It must help find solutions to their main problems. The goal is to make something so awesome for free that you can freely ask for money for it.
Even if the purpose of your webinar is to directly sell your products or services, sales should not take up more than 10% of your time and focus.
Tie the sale to prizes, so you can mention them at the beginning and make a separate appeal towards the end. The main content of the webinar should still be to provide the user with valuable knowledge, which you already promised in the marketing messages.
It’s always a little easier to host a webinar with an interesting and smart guest, so choose carefully who you invite to go live with you. As mentioned above, the advantage of webcasting is that you can participate from any corner of the world, and this also applies to the guest.
If you can’t think of a topic right away, it’s always good to explain HOW something is done in your field. It is also good to talk about the experiences acquired during the projects already completed (case studies).
Some ideas:
- Hairdresser: How to easily make a festive hairstyle at home
- Event organizer: How we organized our company’s summer days and what we learned from it
- Pilates trainer: How to get rid of back pain with exercises
- Planting: When to put seeds in the soil and when to transplant plants
It is definitely worth thinking about how to make the beginning exciting right away and which hashtags could be used to get more attention on social media. Every little detail helps grow your audience.
Webinar structure
The most appropriate length of a live broadcast is usually 45-90 minutes, which must also include listeners’ questions. Such a time format also forces you to stay on your chosen topic and be as specific as possible.
Think for yourself and consult with the guest whether you want to use slides and/or a whiteboard, because their organization should not be left to the last minute. This is especially important for slides, they must be in a format suitable for the technical team. Which one to be more precise, it is wise to ask them in advance.
Test with your team and guests before starting the actual event with all the necessary screen sharing and other features you need to use. A webinar should not start with the first 10 minutes going over the presenters’ computer settings to get the sound working.
More details to review:
- background,
- clothing,
- sound,
- video quality,
- time of occurrence.
3. Technical implementation of the website
The most common and easiest channels for conducting webinars are: Facebook, Zoom and Youtube.
The choice of the appropriate channel depends on how many people are expected to join your website, where you want to direct the traffic of your visitors and what feels most convenient to you.
Based on Timo’s experience, the pros and cons of each channel are as follows.
Webinar on Facebook
| PROS | CONS |
| At the beginning of the live broadcast, Facebook itself helps to spread the event. | The viewer has a lot of distractions – friends are writing and messages are coming. |
| There is no limit to the number of participants. | The picture and sound quality is mediocre. |
| People are often already on Facebook. | The settings and configurations on the platform are constantly changing. If you rarely do, then you have a headache with them at the moment. |
| Definitely the best platform in terms of viewer engagement, because people are used to commenting and liking there. | If you want to do a very long live broadcast (like Timo’s “12 hours of marketing”), you have to consider that Facebook Live can last a maximum of 8 hours. “12 hours of marketing” was therefore interrupted halfway through and a new broadcast was started. |
| Free of charge |
Webinar on Zoom
| PROS | CONS |
| The most intimate and personal, you can see people face to face. | Paid. |
| Participants can be divided into separate virtual rooms to discuss. | A limited number of participants (maximum 1000 people). |
| Allows you to make questionnaires. | The picture and sound quality is mediocre. |
| There is no time limit. | The participant must have Zoom installed on their computer. |
| It is possible to let people participate only with a special link and, if necessary, a password. | The chat part is not as convenient as on Facebook. Can’t publicly reply to a specific person’s comment and react with hearts and thumbs. |
| No confounding factors. |
Webinar on Youtube
| PROS | CONS |
| Channel with the best picture and sound quality. | Estonian people are not used to it. |
| With the help of a link and a password, it is possible to make a private live broadcast. | The chat part is not as convenient as on Facebook. Can’t publicly reply to a specific person’s comment and react with hearts and thumbs. |
| Free of charge. | |
| There are no confounding factors. | |
| There is no limit to the number of participants. | |
| If necessary, you can also conduct a 12-hour live broadcast. |
The biggest differences between these three platforms are therefore the ability to interact with people and the view of comments. Some presenters are distracted by the comments being visible all the time, so their assistant sorts out the best questions to answer. Others, however, want to actively engage in dialogue and constantly see people’s reactions on the screen.
In the case of Timo’s webinars, someone else is usually involved in providing chat support and consolidating questions, who only conveys the most important things to him. The assistant has another task: he collects good feedback and the best phrases from the chat window, later they can be used in marketing materials for the distribution of a good recording.
If you have any questions, talk to our team, we will find the most suitable solution together.
