For companies looking to include webinars in the overall business strategy, it’s crucial to develop a reliable webinar management process to produce quality content.
Hosting a webinar is an effective way to boost an organization’s marketing because it allows you to share your value with a global audience and build more connections. Webinars tend to be more accessible, convenient, and cost-effective compared to in-person seminars, and that’s what makes them so popular today.
If webinar management is a concept that is new to you, this Findstack guide is a perfect starting point that will provide you with the best practices and webinar tools to ensure your webinar is a success.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
What is Webinar Management?
Webinar management refers to the process of organizing, planning, and executing a successful webinar from start to finish. It involves various stages, such as:
1. Pre-event Planning
This includes setting goals, choosing a topic, selecting a suitable platform, and identifying the target audience. It also involves preparing content, creating an agenda, and coordinating with speakers and presenters.
2. Promotion
In this stage, webinar managers create and execute marketing strategies to drive registrations and attendance. This may involve email campaigns, social media promotion, paid advertisements, and leveraging partner networks.
3. Technical Setup
Webinar management includes ensuring all technical aspects are in place, such as audio, video, and screen-sharing capabilities. It also involves setting up interactive features, like polls and Q&A, and testing the webinar platform to prevent technical issues during the event.
4. Live-event Facilitation
On the day of the webinar, managers coordinate with speakers, manage audience engagement, and troubleshoot any technical issues that may arise. They also monitor and moderate the chat, Q&A, and other interactive features.
5. Post-event Follow-up
After the webinar, management involves analyzing attendance and engagement metrics, gathering feedback, and nurturing leads through follow-up emails and content sharing. This stage also includes making the webinar recording available for on-demand viewing and measuring the overall success of the event.
Why is Webinar Management Important?
Opportunity to Maximize Time
When you prioritize effective webinar management, it will be much easier to make sure your webinar is carried out according to schedule in the time frame you intended. This way, you’ll get your attendees’ optimum attention and engagement because you’re not wasting their time with delays due to poor time management.
Helps Avoid Technical Issues
Ensuring efficiency is a large part of excellent webinar management. There are many technical aspects you need to consider when hosting a webinar, such as accessibility for attendees, smooth user experience, successful content sharing, incorporating online attendee engagement, and much more. You need careful and consistent planning to guarantee you provide the best delivery and avoid unnecessary interruptions.
Ensures A Successful Webinar
It takes a lot of work to plan and prepare for a successful webinar. But, by making the effort and incorporating the strategies we’re about to share with you, you’re more likely to host a memorable webinar that will help you achieve your business goals.
Webinar Management Best Practices
Have a checklist ready
You need to develop a webinar management checklist as a useful organizational tool for the webinar planning team. It will help everyone stay on the same page and never lose track of all the aspects you need to take care of before, during, and after the event.
Here is a broad sample checklist to give you an idea of how you can organize your webinar:
Pre-Webinar Tasks
- Define the topic of the webinar
- Confirm the appropriate date and times (being mindful of the most prominent timezones to incorporate based on target attendees)
- Create the agenda and presentation materials
- Select the appropriate webinar platform and test it out
- Prepare marketing materials for the webinar
- Send webinar invites and set up reminder intervals for those who register
- Have a backup plan to prepare for technical difficulties
During Webinar
- Introduce moderators and guest speakers
- Quality check audio and video
- Monitor attendee engagement (e.g. live chats, polls, attendee questions)
- Emphasize staying on schedule by keeping track of timing
- Record the webinar
Post-Webinar
- Collect feedback to evaluate webinar success
- Follow-up with attendees via email (can include a link to the webinar recording)
- Share feedback with the team
- Analyze all data collected from polls and surveys to help improve future webinars
- Keep a record of attendee contact information for future webinars
- Archive all content materials from the webinar
You’ll also need to consider the most effective way to share this checklist with your team members. Perhaps you may want to keep it simple by using a shared Google Sheet or opt for using a project management tool such as:
The latter option may be better because you can create alerts, easily share materials and assign individual tasks more efficiently.
Know your attendees
Once you’ve closed your registration for your webinar, you’ll need enough time to evaluate your attendees so that you can provide them with a tailored and valuable experience. Also, by understanding what type of attendees are going to be present, you can segment them into the appropriate groups (especially if you’re separating groups based on beginner, intermediate, and experienced segments). This will give your attendees a great impression of your organization because each group is being acknowledged and accurately provided for.
Some key questions you can ask to get to know your attendees are:
- Which industries are they a part of?
- What current issues are they facing?
- What are their goals for attending?
It’s in your best interest to use an online form builder to include a survey in your registration process. This way, attendees can answer these questions for themselves, saving you some time.
