The Anatomy of a Great Webinar
All great things start with proper planning, akin to constructing a building where without a solid foundation the entire building has the potential to collapse. Hosting a great webinar also starts with meticulous planning, and gathering the right kind of research to ensure your audience feels engaged and focused.
Webinars range from topics that specifically focus on either building a new skill, introducing new technology or product, or hosting a Q&A session with industry experts. Though webinars and their utility is driven by the content being curated, it is equally important to keep in mind timelines, audience engagement, and the effectiveness of the webinar itself.
We are going to discuss key points that lend to the anatomy of a great webinar that is utilitarian, effective, and engaging. Our key areas of focus for today will be whether your content deserves a webinar, a checklist of best practices, and detailing valuable lessons we learned from a poll we conducted recently on LinkedIn regarding the best duration for hosting a webinar.
Does your content deserve a webinar?
Some might feel this to be a silly question, however, this question needs to have an answer in the affirmative even before you start creating a presentation for your content. Most people focus on lead generation rather than on the impact that a webinar may have on an audience. This is the gravest mistake as not only does it shine a poor light on you, it also devalues your brand.
So before you get down to building a presentation, it is important to assess the validity of your webinar and whether you will watch your own webinar? A great webinar acts as both a tool for imparting knowledge and as a means to lead generation, particularly for B2B companies. Content that qualifies for a great webinar should meet the following criteria:
- A niche topic that can be approached via a fresh angle
- The ability to have a panel discussion vis-à-vis new developments within your industry
- Room for creating a how-to tutorial
- Space for an industry leader
If anyone or more of the above criteria are met, you can be assured that you have the makings of a great webinar at hand. Now that you have settled on a genuinely interesting topic, let’s build a great webinar keeping in mind the following potential checklist.
1. Content needs to be specific:
Avoiding general and broad base topics, it is smarter to focus on a specific idea that keeps your audience engaged and keeps your webinar from getting boring.
2. The Right Speaker:
It may not seem that vital, but it’s important to choose a person who can speak with clarity and confidence. A dull-sounding speaker has the ability to lose their audience fairly quickly.
3. The Right Platform:
Depending on the style of your webinar, it is important to choose the right platform to host the webinar. Not all platforms give you the same abilities, thus choosing the one that fits your webinar format is pertinent.
4. Content Promotion:
A webinar allows you to not only impart knowledge but also provides an opportunity to promote your product/service and makes for co-marketing opportunities with your trusted partners. A smart presentation, by the time it finishes, should have the ability to create a demand for your product within the audience.
5. Script & Presentation:
Always prepare for a webinar by having a script in place. You don’t need to follow it to the letter, however, a script allows for more control and a smoother flow of things during the webinar. It is also important to have a lively presentation, and if possible an interactive one. Purely text-based slides can get boring.
The most important aspect of a webinar is the ideal length of a webinar. We at WebinarKhoj recently conducted a poll on LinkedIn to determine what the audience considers the best duration for a webinar. A whopping 57% of the respondents voted for 45 minutes. This led us to go deeper, and we found that this is a sentiment shared by most people across the globe. Even with traditional seminars that took place in a brick-and-mortar setting, presenters took a break every 45 minutes so the audience can refresh, and be ready for the next slot of information. Keeping an audience engaged for any longer than 45 minutes leads to a redundancy in the brain’s ability to absorb information. Thus, keep it short, keep it crisp and keep it fun.
We hope this paper has helped you get a fresh perspective on how to host a great webinar. So let those creative juices flow, and create a webinar that truly impacts your audience!
