Webinars have been around for a while, but this marketing trend hasn’t faded. Webinars can be an extremely useful marketing tool for a number of reasons — mainly because it allows companies to better engage with potential leads and convert them into paying customers. But when you’re starting to host your first webinar, there might be a few hurdles to overcome, such as choosing the right webinar platform for your business, planning out the webinar structure, choosing the right team, and more.
In this article, I’m gonna give you my top tips on how to set up and host a webinar to help generate more leads and sales for your business.
Deciding the Main Purpose of Your Webinar
What is the main purpose of your webinar? This is the first question you should ask yourself. Are you trying to just generate new leads for your business and make sales directly after your webinar? Do you want to capitalize on already existing clients by inviting them to view your new product offering? Or do you just want to give out as much free useful information as possible about a topic you’re especially passionate about?
Ask yourself what is the purpose of your webinar and what are you trying to achieve. You’ll most likely have a few different purposes, such as making sales, improving brand awareness, generating new leads, keeping existing customers informed about new products, and more.
But choose which one you think is most important, and then use your choice as the starting point for your webinar. Once you’ve decided on the main purpose of your webinar, you can begin to make a plan.
Planning Your Webinar
It’s very important that your webinar follows a logical flow, so create a plan to ensure you maintain focus and keep viewers engaged.
But where do you start? Here’s a simple structure you can follow and build upon:
- Welcome introduction.
- A brief introduction to the offering.
- Call-to-action.
- Relevant background history about the company.
- A full explanation of the product/service offering.
- Call-to-action.
- Q&A.
- Call-to-action.
- Closeout the webinar and thank viewers for attending.
Take each step here as a rough guide on how your presentation should go, and create an idea of how each stage will work. Start by designing your webinar and writing a script.
While Photoshop is one of the best programs for design, beginners are better off either using Canva or hiring a professional graphic designer to help them.
Also, writing a good sales script can be tough. But it’s important to get it right. One of the best tips on writing good scripts is to keep it in a conversational and relatable tone — not in a corporate, robotic tone that makes people want to instantly leave your webinar. Copywriting expert, Nick Usbourne, recently gave us some awesome tips on how to write in a conversational tone.
Choosing a Webinar Platform
There are so many webinar platforms to choose from. Good options include ClickMeeting, GoToWebinar, and Zoom — all of which can accommodate both smaller and larger audiences. It’s best to try a few different options to find which platform feels right to you, but if you’re a beginner to webinars I think Zoom is a really good choice.
Zoom is also great as many people are very familiar with the platform, so attendees may feel more comfortable jumping onto a Zoom-based webinar as opposed to another webinar service.
Having the Right Setup
Having the right setup really depends on your budget. But here are a few items that you’ll most likely need:
- A fast and reliable internet connection.
- A backup computer.
- A high-quality microphone.
- Lighting equipment.
- An HD camera.
While you can get away with using your laptop’s built-in webcam and mic, if you want to look and sound more professional, you’re better off upgrading to a high-quality camera.
But the most important items are fast and reliable internet to ensure the webinar runs smoothly without any connection drops, and a backup device that has all of your webinar information — just in case you have any technical troubles and need to swap devices.
Practicing Your Webinar
It’s crucial that you do plenty of trial runs of your webinar to see what works and what doesn’t. This way, you’re avoiding making any embarrassing mistakes that make you look like an amateur.
Give yourself time to practice your delivery, timing, your tone, as all of these are super important if you want to keep viewers engaged and build trust that leads to sales and conversions. You can also record yourself performing the webinar and watch it back to look for areas that need improving.
As the saying goes: “Practice makes perfect.”
Going Live!
It can be daunting launching and hosting your webinar for the first time. But as long as you have all of the right equipment in place, and a well-thought and well-rehearsed plan, the sky’s the limit!
The more webinars you host, the better you’ll get and the more successful they will be — hopefully webinars will become one of the most powerful marketing tools for your business!
If you’re looking for new ways to improve your marketing strategy or grow your business, read through some of the latest articles on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James