4. Webinar Marketing
This activity is the key to making the seminar preparation and other previous work bear fruit. It is important to understand that it is difficult to even get a person to sign up for a free live broadcast. He just has a thousand other ways to spend his evening (spending time with family or friends, Netflix, reading a book, resting his eyes and being in nature, etc.). Fears that maybe someone will ask him something directly as a viewer, maybe this web joke is a waste of time, maybe someone will start sending spam to his email address, etc. also play a role.
There are many reasons not to come to your website, and if you don’t allay these fears with marketing, your previous work will go to waste.
According to Timo, there are two critical components in the marketing of a web portal that must be in place: the registration page itself and the fact that people get there in the first place.
Important points on the registration page:
- what benefits the viewer gets from the webcast;
- a clock ticking down;
- confidence-inspiring numbers;
- bullets with more accurate benefits;
- pictures of the performers + introduction;
- number of registered participants;
- feedback from previous participants;
- video;
- who is suitable, who is not;
- registration button with a call-to-action.
Channels to distribute the webinar:
- personal social media channels,
- FB groups (in agreement with admins),
- FB ad,
- YT ad,
- personal invitations,
- a short live with a performer to get in front of his audience,
- your email list,
- guest’s mailing list,
- guest’s social media channels.
In order to make the life of registrants easier, it is a good idea to use the option of immediate addition to the calendar (addevent) on the registration Thank you page. And of course, send them reminders 3 days, 1 day and also 15 minutes before the start of the live broadcast, because people forget or more recent obligations come up. If you are sure of the usefulness and quality of the material to be shared, you should remind the registrants of the webinar. Believe me, most of the recipients of the letter will be grateful to you for this.
Timo emphasizes that even though there is a lot of work involved in making a website successful, most people are not ready to do it. If you are, you have a clear advantage over others.
In addition, he promises that everything will get easier and better with each next webinar, you will develop a system and an understanding of how and what to do. Timo recommends doing 5-10 webnars first and only then deciding if it’s too hard for you or not.
For inspiration: Turunduslabor, Edu Akadeemia, Kasak Solutions, Bränd Nimega Sina, and Täitsa Pekkis podcast have given their business a boost with online stories.
5. Live streaming of the webinar
Test, test and re-test everything that could go wrong before going live. For example, at the beginning of one of the major Marketing Lab events, when 500 people were already present, Facebook blocked the live because the background music was wrongly selected and there were no rights to play it. Therefore, it is reasonable to start the transmission already 15-20 minutes before the proper start, so that during this time the last tremors will show themselves.
Have water, coffee and throat lozenges ready for you (and your guest).
Prepare yourself mentally. If you’re webcasting alone, make sure you’ve talked loudly before and your voice is awake. Do you need 5 minutes of silence before the performance to rethink the topics? Or do you need a nice warm-up conversation instead? Maybe you could dance instead before the webinar and activate yourself that way?
Find the most suitable way for you to increase your energy level, because people can tell very well whether you are tired and sleepy or energetic – your state will also be transferred to them. Be yourself and smile! You host a webinar to help people with really useful content and they want to listen to you.
Don’t be discouraged if the audience is small in the first webcasts. The rule of thumb is that 25-35% of registrants usually show up. In any case, give your best – you build your audience in small steps.
If you want, you can give people a few minutes to gather at the beginning of the webinar, but fill that time with something exciting. Talk about something interesting, for example, about the preparations, so that people don’t get bored while waiting.
Let viewers know what the schedule of the webcast is before starting the content side. Even if it’s simple: the first 30 minutes you interview the guest and 15 minutes you answer the participants’ questions. Or if you want to answer the questions on a regular basis, say that clearly too. Also let them know the expected length of the webcast and explain whether and under what conditions they will be able to see the recording.
If you already have an idea for the next webinar, don’t forget to shout it out at the end. There is a very high probability that if the webinar is successful, a large number of participants will also come to your next seminar.
6. After
If you used slides, it is recommended to send them to the e-mails of the participants later. Also for those who didn’t get to listen to the live broadcast – it’s good to include a link to the replay. (That is, of course, if you decide to make the replay public.)
In the same letter, it is also possible to make some sales with some special offers.
Be sure to also ask the participants for feedback.
It is always wise to sit down with the entire management team and write down the conclusions – what went well, what went poorly and what to do better next time. In this way, each subsequent webinar will be better and better, and the number of participants will probably increase as well.
And don’t forget that the recorded material can be used in the future either as a bonus in the sale of some products or services or as marketing material.