How to Run Your First Webinar and Make Sure It Converts

One thing I love about webinars is that they are always growing and evolving. There are tons of new ways to target the right people and get them to engage with your webinar.

With some creative outreach and follow up strategy, you can make some huge gains in your business by trying new tactics.  But if you’re a newbie, even the basics of running a webinar can be a little intimidating.

To help you through the potentially awkward process, I’ve outlined five areas you should focus on to ensure you and your team are fully prepared to put on a high-quality, successful webinar.

5 Ways to Run an Awesome Webinar

1) Use a Webinar #Hashtag

The first thing I recommend doing before you even start your webinar is to use a dedicated hashtag for your upcoming event. You can add the hashtag to all of your marketing for the webinar and it will help generate a conversation around the event.

I recommend using a lesser-known hashtag instead of something generic like your business name. This will help ensure all tweets with the hashtag are about your webinar. Simply adding an emoji can help differentiate this event from others.

A custom hashtag will help you create a community of people with something in common. Once the webinar begins, use the hashtag to interact with the audience, gather questions, and answer questions.

When the webinar is over, use the hashtag to follow up on any unanswered questions and send any follow-up material. Remember, most people don’t buy on the webinar but a lot of them do based on your webinar follow-up sequences.

2.) Interact With Your Audience Regularly

One of the main reasons I love webinars is that you’re capturing the attention of your audience much longer than almost any other medium. For most platforms, it’s hard to even get the attention for more than a few minutes. But with webinars, you’re asking someone to connect for 45-60 minutes or more.

To keep attendees present, make sure you are interacting with your audience on a regular basis. That starts before the webinar even begins. The goal is to build trust and rapport with your attendees from the moment they get logged on.

In the beginning, make sure to let them know what to expect, generate excitement, and give them a reason to stay through the end. The best way to do this is by teasing bonus items or freebies like an additional ebook or video series.

I can’t stress how important this is at the beginning and throughout your webinar. Ask your audience to hit the chat box to engage and create a conversation. Not only does this keep them engaged, but it will also help you learn more about your audience for future webinars.

3) Create an Awesome Slide Deck

The third thing I recommend doing is to create an awesome slide deck. You can’t keep someone’s attention if you have a generic deck. Don’t simply put a few stock images and some black text on a white background.

Get creative and think about what you would want to see if you were attending the webinar. Make sure each slide is thought out and adds value to your audience.

Make sure that you have:

• Great copy (less is more)
• A consistent color palette
• Bright and intriguing images
• Include your logo, websites, and a custom hashtag

I talk more about creating an awesome deck in this post to give you even more details.

4) Have Awesome Speakers

Besides creating an awesome deck, you want to make sure to have a speaker that will keep your audience engaged and excited about the content.

As an attendee, there isn’t much worse than a monotone speaker who sounds like a boring college professor simply reading the slides. Your speaker should be very knowledgeable, personable, energetic, and well versed on the topic of your webinar.

Another thing you can do is have more than one speaker. This will let two people bounce ideas off one and other and create a discussion for the audience. This can help liven the conversation and keep it fun.

Lastly, you can also have a separate speaker who is a moderator for the event. This could include answering Q&A, introducing guests and keeping everything on time.

5. Be Ready and Prepared

The final tip for making an engaging webinar is to be 100% prepared. One of the first things to do is have a sound check. Even with our amazing technology, things still happen from time to time. Make sure to test your webinar and equipment before getting started.

Also, make sure the host is in a webinar friendly environment and not somewhere loud. While it doesn’t need to be a studio room, make sure it’s quiet and the background isn’t distracting.

Next Steps

If you want more useful tips to learn how to automate and scale your webinars…you can watch 2 different webinars.

1.  A webinar all about the 6 steps to a high converting sales webinar.

This webinar is for you, if you are someone just starting out with webinars!

You can join that webinar by clicking here.

2.  Our ‘Sell your products, services and programs 24/7 leveraging one simple webinar.  This session is for you if you are ready to scale up your webinars and sales leveraging automated webinars.  We also talk about generating at least 12k a month from webinars by increasing your pricing!

You can join that webinar by clicking here.