Happy October, everyone!
Even as we approach the final quarter and months of the year, with restricted travel still in place, many of us are still having customer meetings and attending conferences virtually. A couple of months ago, @Nadia Vieira and I shared tips on creating compelling slides. Today, I will be sharing best practices on yet another parallel topic: How to Turn Webinars into a Valuable Virtual Event Experience.
Whether live or on-demand, webinars have long been here even before the current times of Work From Home / Remote Work. And while you may be presenting your demo and sharing a presentation in a webinar, webinars encompass many other areas important in the customer journey as well. For example, our own Education and Customer Experience teams have on-demand training webinars (i.e. CRM Integration for Admins & Program Managers and live office hours for Sales Professionals. As you can see, webinars go beyond more than just a customer meeting or a product demo. Let’s dive into how you can provide your customers with the best virtual event experience!
- Build a content strategy for your webinar. Just like any piece of external content you deliver, make sure you are sharing the right ideas to the right audience with the right speakers.
- Pre-event: Drive awareness and sign-ups by sharing sneak peeks or a small fraction of the actual webinar’s snippets. Another way to create more buzz is through specific hashtags relevant to the webinar or your organization.
- During the event: Don’t be afraid to lead the conversation in the beginning to drive engagement. Consider having short breaks in between sessions and ask for open-ended questions to keep the audience’s attention and engagement high. If available in your hosting platform, try launching polls and ask for emoji reactions to gauge how your audience is enjoying the webinar.
- Post-event: Share thought leadership, content summary, or results/feedback to continue the conversation and set a good foundation for future webinars as well.
- Webinar logistics: Webinars should be 30-45 minutes long and are best held at 10am or 11am in the middle of the week.
- Test your technology and have a backup option in case of technical issues.
- Have at least another co-host for your webinar. Having another host with you will make it easier to moderate and facilitate audience engagement and help everything run smoothly as well.
If you’d like to see more webinars best practices as well as some examples, check out this playbook from our Marketing Solutions team. Finally, I’d love to hear any insights or tips you may have on providing the best virtual event experience for your customers right now. What are some things you’ve learned from hosting webinars in the past few months? Have you noticed any difference between hosting/attending webinars now and pre-pandemic? As always, I look forward to the discussion!
Thank you and happy hosting!
Eva C.
