From managing technology, to budget planning, to partnering with the right speakers, to ensuring a positive attendee experience, and everything else in between – hosting a professional webinar is, at once, an art and a science that very few have truly mastered.
Our aim with this blog is to bring you a comprehensive guide on everything that goes into hosting a webinar professionally, so you too can enjoy the many benefits it can reward you with.
Let’s get started with the fundamentals.
Who is a webinar host?
A webinar host is the person who is in charge of conducting and moderating the whole webinar.
Here are some typical responsibilities of a webinar host:
- Run pre-webinar checks to ensure everything is working right, including the internet connectivity and technical aspects.
- Set the webinar agenda and coordinate with the speakers
- Create slide decks, design webinar content flow, etc
- Engage webinar participants throughout the webinar
- Ensure ongoing attendee engagement with post webinar content sharing
The host leads the audience throughout the webinar, and ensures they receive the most value out of it and have a wonderful experience, overall.
How to host a successful webinar?
Proper planning and execution are key to any successful webinar.
The following list shows the areas you need to emphasize:
- Planning the webinar
- Structuring the webinar presentation
- Hosting the event
- Engaging the audience
- Concluding the webinar
We’ll dive into these sections and provide a view of what you need to do in these respective phases.
1. Planning the webinar
Here are the aspects you need to consider while planning a webinar to ensure success.
Choosing the Webinar Topic
The ideal webinar topic must not only align with your audience’s needs and interests, but also with your brand and your area of expertise.
To get a better understanding of the kind of topics that interest your audience, consider sending our surveys to them, or leverage tools like ‘Answer the Public’ or ‘Also Asked’.
Also Read – Webinar topics that will boost your audience’s interest
Familiarizing yourself with the webinar software
Hosting a professional webinar needs a dedicated platform. It is crucial that you are thoroughly familiar with the platform and all its functionalities well in advance, to avoid any technical challenges during the live event.
Take your time to understand the webinar platform inside out by setting up a few rehearsals and practice sessions with your team, guest speakers, co-hosts and moderators, etc. This allows you to easily customize the webinar engagement activities based on the platform’s capabilities.
Choosing the best webinar format
Choose the webinar format wisely, from the following options given below based on your webinar content and goals you wish to achieve:
- Single Speaker: This is where one person works on presenting the content to the audience throughout the virtual event.
- Dual Speakers: Here, generally, two people discuss a particular topic and use the interview format.
- Panel Discussions: In panel discussions, there are 3-5 experts invited to converse around a specific set of questions around a particular topic.
Assigning roles and responsibilities
Assigning roles and responsibilities amongst your team members helps prevent confusions or errors during the live event.
This can include:
- Setting the right expectations with the speakers or panelists about their role in the webinar, their content structure, flow, timing, and other details.
- Discussing details with the moderator on how to manage the backstage, handle the live chat and encourage attendees to engage with the content, filter or highlight questions in the chat, monitor the video and audio quality of the webinar, etc.
- Prepping any backup crew you may assign to help the moderator with last minute glitches, unexpected situations and emergencies.
Scheduling the webinar
Schedule the webinar for an appropriate date and time. To find out a perfect schedule that will favor both your team and the webinar attendees, collaborate with your internal team to identify the ideal slot for the webinar.
Consider the preferences of your target audience through the use of social media, conducting surveys, etc. Gather insights from these tools and schedule the webinar accordingly.
Creating the webinar registration page
To maximize webinar attendance, you need to promote your event well. Creating a well-designed dedicated landing page to streamline registrations is paramount.
Make your webinar registration page attractive by using colors, fonts and content that not only align with your brand but also have the desired effect on your prospects.
Planning the webinar promotional strategy
Here’s how you can create an effective webinar promotional plan:
- Make sure to leverage your social media channels effectively and create promotional posts that align with the specific channel. Your strategy for instagram will not be the same as the one that will work on LinkedIn, for instance. So prep accordingly.
- Bring your panelists, speakers and external partners to promote the webinar among their audiences. This will expand the reach of your promotional activities, and could maximize registrations.
- Make sure the landing page or registration page is intuitively crafted, so prospects can easily fill out the form and register to the event effortlessly.
- Leverage your website effectively to spread the word about your event – Pop-ups, blog posts, quick teaser videos, are some ways to consider.
- Create an impactful email campaign to send out to your prospects and customers, depending on the topic of your webinar.
- If you have the budget, invest in paid advertisements for maximum reach and conversions.
2. Structuring the Webinar Presentations
By structuring the webinar presentation well, you’ll eventually be able to ensure that the webinar content is organized, which will help engage your audience throughout the sessions.
- Create a Webinar Outline: Developing an outline will help you organize your thoughts, avoid over-stuffing content, determine the length of your webinar, find out the areas where you can engage your audience, etc.
- Develop your webinar agenda: The agenda serves as a roadmap of the webinar will help you stay on track with time and will be useful when you assign your webinar moderators with estimated durations for each segment.
