5 Tips for Wonderful Webinars

Webinars are a great marketing tool, allowing you to connect with your audience without requiring travel or significant financial investment. Webinars provide you with a stage to demonstrate your expertise in specific areas, interact with your audience in real time and drive great conversations. In order to ensure you host a successful and engaging webinar, here are some tips you should always follow:

Choose the Right Speakers for your Audience

We recently released a blog post about how to manage events with Marketo and the benefits of incorporating events into your marketing mix. To make your webinars appealing to your audience and enhance their experience, we recommend having two speakers lead a webinar. Multiple speakers allows for additional conversation and different opinions and insight into a topic. Think of the people you consider to be great presenters and session speakers at a conference. When selecting webinar speakers, consider your audience and find a speaker that is a fit for them. Select subject matter experts that are engaging and entertaining to hold your audience’s attention and enable them to learn during the webinar session.

Choose the Right Webinar Platform

There are a number of Webinar Platforms on the market. Some of them offer different features and support different audience sizes, so you will have to select a tool that best meets your needs. You will also want to consider the platform’s ability to integrate with your marketing automation tool. Once connected to your marketing automation tool, there are many webinar platforms available that will automatically sync registration and attendance information to the program, reducing the need for manual work, such as list uploads. We are currently using GoToWebinar at Perkuto to set our Office hours webinars every week.

Use Tokens Tokens allow you to dynamically insert information into emails and landing pages in Marketo. Tokens can be leveraged to help you save time when creating a webinar program, as you can use lead and program specific tokens to automatically update content – significantly reducing the amount of time it takes you to build the program and its assets. As always, automation is key!

What’s cool about tokens is that anytime you need to program a recurring webinar or display it on-demand, you will be able to use your Webinar templates and change your tokens for speakers, dates, links, pictures, etc.

Plan for live and on-demand versions

Webinars and especially On-demand Webinars is a great way to have gated content. Among the follow-ups, you better keep an option for people who couldn’t attend live and send them the link to the recorded webinar. Thus, you could also make this content gated and available to other leads that weren’t even registered to the original event. You will have to create a separate program that makes the recorded webinar available, through form fill, to leads who never actually registered to the original event.

Checklist for a Successful Webinar

A lot of work goes into coordinating a webinar. There are a lot of moving pieces and you want to ensure that the entire event runs smoothly for your audience. For a complete checklist of items to review and address when preparing and hosting a webinar, download our ultimate webinar program checklist. This eBook contains checklists for all aspects of a webinar, including: