Webinars are a good and useful tool for business & projects. Webinars can help you to get your point across a little better in order to sell, train employees or provide information to clients, future clients, students, business partners, associates, guests at a meeting etc…..
These practices may not apply to every webinar but they provide some useful guidlines that could be considered.
1. Use Guest Speakers.
Do attendance rates improve when including guest speakers?
When it comes to improving attendance rates, having guest speakers at a Webinar is one of the leading best practices. You don’t have to have guest speakers but sometimes it could help. Some Webinar sponsors would agree and some wouldn’t. Most Webinars do not have more than one featured speaker, despite this approach in generating interest and attendance .
2. Plan a Rehearsal of the Webinar.
When you include guest speakers in your webinars, how often do you run a rehearsal session for the Webinar in Advance ?
Rehearsals in advance of a live Webinar is a good practice followed by many Webinar sponsors. Most of these sponsors hold these rehearsals occasionally.
3. Promote the Webinar in advance.
How effective is promoting the Webinar in advance?
An important but difficult aspect of conducting Webinars is getting the majority of registrants to attend the event itself. The most effective method for generating interest and signups in a Webinar is for current vendors to send emails to their customers requesting their attendance at the event.
Effective and various methods for adveritising Webinars.
A) emails from vendors that you already work with.
B) search engine queries that you initiate.
C) direct mail.
D) press releases.
E) advertisements in newsletters.
F) unsolicited emails.
G) banner ads.
4. Obtain Registrants’ Profile Information.
Is it helpful to have a preview of registrants’ profile when customizing Webinar content?
The majority of Webinar sponsors find it helpful to have information on registrants’ profiles in advance of the event in order to customize the content of the Webinar. This is important, if not critical since it allows content to be more closely matched to the specific needs of the audience, insuring that the Webinar is relevant as possible for attendees.
5. Send invitations at least one to two weeks in advance.
How much advance notice do attendees prefer when receiving webinar invitations ?
Most Webinar attendees prefer to receive invitations a week or two prior to the event, others prefer longer notices and some will accept shorter notices.
6. Limit Webinars to One Hour.
Some Webinars for in-house training may take longer. Its a good practice to limit the length of a marketing or similar Webinar to 60 minutes in order to allow a minimum of disruptions for attendees. Opening the event 15 minutes early will allow attendees time to test the audio connections and Webinar interface, to download any needed software or iron out any technical difficulties that might arise.
It is important for Webinar sponsors to have someone available to field questions and resolve technical difficulties including last minute instructions.
7. Provide Time for Q & A.
How often do Webinar attendees use the Question-and -Answer Function during Webinars?
The question-and-answer function is used by most Webinar attendees. Most attendees have asked a question to presenters using the Web interface chat function. This is an important tool for attendees, since many Webinars don’t permit voice communications between presenters and attendees.
8. Conduct Polls during the Event.
Most Webinar sponsors conduct at least one poll during their events and some don’t. Polls are an important mechanism for soliciting feedback from attendees, either to keep attendees engaged in the event and / or to tailor content to specific needs of the audience.
9. Conduct Product Demonstrations.
Frequency with product demonstrations is a good practice. Most sponsors conduct product demonstrations occasionally and some rarely or never do.
10. Conduct Post-Event Surveys.
Conducting post-event surveys is a good practice even though some sponsors rarely, if ever conduct these type of surveys but many do. These surveys are useful to gain feedback on the event itself and to provide additional information for use in sales calls and future Webinars etc….
Webinars are a very effective and inexpensive method for imparting information, whether the goal is to market to prospective customers or to train employees. There are a variety of simple best practices that any organization should consider implementing during a Webinar. These practices could dramatically improve the effectiveness of Webinars and provide much greater return for very little effort.
Clerical Business Solutions www.clericalsolutionsinc.net
Renee Cloud-Virtual Assistant Email: info@clericalsolutionsinc.net
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Very informative post! I learned a lot. I’m doing basic research on Webinars, and this is some of the most helpful information I’ve come across.