- Put together the presentation slides: When creating presentation slides for your webinar, it is important to avoid long blocks of text on a single slide. Incorporate appealing visuals, which play a huge role in helping attendees better grasp the webinar content. Inserting pictures, GIFs, videos, diagrams, and graphs make your webinar more dynamic and impactful.
- Plan on Audience Engagement: A speaker can have extensive knowledge in a specific subject and can also be a great speaker for in-person events, but delivering content in a webinar is a bit different. Hence, encourage them to learn the interactive elements of the webinar software, such as polls, chats, using breakout rooms, etc., to maximize attendee engagement and participation.
3. Hosting the Live Event
Now that you’ve planned and prepared everything for the live webinar, it is time to kickstart the event. Establish a welcoming atmosphere among your webinar participants, and kick things off with confidence.
Welcome your Audience
Commence your webinar by turning on your mic and camera, unmute yourself and warmly welcome the attendees who have joined the virtual room. If you plan to wait a few minutes for more participants to join the live sessions, state how much time you want to wait, and engage the ones who are present.
Set the hygiene protocol of the event
After acknowledging and greeting all the attendees, take a moment to explain the basic rules of the webinar.
This can be:
- Establishing expectations around camera and mic usage for attendees.
- Explaining how they will interact with the host or the speaker in case they have questions; will there be a dedicated Q&A session or not.
- Specify what the duration of the webinar will be, and share the agenda explicitly.
- Remind attendees to maintain a kind and respectful environment throughout the event.
Introduce the speakers
Depending on the format of your webinar, there can either be just one or multiple speakers. If it is the latter, take a moment to introduce them individually, and establish their expertise thoroughly. Explain your role as the host, and then gradually transition the spotlight to the guest speakers and invite them to share their insights with the webinar attendees.
4. Engaging the Audience
To engage your audience during live webinars, you need to implement certain techniques, which are mentioned below.
Open with an icebreaker
You can tailor the icebreaker either to the webinar topic or it can also merge with the purpose of the webinar, to make attendees feel more engaged and connected. Encourage them to share their specific expectations from the webinar content, and eventually set a positive tone for the webinar.
Employ live poll
Conducting live polls is one of the best ways to engage your webinar audience throughout the event. Make use of live polls wherever you find them applicable to gather the opinions of your audience.
Leverage Q&A Sessions
Incorporating Q&A sessions is a must in webinars to address the queries of the audience and clarify any doubts or confusions they may have. Research states that 92% of attendees want a Q&A segment during the latter half of the webinar to clear their doubts.
Here’s how you can address them:
- Allow the webinar attendees to unmute themselves and pose questions towards the end of the webinar.
- Several webinar platforms provide a Q&A tab where attendees can submit their questions.
- Allocate a dedicated slot for the Q&A sessions only for the webinar audience.
- Employ using Airmeet which offers a hand raise feature to all the participants, using which they can join the stage with the speakers and can interact regarding their queries.
5. Concluding the Webinar
When concluding the event, it is necessary to create a long-lasting impression in the audience’s minds so that they think about your message even after the event concludes.
Here’s what you can do:
Share the key learnings
As the webinar has nearly come to an end, take a moment to thank all the participants for attending the event and leave them with a closing slide that summarizes the key learnings of the webinar.
Also, depending on the format of your webinar, encourage the attendees to share their key takeaways as well; this will help you to wrap up the session in a positive way, and will also allow your participants to reflect on the valuable insights and foster a sense of engagement.
Include a CTA button
Inserting dynamic CTAs is a great way to encourage further engagement from the audience, and this can be done towards the end of the webinar. Include a clickable link that can redirect them to:
- A web page where prospects can buy products or download an ebook
- A link for scheduling a demo call with your sales team
- A feedback form for participants to provide share their experience
- A registration form for your next webinar
- The social media handles of the company and your webinar speakers
Send a recording of the webinar
It is important to record your event and share the recording with the attendees to help them revisit portions of the webinar they found value in. It is also favorable for those who couldn’t attend the sessions. By using Airmeet, you can record your webinar sessions and access those from the ‘‘session recordings’ tab later on.
Dig into the webinar analytics
Post-webinar, it is necessary to review the webinar analytics, and understand what worked and what didn’t. Take time to analyze the engagement metrics, which include the attendance rate, audience interaction, average viewing duration, etc. Analyzing data post the event will help you make necessary changes and improvements in your subsequent webinars.
Bottom Line
Hosting a webinar indeed needs a lot of preparation and planning, to ensure seamless execution.
As the webinar host, you are required to ensure seamless flow of the entire event – from technical and non-technical aspects, to attendee management and crisis management in case of last-minute glitches.
Following the steps mentioned in the blog will help you stay on top of it all and make sure that your event is successful.
FAQs
The important things to include in a webinar invitation are the topic, data and time of the event, schedule, agenda, speaker bio, and the registration link.
To ensure that your security and privacy remain intact, you need to invest in a reputed webinar platform with strong security measures and also ensure that it is compliant with data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, among other things.
