Webinar trainings always have a purpose.
Maybe you want to offer free content to drive leads. Or maybe you need to upskill your staff in a certain area.
But even with the best intentions, your training will fall flat if you don’t create killer content and plenty of room for engagement.
The last thing you want is to deliver a webinar where the audience isn’t paying attention.
In this guide, we dive into essential best practices and plenty of expert tips to help you make sure your sessions meet their mark.
What’s in this guide:
- What is webinar training?
- What are the benefits of training with webinars?
- How does webinar training work?
- What are the top use cases for training webinars?
- What are the different formats of webinar trainings?
- How to create webinar trainings
- Tips to take your training webinars from good to awesome
- Best practices for better training presentations
What is webinar training?
A webinar training is a form of virtual training or educational session held online. It combines the elements of a live webinar presentation, lecture, workshop, or interactive session with the convenience of online access.
In a webinar training, the presenter or instructor delivers the content remotely to participants who join from their own computers or mobile devices. Communication is typically facilitated through audio, video, and chat features. Webinar trainings are used for employee training, professional development, educational courses, product demonstrations, and marketing events.
What are the benefits of training with webinars?
Webinars offer a ton of benefits compared to traditional, in-person events.
- Accessible – Unlike live, in-person events, a webinar presentation can be joined online from anywhere in the world.
- Affordable – There are many free and affordable webinar platforms. The subscription you’ll pay for this type of software is probably a fraction of what you would spend to host a live, in-person training session.
- Scalable – With an in-person training session, you’re saddled with the room and seat capacity of your chosen venue, but live webinar trainings can be scaled to support thousands of people.
- Can be replayed – Webinar trainings are easy to share. You can send the recording to people who missed the live event, or continue to promote or even sell the replay of your training.
- First-party data – Webinar trainings give you a wealth of first-party and event intent data that you can use for marketing and sales purposes. In addition to lead information, you can collect insights on the webinar promotions and content that attendees respond most to and for this in your follow-up campaigns and future webinars.
How does webinar training work?
To conduct a succesful webinar training, you’ll need a webinar platform. You set the date and time of your webinar, create a registration page with your webinar software, and share this with your audience. Your audience then registers for the training session and can add it to their digital calendars. You can pre-set email reminders to ensure a good show-up rate.
Make your webinar more engaging with high-quality slides, speakers, and games (keep reading for content ideas). Go live at the designated time, host the webinar, and use the replay as desired.
What are the top use cases for training webinars?
With a successful webinar training, you can help upskill your customers, employees, or community.
There are several different use cases. These are the most common:
Trainings and masterclasses for lead generation
Webinars are great for lead generation. They act as high-value lead magnets you can use to collect email addresses and/or phone numbers.
For example, interior design business coach Salimah Mamdani drives paid and organic traffic to her masterclass on marketing. This drives leads for her coaching program.
Webinar trainings for brand awareness
You can also host live webinars to generate interest in your brand.
Nail polish brand Olive & June runs a Mani Bootcamp a few times a year to teach people how to get salon-perfect nails from the comfort of their own home (and for far less cost).
Customer onboarding and product training
Webinar trainings are commonly used to help customers onboard to a new software or learn how to use a new product.
For example, SEO platform Ahrefs has an on-demand training webinar to walk new users through their most popular tools.
Employee training and onboarding
Digital-first and traditional businesses alike use webinar trainings for professional development. Whether live or pre-recorded, webinars can boost knowledge transfer and make employee training programs more affordable and scalable.
Online coaching and workshops
Webinars are also great for group coaching sessions and community workshops.
For example, Kaiser Permanente uses Airmeet to create engaging, participatory events for their members, teaching them all sorts of life skills and wellness practices.
What are the different formats of webinar trainings?
While the content can cover anything under the sun, webinars typically fall into one of these three main formats:
- Live trainings and workshops – In this webinar format, the presenter shows up and delivers the content to a live audience. This format is ideal because it allows interaction between the speaker and the audience.