Specify clear objectives for your webinar
Your team needs to develop clear business objectives for your webinar alongside methods on how you can measure your success. What are you hoping to achieve by hosting a webinar? Your answers to this could include:
- Share new industry insights based on research your organization conducted and assert your organization as an industry leader
- Gain brand awareness
- Create buzz for a new product
- Educate your audience on a cause your organization is passionate about
- Network with major industry leaders
- Appeal to a new customer base
Agree on a topic and corresponding speakers
Your webinar can’t address too many topics because it becomes less memorable and has a lower chance of providing a long-term impact. A clear objective and topic make it easier for attendees to decide whether your event is relevant to their current needs, so you need to reflect the main objective in your marketing.
For instance, let’s say that your industry is education, and you want to host a webinar to improve teaching methods for students. This may be too broad to gain enough attendees. So, you should research the needs of those in your industry and pinpoint a specific topic that will provide the maximum value for your attendees.
Below is a great example of a webinar with a clear topic. Learning to Learn is a webinar conveniently based on the educational sector. Rather than focusing on a broad topic, they focus on teaching neurodiverse students. This is a great topic to hone in on, as there has been a greater effort in recent years to improve teaching methods concerning neurodivergent students, which will make the topic much more relevant and valuable to attendees.
The potential value they can gain from attending the webinar is made clear to them because it addresses the problem and offers a valid solution to help solve it. Once you have your topic, you can now start researching the best speakers to help you provide the most valuable insights to your audience.
Fortunately, you can find relevant speakers on the following platforms if you aren’t sure where to start:
- Keynote Speaker
- SpeakerHub
Write a creative brief
Drawing up a creative brief for your webinar will help structure the production of your webinar and keep the whole team on track. It’s supposed to function as a business plan, so it should include:
- Target audience(s)
- Webinar topic
- Key themes
- Webinar visuals
- Your business objectives
- Guest speakers and their credentials
- Checklist deadlines
- Webinar schedule
In your creative brief, you can also determine the format of your webinar. Here are the most popular formats:
Set the schedule
It’s very important to stay mindful about the scheduling of your event. This helps you avoid conflicts with other major events, such as holidays or local celebrations.
When creating your schedule, you also need to make sure your timing is accommodating enough to avoid rushing. Your attendees are not going to enjoy a webinar that feels rushed because it feels as though they are being cheated of the value they signed up for, and you compromise on your ability to encourage them to engage in the conversations actively. Plan wisely to make sure you have sufficient time to get through everything, including Q&As and discussions.
Create a promotional plan
To build your promotional plan, you first need to determine the target number of registrations you want to achieve, as this will help you determine the marketing tactics to use to hit this goal. It’s good to also specify the target number of registrations you want to gain from each promotional channel you choose.
These are the different promotional channels you can utilize:
- Create a webinar landing page
- Promote your webinar on relevant social media channels (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)
- Consider writing a blog post regarding your seminar
- Promote your webinar with email marketing
Email marketing tends to generate a large number of registrations for professional events, so make sure you prioritize this channel. In your promotional plan, you’ll need to incorporate the timing of your email promotion so you make use of optimum send times (which will result in higher opens and sign-ups. According to ON24, the best days to send webinar promotion emails for the business market are Wednesday and Thursday because people have higher availability. You are free to test it out yourself.
Select the best webinar platform
Ensuring you do the appropriate research to select the platform where your webinar will be held is extremely important for your user experience.
Here are some things to consider when choosing a webinar platform:
- What is your budget?
- Is the platform mobile-friendly to ensure attendees logging in on a mobile device will have a smooth experience?
- Are all the features you require available? (E.g., webinar recording)
- How many attendees can it accommodate?
- How easy is it to use?
- Will your attendees be able to engage effectively?
Feel free to take advantage of Findstack to kickstart your webinar platform search. Through our platform, you can compare different webinar software to help you find your perfect match.
Perform a dry run
To help you determine if your event is going to run smoothly, you need to do a dry run at least 3 to 5 days before you’re set to go live. This will help you determine if you need to make tweaks to your scheduling and fix any technical issues ahead of the event.
In your practice session, make sure to cover the following:
- Brief presenters and guest speakers on the chosen webinar platform’s features. This will help them understand which features they can use. Make sure to also advise who they should turn to if they encounter any difficulties.
- Check all your presenters have the appropriate equipment that is compatible with your webinar platform. This includes devices, internet browsers, headsets, and more. If you have a good webinar platform, it will allow everyone to test their device compatibility before the event.
- Go over your webinar visuals and agenda to ensure everything is in the right order.
Choose the Right Tool for Effective Webinar Management
Webinars are clearly becoming more and more valuable for business leaders to utilize in order to achieve their goals. By using the webinar management strategies we’ve outlined you’ll be sure to provide the best value for your audience.
Findstack is your best starting resource to discover the best webinar software for your needs. Look through our comparisons and buyer’s guides so that you can make the best decision!
