How to Host your First Webinar (Step-By-Step Guide)

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Kristen from HubSpot and today I'm going to talk to you about how to get started with webinars if you enjoy this video don't forget to like it and subscribe to our channel post any questions or suggestions you have in the comments below let's get started you don't need to be a rocket scientist to host a webinar all you need is a webinar checklist and we're here to provide it today we'll go through everything you need to run a webinar from the early planning stages to the big day itself first leverage your sales team for content topic ideas when it comes to building a successful webinar strategy it comes down to sales and marketing alignment if the marketing team is creating content that isn't helping their sales conversations it won't be a successful effort - driving high quality leads to sales luckily you have experts at your disposal for coming up with content ideas that will actually complement and aid the sales conversation the reps themselves instead of guessing what your sales team might want a webinar to be focused on ask them get reps Buy in for a webinar before you plan it set up a meeting to discover new content ideas and to find out what pain points they need to help solve this will go a long way for ensuring sales follow-up with registrants is seamless once the webinar is over next nail your promotion strategy once you've come up with relevant content topics for your webinar it's your job as marketers to get that webinar in front of as many eyes as possible with webinars it's not just about generating initial excitement you have to build excitement and encourage engagement once the webinar goes live here are a few tips for doing both try your hand at Ko marketing one of the best ways to get new expertise generate interest for a piece of content and expand the reach of a campaign is to run a co marketing webinar instead of running a webinar with speakers internally try working with another company that's going after a similar buyer persona and bring their expertise into the conversation doing so creates more interesting content and gives you the opportunity to get your webinar in front of another company's established audience create automated email reminders under each sales rep Siam's that will be sent to prospects who have been invited but not yet registered create manual email templates reps can send in their one-on-one communication with prospects set up an automated email to notify reps when their prospects has registered for your webinar this will help them engage and close those prospects down the road once you've gotten registrants that doesn't mean they'll show up after all if you promote your webinar one to two weeks in advance a portion of your registrants are likely to forget when the live date comes around remember to send out reminder emails the day before and day of the live event to ensure a high live attendance rate remember don't just stick to a PowerPoint and talking-head format the format of slides with a person speaking on screen has been done time after time don't feel the need to stick to the script literally instead think about ways to mix up how the information in your webinar is presented at HubSpot we've found unscripted discussion style webinars to be quite effective at engaging our audience and many of our live events we've forgotten the slides completely and instead brought two speakers together and how to host ask live questions on air it's effective for both encouraging Twitter participation via a hashtag and keeping the content conversational but informative try building a webinar around your prospects questions send a call for questions to be answered live on air this will help build engagement and excitement for what's to come hopefully the people asking questions will be more likely to show up day up to you can also use a landing page that includes a voting feature for people to vote their top questions this will also help you prioritize the material your audience is most interested in next deliver necessary information to sales a huge part of the pre and post webinar process is making sure the right information gets delivered to sales that's why GoToWebinar and HubSpot recommend creating one webinar hub that's easily accessible by sales with the following information on demand recordings of all webinars a calendar with past and future webinars documentation that details the webinars goals title target persona funnel stage key points speakers and logistics promotional and follow-up emails collection of graphic and text CTAs sales reps can drop into their communications a mechanism to collect suggestions from sales reps for new topics and general feedback once the webinar is done it's time to make sure the sales reps are ready to close their leads send a follow-up email to your reps and include the following information leads who registered leads who attended leads who registered but didn't end leaves who never registered new SQL leads from post-webinar lead scorers and any other relevant webinar data putting any extra effort will go a long way toward making sure the webinar is successful from both a sales and marketing standpoint remember it's all about alignment webinars as a marketing tool aren't dead they're also an effective sales tool but only if your sales team has the information content and resources to use them to move prospects down the funnel and close deals thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video be sure to like it and subscribe let me know how you're doing in the comments below