Webinars have become standard practice for organizations and small businesses trying to shorten their sales cycle, extend their reach and gain customer loyalty.
There are four phases to delivering a successful webinar: planning, configuring, practicing, and executing. This post will focus on the planning phase, in which you determine your target audience and message, the date and time of the session, the speaker(s), and the plan for marketing the online event.
Objectives
Since most webinars are aimed at “teaching” the attendees something about your products, services, company, or a specific topic, it’s very important to nail down what you want to say and who you want to say it to. You should identify what your goal is for the webinar (secure customer loyalty, attract new leads, gain brand exposure, etc.) and then determine what content and marketing approach would allow you to achieve that goal. As an example, if your goal is to secure customer loyalty, you may want to have an employee who knows the product really well share some “inside” tips for maximizing product usage. You could then market the webinar through an email to your customer list and through the company newsletter.
Budget
Before you proceed with the planning of your online event, you should determine how much money you can and will spend. You should be prepared to decide how much you can spend on lead acquisition, which types of marketing (e.g., email blasts, direct mail, etc.) you can afford, and whether you can afford to pay a high-profile presenter who would draw more people to your event.
Scheduling
Schedule the webinar for a date and time that’s agreeable to all team members and potential participants. Also consider some general best practices for scheduling events:
- Tuesdays and Thursdays are typically the best days to run events.
- Events shouldn’t take place less than a week away from major holidays.
- Eleven o’clock (11:00) a.m. Pacific Time is a good time schedule webinars that will accommodate a national audience.
Don’t forget to schedule a one-hour rehearsal time so that you and your technical team can go over the webinar specifics and be on the same page about the event flow.
Audio
Decide on an audio solution, either phone bridge and VOIP. If you are using a phone bridge, call your audio conference provider and book an operator-assisted room for the event. However, you will probably want to utilize passcode entry (rather than operator-assisted entry) as operator-assisted entry will really slow down an event with a lot of participants. You will need the phone number and passcodes in order to send out an email invite and email reminders for the event.
Webinar Technology
Last but not least, you will want to decide on the right webinar technology. Whatever solution you choose, make sure it has easy-to-use administrative controls, tools for keeping the audience engaged, and built-in communication tools for pre- and post-event emails.
Stay tuned for the next three posts on webinar best practices.
Posted under Web Conferencing
This post was written by Christine Olivas on February 12, 2009