- Recorded or on-demand trainings – Once recorded, webinars can be shared widely. Typically, webinars are conducted live and replays are made available on demand. But with a recorded webinar format, you can also pre-record a webinar without a live audience and share the recording if you prefer.
- Evergreen webinars (faux live) – Evergreen webinars are those that appear live, even when they’re not. Some webinar platforms allow you to even fake a stream of viewer comments. We don’t recommend this format. Your audience is savvy and they’ll know when something isn’t really live. You’re better off hosting live trainings or offering a recording.
How to create webinar trainings
Follow these steps to create successful webinars that create lasting relationships with your webinar attendees and boost ROI.
Step 1. Research and identify a topic for your training
The first step is to come up with a great topic. If this is a marketing-related event, use customer and competitor research to uncover your audience’s pain points. If this is for employee training, talk with regional or department managers about the lessons they want to scale. Build content to solve for your webinar attendees, and don’t push your product too hard unless it’s a BOFU level webinar topic.
Step 2. Onboard industry leaders and knowledgeable trainers
A great webinar needs great speakers.
To create a successful webinar, enlist the help of a knowledgeable trainer. This might be an executive leader, business coach, or other expert.
We do this regularly at Airmeet. For example, we invited Emilia Korczynska, Head of Marketing at Userpilot to teach our audience how to get a measurable return on events.
Step 3. Choose a date and time
You’ll need to set a date and time for your webinar training. If this will be a live webinar, you’ll want to choose a time that works for the maximum number of people. For instance, if your audience is in North America, you might choose 11am PST / 2pm EST to allow people to watch the webinar during their lunch break. But if you’re targeting Europe as well, then you might want to choose 9 am PST, which would be 6pm in Western Europe and not too far outside of working hours.
Step 4. Pick a webinar platform for the training
You need webinar software to help you promote and host your webinar.
Look for a webinar tool that offers all of these key features in one place:
- Support for live and pre-recorded webinars
- Webinar solution with high-quality video and audio
- Registration landing page templates
- Ability to cater to different webinar formats
- Automated email reminders
- Webinar replay pages
- Ability to hold a branded webinar registration page
- Webinar handout and resource sharing
- Engagement features like live chat, polls, and Q&A
- Virtual networking and social spaces for an online event
Step 5. Build content around your audience’s pain points
Now it’s time to produce a brilliant webinar. To captivate your audience, build the content around their pain points. Use a storytelling format, beginning with a problem and ending with a clear solution.
Create interesting slides with statistics, infographics, and examples. Go above and beyond and create a handout or resource like a one-page PDF summary of the content, a spreadsheet calculator, or a bundle of useful templates.
Step 6. Create a plan for audience engagement
Passive webinar trainings are boring. When there’s no participation, people zone out and stop paying attention.
To run a great live webinar, you should bake in audience engagement. Will you ask someone from the audience to share their experience? Will you encourage people to drop their questions in the chat for live Q&A? Make sure to facilitate some form of engagement. (See even more ideas in our tips section below.)
Step 7. Brand your webinar (from registration pages to emails and event)
Make sure that every element of your webinar is on brand. This includes the registration page, the event slides, the images you share on social media, and the emails you send.
Here’s an example from one of our events, Personalized. The registration page includes our logo, brand colors, and font, while the content aligns with our core value propositions and brand voice.
Step 8. Promote your webinar and get signups
Now that you have branded assets, you’re ready to promote your webinar.
Here are some popular methods for driving webinar registrations:
- Social media advertising
- Email marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Website banners
- Blog side-bar announcements
- In-app notifications
Step 9. Invite people directly
You can also send direct invitations to people who you think would benefit from your training session. This might be a list of relevant employees, specific clients, influencers, brand ambassadors, or other people in your network.
Step 10. Set email reminders for the training
Make sure to set up automated email reminders. You can trigger these emails inside of your webinar platform. You might want to send one reminder 24 hours before the live event, and another reminder 1 hour prior.
