10 tips for your successful webinar

Webinars could also be described as the Secret weapon of content marketing, designate. As a hobbyhorse of B2B marketing, you should not do without those as a manufacturing company. This way, you can offer your target group useful content free of charge, which in turn will bind them to you in the long term. This does not necessarily have to happen through classic blog posts or white papers, but also works "personally" through webinars. The topics for the manufacturing industry can be diverse: New and/or changed supply chains, products and services can be presented.  

The (live) seminars held on the Internet can only be a success if they are well-prepared and followed up. Spontaneity and short notice are improper here. Used and prepared correctly, webinars have countless advantages, such as: Lead generation, cost-effective new customer acquisition, direct feedback opportunity, stronger impact through personality, expert positioning. In the following, we will give you five tips each for the preparation and follow-up of a webinar and, at the end, we will introduce you to a corresponding tool for the
marketing automation of your future webinars.  

Get started with your first webinar. With these five tips for preparation, nothing can go wrong! 

Scheduling is everything  

When scheduling the webinar, make sure that it can be easily integrated into the participants' daily lives. Here you must consider the time, day of the week and the specific date. A webinar just before Christmas, for example, makes little sense - you know it yourself, people are often stressed and have other things to do, so they are correspondingly less open to such an event. So think carefully about who your target group is and when your webinar might fit best into their schedule.  

Draw attention to your webinar  

Use all the channels at your disposal to draw attention to your webinar. Also, integrate the promotion on your website and in newsletters. It is important that you start early with the application. Your participants must be able to plan - and as mentioned at the beginning, spontaneity is improper here. A good time to start advertising is four to six weeks before the event. The closer the event gets, the more you can draw attention to it. On the day of the webinar, you should again put extra "pressure" on it! 

... And remind you regularly  

When participants register for your webinar - great! But as you probably know, in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, appointments often get lost. And registering and actually attending a webinar are two entirely different things. This is where you need to help so that registrations are also converted into actual participant numbers. Therefore, remind people about your webinar sometimes. But be careful: The Reminder emails should not annoy your target audience, there is a fine line here. The more webinars you have given over time, the more you will get a feel for this! 

Teamwork makes the Dream (your Webinar) work  

There's no way you can put together a successful webinar on your own. Teamwork is the name of the game here. In the classic case, marketing takes over the planning, promotion and moderation of the event and the expert:in the actual webinar or presentation.  

Of course, all parties involved must be available at the time of the webinar and must also be available to answer questions from the participants. This does not have to take place face-to-face, i.e. in a shared room, especially in the age of Corona. The participants can also be in entirely different locations - marketing, for example, in the offices of the head office, the expert possibly in the meeting rooms of the production or manufacturing halls.  

The proof of the pudding is in the eating 

Ah, the good technology - sometimes it wants, sometimes it doesn't. To avoid this, you should definitely use a Dress rehearsal for your webinar. After all, it doesn't show professionalism if your presenter's camera doesn't work during the live session, or if the presenter's screen refuses to play the slides.  

In terms of content, try not to plan everything down to the smallest detail. Keep enough flexibility and spontaneity to be able to respond to the participants during the webinar. 

Your webinar not only needs to be carefully prepared, but also appropriately conducted and followed up. Here are five tips!

A successful start 

As is often the case, the first few seconds of a webinar count. The introduction must be right on target and the participants must feel confirmed that they are in exactly the right place. The task of arousing interest is the responsibility of the moderator. After the welcome, it should be immediately clear what the participants will encounter in the webinar and what information they will receive. The speaker should also be introduced and it should be made clear why he or she is particularly predestined to speak on the following topic. 

Keep the presentation short & concise

Do not over strain your participants' ability to concentrate. Endless webinars usually never achieve the desired success. Even one hour of presentation can be too long. Shorter is (almost) always better in the case of webinars. The webinar should not be a pure monologue. And preparing a one-hour presentation is usually not worth your extra effort, either. 

Q&A opportunity is a must

Involve the presenter during the webinar as well. Have him repeatedly read out questions that come in during the chat and have the presenter answer them. Engage in a dialog with the participants and make sure that the presenter does not lapse into an endless monologue. In addition, following the presentation, you should (at least) Allow 15 minutes for questions. This is also good feedback for you, what was not clear enough in the presentation, and what your target group is particularly interested in.

Make documents available for download

After the webinar is before the webinar! Even after the event, you want to keep your target audience engaged. Therefore, offer them the presentation of the webinar and/or a recording of it as a download. Ideally, email the participants on the same day and make it as easy as possible for them to get the relevant documents. This Content gift once again calls you to the participants' lasting positive memory.

Evaluate webinar 

Like all marketing activities, you should also report and analyze your webinars in the aftermath so that you can optimally upgrade next time.  These are some questions you can use to analyze your webinar: 

• How many people have registered? 

• How many of those people showed up for the webinar? 

• Did the number of participants change during the webinar? 

• How was the technical implementation? Were there any problems? 

• How did you cope with the time in terms of content? Was the time exceeded? 

• Were many questions asked afterward? And if so, about the content of the presentation or beyond? 

As you've already seen, hosting webinars is no small task. In addition to choosing a suitable hosting platform, you need to (repeatedly) draw attention to your webinar, generate participants and then provide them with content pieces. For all these tasks, you need a suitable marketing automation tool. After all, webinar management costs time, offers many manual sources of error and predominantly requires a basic framework and structure to be carried out successfully. 

Based on our experience as a Salesforce partner and digitization consultancy, we have developed various modules that build on Salesforce, are quick to implement and highly customizable. Our Salesforce module "Marketing Automation for Webinars & Trade Shows" is perfectly suited to implement the above-mentioned points for pre- and post-processing. 

You already use Salesforce Sales Cloud and Pardot and want to get started with your webinars as soon as possible? No problem!  

Within only four days, we implement the module for you, with which you can 

• get a general basic framework for trade show and webinar management, 

• Ensure time savings & error reduction due to automations,  

• provide a structure for the classification of users (customer list management), 

• better lead management in the B2B area, including automatic transfer to the sales department, and  

• Create landing pages and registration forms even more easily. 

With our tool, participants embark on a unique customer journey: from registration, to reminders, to sending relevant content on the topic. Want to learn more? Contact us anytime and our experts will explain everything you want to know.