If you’ve ever sat through a bad webinar, you know the feeling of pure boredom and regret. You ask yourself every time a new slide appears on the screen why you bothered to spend your money on it at all. That’s the exact opposite way a good, lead creating webinar should make you feel.
If you’ve got a great idea that you want to share with your viewership and potential customers, a webinar might be the right choice for you. And whether you’re a webinar pro or a total newbie, we’re going to tell you how to create a webinar that will blow your viewers away.
Is a Webinar Right for You?
Before you go any farther, you need to decide if a webinar is the best way to get your information out there. This is one of the main reasons a lot of webinars don’t do well. The creators didn’t stop to question whether or not their product was good for anything other than a sales pitch before they put it out into the world.
The best way to create a webinar that creates leads is to create a webinar that has genuine, valuable content that promotes your reputation before your brand or your product.
If you’ve got a unique point of view on a niche topic, something to talk about in relation to the current events in your industry, or an in-depth tutorial, a webinar is a perfect outlet for you.
Avoid webinars on topics that have been done to death, a broad topic, or a small release or update. And, whatever you do, do not make your webinar a sales pitch. Nothing will tank your reputation quite like that.
How to Create a Webinar: The Presentation
There are two main factors to focus on when it comes to creating a great webinar: the content itself and the technical side of things. The first thing we’re going to talk about today is the content of the webinar.
Choose a Highly Specific Idea
As we mentioned before, the best webinars come from specific ideas, not broad topics. While you might feel like a broad topic gives you more to talk about, a lengthy webinar doesn’t necessarily make a successful one.
Instead, go with the specific idea and talk about it in detail. All too often, creators get their viewership in front of the screen and talk to them in broad strokes about the same thing they’ve heard a hundred times before, never bothering to get into the nitty-gritty of their idea.
Don’t make that webinar!
Choose the Right Format for Your Webinar
Now that you have your idea, it’s time to think about what kind of webinar you want to host. If you’re going to be the only speaker for your webinar, that’s great! However, don’t think your options are limited to just that.
Plenty of great webinars are in an interview format. You can have guest speakers, a question and answer portion, or a whole panel of people on your webinar if that’s what works for your topic.
But that’s the key here: your chosen topic. Make sure you pick a format that works with what you’re going to talk about.
Let the Best Speaker Host
The best person to host your webinar is the person who knows the most about the subject. Hopefully, if you’re creating a single host webinar, that person is you.
If you’re working on something that involves a guest speaker, make sure that whoever you choose has a good voice for speaking, knows your topic as well as you do, and can talk on camera in an authoritative, comfortable way.
The Benefits of Presenters
There are a lot of benefits to having presenters during your webinar.
When you have someone with high credibility in your industry join you in your webinar, you’re borrowing their credibility and their viewership as well. It’s never a bad idea to have more than one voice weigh in on an important topic, either.
Also, it helps break up the monotony of the same voice over and over again. Switching things up is a great way to keep your audience engaged!
Make Sure Your Slides Keep Their Attention
On the topic of audience engagement, you need to consider the way your presentation slides look to your audience.
There is nothing worse than a webinar that has a boring slide deck. Every slide needs to make your script stronger and highlight the parts that are the most important.
What your slide shouldn’t do is be a word for word copy of your script. There’s no better way to put your viewers to sleep than to read to them what they could be reading to themselves.
You also want to think about the entertainment factor. If your slides are just black words on a white page with no visual aids or breakup at all, you’re going to run into problems.
If you’re not great with slides, consider outsourcing this part of creating a webinar, to people like the ones at Success Wizards. This helps to ensure that you put out the highest quality product possible.
Your Script Should Kick Butt Too
Now that your slides are awesome, it’s time to take a look at your script. It doesn’t matter if this is your first webinar or your fifth, you need to have a script. You also need to stick to it!
Talking for a long time is hard, even if it’s something you know inside and out. And while going off on tangents might be okay for professors, it’s the last thing you want from your webinar host. A script will keep you on target and will make sure that you hit all the points that you mean to.
How to Create a Webinar: The Technical Side
Those are the main keys to hosting a great webinar, at least when it comes to the actual presentation itself. But there’s more to a webinar than meets the eye. Next up, we’ll break down all the technical things that you need to consider when creating a webinar.
Host on the Right Platform
Your webinar doesn’t amount to much if you don’t have anywhere to host it, right? You want to make sure that the platform you choose to host your webinar on has the right specs for your needs.
It needs to host enough people for all of your viewers and have the right level of interactivity for you. Take a good look at the product you created and decide what host will be the best place to put your webinar.
Consider How You’re Going to Get the Word Out
As soon as you’ve got your slides and script ready, you need to start marketing. Marketing itself is an industry and a half. Even limiting it to the basics of marketing would require a post all on its own. But we narrowed it down to a few simple points for you to consider as a jumping off point.
Use your email list. You do have an email list, right? Let everyone who signed up for information from you know that you’ve got this great new product for them.
Consider whether or not this webinar has any searchable potential. SEO is one of the best tools out there for marketing, so do some research here to see if it’s an avenue you want to pursue.
If you’ve got a guest speaker, pair up with them on the marketing. Ask them to send out information to their email list and get the word out on their end too.
Pick a Quality Microphone
You might think that all you need to make this webinar a success is your laptop, but you’d be mistaken. Laptop microphones often come across as tinny and you’ll be hard pressed to get a solid, uninterrupted feed of your voice for your listeners.
Instead, make sure that you either have a rock solid, reliable internet connection and a good mic, or dial in the old school way and use a landline to get your voice heard.
The Best Webinars Create Leads
There you have it: the top tips on how to create a webinar. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds. You still have to plan for the worst to happen, have backups of everything for the big day, and ensure that you’ve got a studio space that will remain quiet for the entire run of your presentation.
But once you’ve ironed out the steps we outlined above, you’ve got more than a running start of creating a webinar that will bring your customers back and build your reputation as an expert in your field!
If you’ve got your webinar ready to go and you’re looking for how to market it the right way, check out this article next!