If you are the owner of any company, you might be familiar with the term “Webinar”. A webinar is an online conference, presentation or meeting happening on the internet. It is a useful mode of interaction and communication between business partners or clients not available in the same city or location. A successful webinar is an effective tool for any business growth.

You can share your desktop screen, give presentations, take polls and do lot more things in real time through webinars.

Advantages of a webinar

1. Convenient for both the presenters and the attendees as they can easily interact with each other from their location.
2. No special equipment is needed. All you need is a webcam and you are good to go.
3. It is a cost-effective mode of communication because the number of people in a webinar is usually limited.
4. Since webinars are online, there is no restriction on the number of audiences.
5. You can easily record your meeting and use it later on in any discussions.

If you are looking forward to starting a business or increase the growth of your existing business, webinars can be of great help to you. The success of your business lies largely in how you interact with people and make the best use of the latest technologies and tools for a successful webinar.

If you are planning to hold a successful webinar anytime soon, we are going to give some tips on how to make it a successful one.

1. Choosing the right webinar platform

Choosing the most appropriate webinar tool should be your top priority. These tools can be either paid or free. People should be able to easily register on it. While choosing a webinar tool, you should look out for some important feature like: 

1. Document sharing
2. Recording feature
3. Easy to customize
4. Slideshow
5. Desktop sharing
6. Reliable, and more

Some of the best webinar platforms 2018 currently available are Google Hangouts webinar platforms, Skype, Gotowebinar,  Webinarjam, Zoom, Cisco WebEx webinar platforms, Adobe Connect, Crowdcast etc. You can choose any of these depending on your needs and requirements for a successful webinar. We use Crowdcast as it fit our needs the best, features and price.

2. The day and time of the webinar

Make sure to chose a day that is suitable for all the presenters and attendees. In order to reach your business goals, you have to make sure that the maximum number of people attend your meeting or presentation to make it a successful webinar.  

According to a poll by “WhatCounts Poll”, the best time for webinars are Wednesdays and Thursdays. This is because business managers and owners are usually busy with last minute targets and deadlines on Mondays and Fridays.

You can also use Google Analytics for this purpose. This tool helps you in analyzing what part of the world are you getting the maximum traffic from. Thus, you can decide your webinar time accordingly to ensure maximum attendance.

3. Choosing the right microphones and webcams

Never completely rely on the built-in microphone of your laptop or desktop computers. Using landlines phones or headphones can be more reliable and trustworthy. Using the right webinar equipment is very important so that everyone is able to listen to you without any glitches.

You can even keep extra computer parts and equipment batteries for any last moment problems or technical errors. To prevent any blackout during a glitch, keep a printout of your presentation handy.

4. Promote your webinar

In order to reach the maximum number of audience, make sure to promote your webinar well in advance. If you have a website, you can use it to promote your webinar. Create interactive web pages on your website and give all the necessary details in there.

Discuss the agenda of your webinar, introduce your speakers, give the date and time of the webinar. Using social media platforms for advertisement is one of the best webinar promotion strategies. Create unique hashtags for your webinars and use it on social media for every post you make for your webinar promotion plan.

You can make promotional and catchy videos and post in on your social media accounts to give people an overview of what can they expect from your webinar. Content marketing is also a good webinar promotion ideas. You can write various blogs and articles on the theme of your webinar.

5. Topic of webinar

Keep the interest of your audience in mind while choosing your webinar topic. To keep the people engaged and interested until the end, make sure to choose a topic that keeps them hooked up.

Focus on your topic and don’t try to make it broad unnecessarily. Keep your presentation short and interesting. You can go deep into the topic you chose but do not deviate from your goal in between.

Also, make your presentation visually interesting. You can use interactive images and videos for this purpose.

6. Focus on engaging your audience

Do not just try to give your presentation in one go and ignore your audience. Try to get their feedbacks and reviews every now and then

See if they are really getting what you are trying to make them understand. Make sure to give sufficient time at the end of your webinar for audience interaction so that anyone can put forward their queries or questions.

If you are using a good and latest webinar tool, you might also get poll features in it. You can use this feature to take polls on how helpful the presentation was or any other topic relevant to your webinar.

7. Practice before the final day

Before hosting a webinar on the final day, never forget to rehearse thoroughly for it. A webinar will be getting a huge amount of audience and you do not want to make any mistake in front of them.

Make sure you have examined the equipment you are going to use, practice on how you are going to walk and talk, make sure your laptop or desktop computer does not hang at the last moment, check if you have all the media files and presentations ready.

To host an engaging and successful webinar, you need to make sure there are no efforts left out from your side.

8. Vote of thanks

After you have hosted a successful webinar, do not forget to send your attendees an email thanking them for being present for your webinar. You can ask valuable feedbacks from them on how they found your presentation and webinar.

As a kind gesture, you can send the recording of your webinar to people who could not attend your webinar for some reason but had registered.

You can also send promotional items to the people who attended your webinar so that they may be interested in working with you in the near future.

9. Assessment of your efforts

Your webinar tool may provide you webinar metrics that will give a review of your webinar success. 

Check the webinar conversion rates to see how many registered and how many actually attended. 

Get in touch with your speakers and presenter and get their feedback on their experience.

Analyse your average webinar attendance rate so that your net webinar is a bigger success.