How to Host your First Webinar (Step-By-Step Guide)

Hi, I'm Kristen from HubSpot and today I'm going to talk to you about how to get started with webinars. If you enjoy this video, don't forget to like it and subscribe to our channel. Post any questions or suggestions you have in the comments below. Let's get started. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to host a webinar. All you need is a webinar checklist and we're here to provide it. Today, we'll go through everything you need to run a webinar, from the early planning stages to the big day itself. First, leverage your sales team for content topic ideas. When it comes to building a successful webinar strategy, it comes down to sales and marketing alignment. If the marketing team is creating content that isn't helping their sales conversations, it won't be a successful effort to driving high quality leads to sales. Luckily, you have experts at your disposal for coming up with content ideas that will actually complement and aid the sales conversation. The reps themselves Instead of guessing what your sales team might want a webinar to be focused on, ask them. Get reps Buy in for a webinar before you plan it, set up a meeting to discover new content ideas and to find out what pain points they need to help solve. This will go a long way for ensuring sales follow up with registrants is seamless once the webinar is over. Next, nail your promotion strategy. Once you've come up with relevant content topics for your webinar, it's your job as marketers to get that webinar in front of as many eyes as possible. With webinars, it's not just about generating initial excitement. You have to build excitement and encourage engagement once the webinar goes live. Here are a few tips for doing Try your hand at co marketing One of the best ways to get new expertise, generate interest for a piece of content, and expand the reach of a campaign is to run a co marketing webinar. Instead of running a webinar with speakers internally, try working with another company that's going after a similar buyer Persona and bring their expertise into the conversation. Doing so creates more interesting content and gives you the opportunity to get your webinar in front of another company's established audience. Create automated email reminders under each sales rep's names that will be sent to prospects who have been invited but not yet registered. Create manual email templates Reps can send in their one on one communication with prospects. Set up an automated email to notify reps when one of their prospects has registered for your webinar. This will help them engage and close those prospects down the road. Once you've gotten registrants, that doesn't mean they'll show up after all, if you promote your webinar one to two weeks in advance, a portion of your registrants are likely to forget when the live date comes around. Remember to send out reminder emails the day before and day of the live event to ensure a high live attendance rate. Remember, don't just stick to a PowerPoint and talking head format. The format of slides with a person speaking on screen has been done time after time depending. Don't feel the need to stick to the script literally. Instead, think about ways to mix up how the information in your webinar is presented. At HubSpot, we've found unscripted discussion style webinars to be quite effective at engaging our audience. In many of our live events. We've forgone the slides completely and instead brought two speakers together and had a host ask live questions on air. It's effective for both encouraging Twitter participation via a hashtag and keeping the content conversational but informative. Try building a webinar around your prospect's questions. Send a call for questions to be answered live on air. This will help build engagement and excitement for what's to come. Hopefully the people asking questions will be more likely to show up day of too. You can also use a landing page that includes a voting feature for people to upvote their top questions. This will also help you prioritize the material your audience is most interested in. Next Deliver necessary information to sales A huge part of the pre and post webinar process is making sure the right information gets delivered to sales. That's why GoToWebinar and HubSpot recommend creating one webinar hub that's easily accessible by sales with the following on demand recordings of all webinars A calendar with past and future webinars Documentation that details the webinar's goals, title target, Persona, funnel stage key points, speed speakers and logistics Promotional and follow up emails Collection of graphic and tech CTA's sales reps can drop into their communications A mechanism to collect suggestions from sales reps for new topics and general feedback. Once the webinar is done, it's time to make sure the sales reps are ready to close their leads. Send a follow up email to your reps and include the following Leads who registered Leads who attended Leads who registered but didn't attend Leads who never registered New SQL leads from post webinar lead scores and any other relevant webinar data. Putting in the extra effort will go a long way toward making sure the webinar is successful from both a sales and marketing standpoint. Remember, it's all about alignment. Webinars as a marketing tool aren't dead. They're also an effective sales tool, but only if your sales team has the information, content and resources to use them to move prospects down the funnel and close deals. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like it and subscribe. Let me know how you're doing in the comments below.