10 tips for organising a webinar and generating leads

Do you want to organ­ise an event to high­light your company’s ser­vices or prod­ucts with­out com­mit­ting to rent­ing a room, book­ing ser­vice providers, etc.? Organ­is­ing a vir­tu­al pro­fes­sion­al event can bring you a num­ber of advan­tages at a low­er cost. For organ­is­ers, cre­at­ing a webi­nar rep­re­sents an excel­lent way of get­ting in touch with poten­tial cus­tomers in a non-com­mer­cial way. Fol­low these 10 tips to dis­cov­er how to organ­ise and plan your first webi­nar today!

Sum­ma­ry

1. Why set up a webi­nar?
2. Select a video­con­fer­ence plat­form
3. Man­age reg­is­tra­tions for the webi­nar
4. Pro­mote your webi­nar
5. Send out the link to your webi­nar
6. Choose the sub­ject of the webi­nar
7. Find the right for­mat for your webi­nar
8. Cre­ate the con­tent of your talk
9. Analyse your cus­tomer data
10. Keep in touch after the webi­nar

1. Why set up a webinar?

Webi­na­rs are gen­er­al­ly more prac­ti­cal for your atten­dees than face-to-face events, as there is no need for them to leave their office to attend them. Fur­ther­more, they still have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to get involved and ask ques­tions. They might even feel more con­fi­dent in doing so, with­out need­ing to raise their hand and speak into a micro­phone in front of an entire audi­ence. As long as you can eas­i­ly run your online talk and pro­vide prac­ti­cal advice to your audi­ence, organ­is­ing a webi­nar may well be the right option for you.

2. Select a videoconference platform

There are numer­ous webi­nar and video­con­fer­ence plat­forms on the mar­ket, includ­ing some that are more or less free, such as Zoom, YouTube, Skype, Google Meets and Google Hang­outs. There are sev­er­al fac­tors to take into account when mak­ing your choice:

• Max­i­mum num­ber of atten­dees
• Option of switch­ing eas­i­ly from one speak­er to anoth­er
• Ques­tion-and-answer options
• Screen shar­ing and slides
• Audio and video record­ing
• Cost of the solu­tion and of its fea­tures

3. Manage registrations for the webinar

Choos­ing a reg­is­tra­tion tool is just as impor­tant as choos­ing the video­con­fer­ence plat­form. It’s through the lat­ter that you’ll be able to sell access to your webi­nar. With Weezevent, you can eas­i­ly set up reg­is­tra­tions with fees for a webi­nar — you can even acti­vate a pay-what-you-want option, as well as a free option.

Cre­ate an event in just a few clicks in order to set up online reg­is­tra­tions for your webi­nar on your own site or on a ded­i­cat­ed mini-site. Your atten­dees will ben­e­fit from a smooth cus­tomer expe­ri­ence with­in a secure book­ing solu­tion. Gath­er key infor­ma­tion on your audi­ence at the time of reg­is­tra­tion in order to bet­ter under­stand them and improve your future events.

4. Promote your webinar

Inte­grate your reg­is­tra­tion mod­ule into your Face­book page or event in order to eas­i­ly man­age book­ings for your webi­nar. At the same time, if you’ve already organ­ised online events or talks, your data­base of email address­es can be synced with­in our email­ing and CRM solu­tion.

When you com­mu­ni­cate around your webi­nar, clear­ly demon­strate how each attendee will leave with the skills they’re look­ing for. It’s impor­tant that they don’t sim­ply think you’re going to sell them some­thing. Men­tion that they will have the chance to find answers to the impor­tant ques­tions they ask them­selves on a dai­ly basis.

For free events, esti­mate the non-atten­dance rate at 50%. You can there­fore tar­get a num­ber of reg­is­tra­tions that’s high­er than what you real­ly expect. If the con­tent of your webi­nar is use­ful enough for a cer­tain audi­ence, there’s no rea­son why you shouldn’t charge for atten­dance. Sell­ing access to your webi­nar, even if it’s just a sym­bol­ic sum, will help you find a more seri­ous, engaged audi­ence. Cre­ate and struc­ture your prices as you see fit with Weezevent’s intu­itive fea­tures.

