Running a webinar? Here are our tips to help you get started.

With over 70% of people now working from home, virtual events such as webinars have become the leading forum to connect and promote products, services, and solutions. Although webinars are not a new concept and were usually used by software companies to demonstrate their product online, businesses in general have now had to shift into a virtual world or risk being left behind.

Planning to run a webinar from scratch and looking where to start? Below we have listed some of the key things needed, from creating content and driving attendance to technical production and presentation.

Creating content for your webinar

Ideally, you want to deliver content that leads back to your business and how it adds value in your specific field. Try to create passion within your content, not just a sales pitch; it should establish you and your business as experts in your field. When thinking about content, it should practically show HOW you do what you do with a clear understanding of WHY you do it.

Presentation tools such as PowerPoint empowers you to create visually appealing content and enables you to organize sections whilst guiding the facilitator using the Notes section. Most live events platforms have integrated PowerPoint capability, allowing you to execute a seamless webinar experience.

Driving attendance to your webinar

Perhaps the most important part of running a webinar, attendance will greatly determine your webinar’s overall success rate and form the basis of ongoing development of your presentations so that your next virtual event can be tailored and targeted more specifically to your audience’s needs.

We recently held multiple webinars on Microsoft Teams, covering our experience in staying connected to remote workforce and how to implement and deliver Microsoft services to ensure an ongoing business as usual result, attendance for these events was increased by 300% when we added direct telemarketing follow up to our strategy, along with email campaigns and social media promotions. Taking advantage of all channels available to get the word out about your webinar is a crucial part in making sure your virtual learning event stands out among the hundreds of webinars taking place during this time of remote working.

TIP: Coming up with an attendance summary of each round of webinars is helpful to get a clearer picture of who your audience are and how your webinar helped them out. This summary may include names of attendees, their contact number/email, their business/organization, from which channel (telemarketing, email, social media, etc.) they come from, etc.

Webinar Technology

Choosing the right platform to facilitate your webinars can be tricky. There are a lot of software vendors to choose from that offer a wide range of features. Below we’ve listed the top things to look for from a webinar platform.

1. Capability for Q&A

   Q&A segments have proven to be one of the most important parts of any learning event; and webinars are no different. This is where attendees can ask questions and have thoughts clarified with the ability for the host/facilitator to answer them. This embedded capability for questions and answers is a Must-Have when looking for a webinar platform.

2. Integration with presentation tools

   As mentioned earlier, visually appealing presentations stand out and are remembered, it’s vital to engage your audience and keep their attention from drifting. Being able to easily integrate presentation tools like PowerPoint saves a huge amount of time and effort during the webinar. This capability also lessens the risk of losing your way once the live event has started.

3. Accommodation of many attendees

   The most common webinar platforms allow a limited number of attendees to come to webinars, and this limits organizations’ reach when sharing their knowledge. Allowing a large number of attendees (e.g. 100 people and more) increases the number of opportunities to turn your attendees to customers. For example, platforms like Microsoft Teams Live Events can host from 1 attendee to 10,000 all on the same webinar.

4. Easy, user-friendly navigation

   Difficulty in usability and navigation will take a toll on webinar facilitators, which will then reflect on the flow of the webinar. While new webinar technologies require a lot of time to get used to, the best platforms help lessen the amount of time needed to onboard a new user. Ideally, all available options within the webinar should be easily accessible in the interface so attendees and facilitators alike can full advantage of the webinar experience, thus adding value to their businesses or organizations. Most webinar application services will also allow a free trial so you can assess which works for you and some like Microsoft Teams are free within existing Office 365 accounts so there’s no burden of additional cost,

Recently we combined all these features together for the Australian-New Zealand Chamber of Commerce (Philippines) when they held a virtual event on the 14th of April 2020. Our tech know-how using Microsoft Teams Live Event helped ANZCHAM keep the Australian and New Zealand community in the Philippines engaged and informed amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Microsoft Teams has enabled not just ANZCHAM’s virtual event through Microsoft Teams Live Event, but our own business as well. Due to COVID-19 hammerjack shifted dynamically to a work-from-home arrangement for over 300 employees in the Philippines and Australia. The ease of connecting and collaborating through Microsoft Teams has our business running as usual, with minimal impact to service delivery.

Besides the challenge of internal teamwork and collaboration, the challenge of engaging communities without face-to-face interactions has become something we’ve all had to learn. Nevertheless, as well thought plan for organizing webinars and live events should be able to help provide value during this difficult time.

At hammerajck we are here to help in any way we can.

Together we stand.