Webinars are a very effective way to communicate with your audience through a visual medium, and are generally conducted by a host(s) who communicates with a large group of people. Webinars are aided with presentations, poll questions, chat rooms, session recordings, and other useful options for the attendees. These additional features allow the attendees to grasp the information more quickly and help them feel connected with the host better than generic online meetings.

What are webinars?

Nowadays, webinars have become a key part of the strategy used by marketers for lead generation. They act as a powerful marketing tool for B2B businesses and consumer brands, and help them generate more qualified leads than the traditional downloadable eBooks, reports, or use-cases.

However, webinars are not all about sales pitches. On the contrary, they are meant to communicate information about your services and products, to acquire and retain customers, increase brand awareness, and differentiate one’s place in the marketplace.

How does one get started with webinars?

The first step towards hosting a successful webinar is to decide on its subject. Success, as they say, is where preparation meets opportunity. And preparation in this case begins by choosing the most relevant subject for your webinar.

Here are a few tips on how to choose your webinar subject

• One of the easiest ways to gain insights into your customer is through the comments and feedback section of your blog posts. Visitor comments also reveal what they’re thinking about your offerings and what they’re expecting from your products.
• Another way is to take a look at your competitors’ websites. Websites can reveal how frequently your competitor is posting content and what type of content is getting the most comments or reactions.
• Considering the most common feature requests, support queries, or service complaints from your customers can also be an effective way of choosing your webinar subject.

Once you understand what your customer is looking for and decide on a webinar topic, you can commence further preparations.

Is content really the king?

While creating a webinar, one must never lose focus from the goal, and one of the common goals to conduct a webinar is to increase audience reach and to gain more clients. This is where the term content is king is most applicable. Your content should highlight the key features of your product or service that add the most value to your audience. Focus on the details, let your audience know about your products strengths, and how it can be the ultimate solution to solving their problem. However, make sure that your presentation does not become an out and out sales pitch.

Also, nowadays, the attention span or the ability of humans to concentrate on one thing has reduced substantially. Therefore, carefully plan the total time span of your webinar and make sure to divide it into multiple engaging sessions.

Creating a webinar for a large audience

Once you have finalized the topic and the approach of your webinar, the next step would be to manage the different components of hosting a webinar such as creating registration, confirmation, and waiting pages, sending bulk invitations, and marketing your webinar. Here the goal should be to make the entire process of attending a webinar as seamless as possible for your attendees.

• Beetsol provides a webinar management solution that can easily be integrated with all the popular meeting platforms such as Zoom, GotoMeeting, Webex, and Adobe connect to create an exceptional webinar experience for your audience.
• It allows you to create well-designed registration, confirmation, and waiting pages that can be customized for each webinar, allowing you to better connect with your target audience, make a good first impression, and ultimately boost registration rate.
• Beetsol’s solution also enables you to create, market, and manage multiple webinars simultaneously with utmost ease. You can effectively track and analyze the key performance metrics of each event, enabling you to gain deeper insights into your audience and make well-informed decisions.

Promoting your webinar

After creating an expert webinar with all its components, you need to market this event to your audience. Below are a few modes that can be used to promote your webinar:

• Sending bulk invitations using email: Beetsol’s webinar management solution can provide you its own email service or give you the option to integrate with your existing email service such as mailchimp, sendgrid, and others. Our solution also allows you to create custom email templates, email lists, and use custom variables for each of your events.
• Promoting your webinars on social platforms: Our integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter enables you to promote your events on these platforms with a click of a button.
• Posting your webinars on your website: Our embed code functionality helps you post all the webinars on your website easily, allowing your site visitors to register for your events.
• Using custom event URL: Beetsol’s whitelabel solution allows our customers to use their own domain to host these events, making them completely branded.
• Sending whatsapp invitations: Our solution also enables our customers to invite attendees using whatsapp.
• Sending reminder and confirmation emails: Our marketing tool helps you setup automated confirmation and reminder emails for your event registrants and attendees.
• Creating paid events: Beetsol’s ticketing feature allows you to create paid events and processes the payments directly to your bank account without charging a fee per event.
• On-demand videos: Sometimes, our customers provide free recordings of their webinars to registrants who have missed the event, or to attendees who would like to revisit it. Using our On-demand webinar solution, you can promote your webinar recordings in a centralized and professional manner on an on going basis. These recordings can either be promoted for free or be chargeable.

Listen to the data

One must always strive for excellence, and in order to do that one must constantly keep improving. To make sure that each of your online events is better and more effective than the previous one, collecting the right data and having access to it in a cohesive manner is very important.

• Beetsol provides detailed reports covering various key metrics of live events. This data is presented with help of customizable dashboard, graphs, downloadable csvs, and other formats.
• We also provide pre-event data or on-page analytics such as page visitors, their source, demographics, bounce rates, and other metrics using either google analytics or custom tracking code provided by our customers.
• Using our schedule report functionality, these reports can be shared automatically with the key stakeholders without requiring them to login into the platform.
• Our solution also integrates with SalesForce, Pardot, Hubspot, Marketo, Sugar CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics, allowing our customers to sync the event data with their CRM seamlessly. This helps reduce the time taken to address any attendee concern or feedback right from the onset.

In conclusion, one needs to consider the above aspects to host a large scale online event successfully. And we would like an opportunity to help you cross all the hurdles encountered while creating an excellent webinar experience for your attendees.

If you think Beetsol can add value to your online event management setup then get in touch with us.