5. Send out the link to your webinar

With Weezevent, all atten­dees receive a con­fir­ma­tion email con­tain­ing legal infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the organiser’s email and address, event date, etc. Reas­sure and guide them by inte­grat­ing the link to your event on the webi­nar plat­form. Do your utmost to ensure that as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble attend the event on the day.

With our email­ing and mar­ket­ing solu­tion, remind all those who have reg­is­tered of the steps to fol­low to access your webi­nar. Do this between 24 hours and 1 hour before the event.

6. Choose the subject of the webinar

The tricky part in choos­ing the sub­ject for your webi­nar is find­ing a spe­cif­ic area of focus that will be of enough inter­est to your tar­get cus­tomers. You will have a good idea of the most rel­e­vant top­ics by analysing the ques­tions that you receive most often. What do cus­tomers want to know more about? What skills do they need to achieve their goals? What exper­tise can you pass on to them? If you already have a com­mu­ni­ty, you can even pro­vide them with a quick ques­tion­naire in order to stack the odds in your favour when choos­ing the sub­ject for your webi­nar.

7. Find the right format for your webinar

There are dif­fer­ent for­mats to con­sid­er when you’re organ­is­ing a webi­nar. You should study them accord­ing to your objec­tives and your con­fi­dence as an online sem­i­nar pre­sen­ter. Would you pre­fer to offer a high­ly inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence to a small group, or give a con­fer­ence with a long speech to a larg­er audi­ence? Do you want to run your webi­nar alone or call on expert speak­ers?

If sev­er­al peo­ple speak, it’s use­ful to have a mod­er­a­tor to direct debates and fil­ter atten­dees’ ques­tions. Hav­ing anoth­er per­son to man­age the tech­ni­cal aspects of the webi­nar while you’re speak­ing can also help you con­cen­trate on the task at hand.

8. Create the content of your talk

Your atten­dees will need mate­r­i­al in order to learn and stay focused through­out your webi­nar. Write a list of sub­jects to address, but a suc­cess­ful webi­nar will above all con­tain attrac­tive visu­al aids. Dur­ing a webi­nar, your atten­dees’ atten­tion can quick­ly be dis­tract­ed from your con­tent when all they can see is a sta­tion­ary per­son speak­ing — espe­cial­ly since you can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly see them.

To avoid this, pre­pare attrac­tive ani­mat­ed mate­r­i­al to bring your speech to life, with images, graph­ics, tables and fig­ures. You can also car­ry out live demon­stra­tions or present prod­ucts to ensure your webi­nar remains visu­al­ly inter­est­ing.

Plan the dura­tion of each part of your webi­nar as well as its over­all dura­tion. Keep an eye on your watch so that you don’t get car­ried away, and set time aside to answer atten­dees’ ques­tions.

9. Analyse your customer data

Review the list of atten­dees in your webi­nar soft­ware pro­gram and mon­i­tor your online atten­dees via your WeezA­c­cess dash­board in order to see who has real­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed. You also have each attendee’s con­tact details and all oth­er infor­ma­tion request­ed at the time of reg­is­tra­tion — sur­name, first name, posi­tion, com­pa­ny, etc. This is a real gold­mine that you can use to cre­ate and refine a data­base of prospects.

10. Keep in touch after the webinar

Depend­ing on the num­ber of atten­dees for your webi­nar, try to mon­i­tor each of them per­son­al­ly. For instance, ask them if they have any fur­ther ques­tions some days after hav­ing ‘digest­ed’ the webinar’s con­tent. For those who reg­is­tered but didn’t attend, say that you are sor­ry they couldn’t make it, explain to them what they missed, and give them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to view a record­ing of the webi­nar — or attend a future ses­sion.

You could also con­sid­er thank­ing atten­dees for their atten­dance by send­ing them a spe­cial offer or exclu­sive dis­count, which will fur­ther increase your chances of con­ver­sion. With Weez­Tar­get, you can also mon­i­tor the turnover and num­ber of tick­ets sold after an email or pub­li­ca­tion cam­paign on social net­works.

With all our tips and a last push of organ­i­sa­tion, your future webi­nar is ready to be launched. To man­age your online reg­is­tra­tions, your attendee mon­i­tor­ing and your mar­ket­ing, dis­cov­er all of our solu­tions’ fea­tures by click­ing on the but­ton below:

Organ­is­ing a webi­nar