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10 Strategies for a High-Impact Webinar

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This article was written by Lauren Tilden, Director of Marketing at GreenBook.

If you’re looking for a way to position your company as a thought leader and generate new leads in a way that’s relatively inexpensive and easy to execute, consider webinars! Accessible to companies of just about every size, webinars are an excellent way to educate attendees on a methodology or idea, share a case study with a positive result, or even help attendees develop a new skill.

In our own hosted webinar program, we’ve worked with research companies to produce over 50 webinars, and we’ve seen some clear strategies that lead to highly impactful webinars. Here are our 10 strategies:

  1. Take advantage of your webinar before it happens. Hosting a webinar is a great reason to get in touch with your existing client or reach out to a prospect. It’s also great fodder for your newsletter, social media feeds, or any other promotional channel you have. Even if people don’t wind up hearing your webinar, it’s a great excuse to be in touch and stay top of mind.
  2. Pick a topic that is of value. Think about your target customer (and the profile of the list that the webinar will be marketed to) and ask yourself what business challenges they have that you can solve. Design your content around that.
  3. Consider partnerships and other ways to generate more leads.Webinars produced by you and promoted to your audience are great. But you may also consider partnering with an organization to produce or promote your webinar, to get your content in front of a large amount of new people. When looking for partners, make sure that the profile of their audience has a large amount of contacts who fit the profile of a prospect.
  4. Keep “the sell” to a minimum. We believe strongly that the best sales pitch is not a pitch at all, but the simple act of delivering value. Unless you have specifically marketed your webinar as a product demo, chances are your attendees are there to learn something, not hear a sales presentation.
  5. Include a happy customer. We have seen some of our highest registrations and attendance numbers on webinars that are co-hosted by a satisfied client who helps explain a case study and discusses the positive results they have seen.
  6. Subject lines are important. If people don’t open your email, they won’t sign up for (or listen to a recording of) your webinar. Select subject lines with the same rigor that you use for your other marketing emails (which we hope includes A/B tests… but more on that in a future email!).
  7. Practice, practice, practice. Very few of us can deliver a great presentation without rehearsal. While you don’t want to sound scripted, make sure that your presenter practices the presentation several times in advance to make sure it flows and sticks to your time constraints. Make sure your presenter(s) connect with either hard-wired internet or a landline, and have a quiet place to talk (no airports, please!). We also suggest a rehearsal webinar to get your presenter familiar with your chosen software, the process for presenting, taking questions, etc.
  8. Design matters. Have a designer (or someone with some design skills) take a look at your presentation before you present. The last thing you want to do is distract people from your (great) content with a poorly designed (ugly) set of slides.
  9. Keep it simple. Your webinar software may offer a lot of bells and whistles (live polling, surveys, video, etc.), but unless you need these tools to effectively convey your material (or have a skilled webinar production team behind you), just skip them. We know from years of working on our IIeX conferences and webinar program, that the presentations that run the most smoothly are always the simplest. In general, don’t increase the chances of a technical issue unless you need to. The exception to this rule is if you are very confident in having good technical support.
  10. Record the webinar & promote it afterward. After your webinar, clean up the recording and share it widely – with attendees, with registrants who didn’t make it to the live webinar, to prospects interested in the topic. This is evergreen content that you can and should use as long as the content is relevant. A webinar is the marketing investment that keeps on giving!

Further Reading: Like this topic? Here are a couple of articles on webinars that we like:

If you’re interested in hosting a webinar with GreenBook (and promoting it to more than 70,000 market research professionals who receive our webinar invites), contact us to learn more.