Step 11. Go live and have a blast
Now it’s time to record your content. To get yourself in the right mindset, take a deep breath and set an intention. You might say something like this aloud or in your mind: “My intention is to share my experience on {topic} with {audience description} so they can {result}.”
By focusing on the purpose of your event, you’ll be better prepared to handle any feelings of nervousness or any snafus that might come up.
Step 12. Follow up
The work isn’t over when your webinar training ends. Sales reps can use event intent data to follow up with webinar leads most likely to convert. Marketers can set up automated, segmented sequences to sell products and services after the event.
Tips to take your training webinars from good to awesome
Let’s go beyond the basics. Try these tips to create truly stand-out webinars.
Welcome attendees with an immersive welcome video or virtual lobby
Create an inviting experience when attendees first join your webinar. You could play a video that relates to your topic or sets the mood for the training. Or, try making a virtual lobby with photo booths, social walls, and networking. You can do all of this with Airmeet Studio.
Hold interactive two-way sessions
Don’t just talk at your audience, talk with them. Invite attendees to the virtual stage to ask a question, share a response, or take part in role-playing or some other game or interaction.
Foster collaboration and peer learning
Find ways to get people interacting with each other during the training. Use breakout rooms for group exercises, reflection, and sharing.
Empower attendees to network
You don’t have to sacrifice networking opportunities when you turn live events into virtual sessions. Set up virtual networking experiences so that your audience, coworkers, or community members can forge 1:1 relationships.
Make room for smaller cohort interactions with trainers and sales reps
Especially for employee training and educational purposes, it can be helpful to have multiple trainers available. Consider using breakout rooms to provide more interaction directly with trainers. For marketing events, you could also have multiple sales reps available to answer questions about your offer.
Use gamification, leaderboards, polls, and quizzes to engage your audience
Take audience engagement to the next level by baking in interactivity throughout your content. For instance, you might add a poll or quiz every 10 minutes to keep things interesting. You can also set up a game of trivia with a public leaderboard to show the winners. Prizes always help boost participation.
Analyze the data to supercharge your sales and customer success effort
Make sure to review your webinar analytics after each training session. With AirIntel, analyze the success of your content and get account-level insights into participation and interest, helping you identify what each audience member cares most about.
Best practices for better training presentations
To create high-quality training sessions, follow these essential best practices:
- Include media and GIFS – Make your content interesting. Add photos, videos, and GIFs to your slides.
- Start with icebreakers – Kick off your webinar with some interactive virtual icebreakers to jumpstart engagement.
- Do a dry run and test the equipment – Always test your webinar platform and video/audio recording equipment.
- Use high-quality audio and video equipment – Upgrade your camera, microphone, and lighting setup for
- Choose a distraction-free background – Keep your background free of clutter. Consider branding your background with your company colors, logo, and swag.
- Be mindful of the time – Always keep your webinar training on track with your agenda and allotted time.
4 Reasons to host your next webinar training on Airmeet
Here’s why you should ditch your boring webinar software for Airmeet.
1. Create highly interactive sessions that convert and educate better
Our AX360 platform was designed for maximum engagement. You’ll see your attendance, participation, and conversion rates rise when you use features like polls, chat, and two-way conversations.
2. Keep attendees hooked to your sessions, not their phones
Set up life-like networking spaces like virtual lounges, breakout rooms, and Fluid Spaces to enhance the attendee experience (and make people want to pay attention).
3. Fuel your sales and customer success efforts with deeper insights
You’ll have the webinar analytics available to help sales and marketing teams convert more attendees into customers. Capture up to 64 intent signals to score leads, personalize experiences, and accelerate deals.
4. Stay on-brand—always
Use Airmeet Studio to effortlessly brand your landing pages, emails, live stage backdrops, webinar reception areas, networking experiences, and more.
Explore everything Airmeet has to offer and start creating engaging webinars today.
