One of the most effective ways of promoting your business is interacting with your customers regularly. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to have your potential clients at the same physical location, making it harder for businesses to reach out to their customers.
This is where Webinars come in handy. They allow businesses to connect and interact with their potential clients in real-time, enabling them to promote their businesses and generate high-quality leads.
What is a webinar?
A webinar (or a web seminar) is an online seminar that allows businesses and educators to interact with their audience in real-time. When used for marketing, webinars are effective products and services promotion tools that allow businesses to interact with their potential clients and convince them to become their customers.
The main feature of a webinar is its interactivity, which gives participants the ability to discuss, send and receive information in real-time. It allows large groups of participants to engage in online discussions or training events with the ability to share real-time video and audio feed, documents and slides even if they are not in the same physical space.
Organizing an effective webinar
An effective webinar has three major players: an organizer, at least one presenter, and an audience.
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Organizer: webinar organizer is the group behind a webinar. Their main roles include planning the webinar, setting up the time of the webinar, finding presenters and speakers who will take part in the webinar, and promoting the webinar to potential attendees. They are also involved in ensuring that all technical infrastructure is available for an effective webinar session.
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Presenters: An effective webinar must have at least one presenter whose role is conducting the live webinar with the audience. An effective presenter must be well versed with the topics and agendas of the webinar. Presenters are also required to prepare all their materials beforehand to ensure that the session runs smoothly.
- Audience/Attendees: The audience is the targeted groups that will attend the webinar. There can never be a webinar without an audience, therefore, they make an important part of a webinar.
Scheduling your webinars
Knowing how to successfully schedule your webinars can ensure that they are well attended and capture the targeted audience. Two considerations have to be made while scheduling a webinar; the timing and the platform on which the webinar will be hosted.
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Timing: Research shows that the best time to host a webinar is 10 am on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It is also important to communicate with some of the anticipated audience to determine which time they are more comfortable with attending a webinar. This ensures that your webinars reach the maximum audience, hence increasing their effectiveness.
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Platform to host the webinar: if your webinar is not self-hosted, it is important to choose the right platform which your potential attendees can get their hands on. For instance, starting your webinars with a paid version of a platform will always result in lower attendance and hence capping your ability to reach your audience.
Promoting your webinar
For people to attend your webinars, they must know that you are hosting one. This is why it is important to market your webinars through platforms such as social media and email lists to your potential clients.
You can also use paid advertisements to target audiences that might not have heard of your business before.
Preparing for a webinar
After organizing and scheduling a webinar, organizers, and presenters also need to prepare for the webinar.
Good preparation ensures that they have the content needed during the webinar and they are well versed with the content contained in the presentations to ensure that they can host it successfully. To achieve this, organizers need to first build a presentation that they will use in the webinar.
These presentations should contain everything that will be discussed in the webinar. They should also be formatted in an easy-to-follow format to allow the audience to comprehend the content.
Next, organizers and presenters need to rehearse the webinar before hosting it. This will make it easy for them when they host the actual webinar. It also tests their comprehension of the subject matter.
Presenting the webinar
When the D-day for the webinar finally arrives for the webinar, you need to have all the tools required to host it as the presenter or the organizer.
You should only allow a maximum of five minutes for those arriving late to settle before starting with the agenda. Start your webinar by introducing yourself, then the presenter or presenters. Next, you need to jump right into the agenda of the webinar and present the content in an easy-to-understand format.
You should allow some form of interruption from your audience to make them participate in your webinar. However, do not let your audience distract you from the goals and agenda of the webinar.
After finishing your webinar, offer your attendees a chance to ask questions. After they have exhausted asking questions, you can now close your webinar. Presenting a webinar normally should not take more than an hour. However, in special circumstances, webinars can go for hours.
