How to organize and conduct a webinar: recommendations from Mogu

If you are just starting your journey in organizing webinars or you are already trying this tool, but the results do not meet expectations, you may have several questions: where to start, how to choose the time and venue, how to attract the audience and lead them to the desired action….

MOGU marketers have developed a small guide to organizing webinars that will help you find answers to all these questions. After studying this article, you’ll have a clear plan of action, from timing and structure to the important details of engaging and interacting with your audience.

What is a webinar

A webinar is an online event that takes place in real time and provides information sharing, training or demonstration for an audience. Webinars include interactive elements such as the ability to ask questions, participate in polls, or join discussions. They are widely used for a variety of purposes including training, sales, marketing, internal company meetings and more.

Content preparation

First of all, you need to plan the content of your webinar, including the topics, information and details that will be covered during the event.

To do this, it’s important to understand your goals.

What is the purpose of the webinar? Do you need to strengthen your appeal to potential customers or promote a specific product/service to increase sales?

Make sure you understand the needs of your target audience. What do they expect to get out of the webinar? What useful information are they looking for? What is the best way to present that information?

Are you familiar with the concept of a customer persona portrait? This is a fictional character created to represent a specific segment of your target audience. The right persona should include demographic information such as gender, age, occupation and income level, as well as psychological data such as hopes, fears and everyday problems. We’ll have a separate article on this later.

Once the goals of your webinar and the needs of your audience are defined and aligned, choosing a topic becomes easy.

Selecting a platform for the webinar

There are many, both paid and free webinar platforms such as Zoom, WebEx, GoToWebinar and others. Explore their features and functions to find the most suitable one for your needs. Make sure the platform you choose supports the features you need, such as slideshows, the ability to ask questions, and feedback from participants.

Invitation to webinar attendees

Now that you understand the purpose of your event, have researched your target audience, and selected a platform to host your webinar, you’re ready to start promoting it. This step is extremely important!

Good content that has been created for an engaged audience won’t do your business any good if no one knows about it. You need to spread the word about your webinar so that people hear about it and attend your event. Marketing a webinar is not much different from marketing other products or services.

Here’s a list of the most effective lead generation channels you can use to attract a large audience to your events:

• Event page (Landing page)
• Social media advertising
• Emailing your subscribers
• Affiliate programs
• Specialized forums
• Google ads.

Then follows a very important stage – creating and maintaining a list of webinar listeners. After all, in the future you will need to lead them as leads through the funnel created in advance. A good solution will be a task tracker. Here is an example of how it can look like:

This way you can clearly understand how many participants are invited, how many of them registered and how many actually came. This is very similar to a CRM system, but this approach does not require any customization and will suit absolutely everyone.

When your webinar is successfully completed, you can’t forget about your attendees, making sure they continue to move forward in the sales funnel. This is usually accomplished through email newsletters.

Here are some helpful tips:

• Prompt Sending. It is recommended that you send messages within 24 hours of the end of the webinar. If you take too long to provide feedback, your attendees may forget about your product.
• Express your gratitude to your guests! Your attendees chose to spend their time specifically on your event and not others. Thank them for that.
• Summarize the event. Remind participants of the main topics covered in the webinar. Provide a brief overview of the key points without going into too much detail.
• Get feedback. Ask each attendee to express their opinion. What did they think of the webinar? What topics did they like? What could be improved? The more feedback you get, the better prepared you will be for future webinars.

Webinar is a powerful tool in marketing. Use our recommendations and you will definitely succeed!