How to Craft a Winning Webinar Strategy in 2023 and Beyond

Webinars are personal—they gather people for a purpose.

Event planners and marketers can be most effective when they think about webinars as a conversation with the audience, from the announcement email to the registration site to the post-event experience. Making the conversation relevant, making it feel exclusive, and keeping it going after the participant leaves the session, will leave an impact and will strengthen your relationship with your target audience.

In our webinar, How to Craft a Winning Webinar Strategy in 2023 and Beyond, experts discuss how they apply experience, psychology, and technology to craft successful webinar strategies.

Read on for some of our favorite takeaways from the session.

Webinar Promotion Best Practices

We all want to excel at driving registration—live webinars are not considered successful unless your audience shows up. In fact, registration was the #1 measure of success among our webinar audience.

So, what are the best ways to drive registration and make sure that those registrants convert to engaged eyes and ears?

First, remember that not all people are alike. You will need to promote your webinar based on different personality types when you plan your outreach:

• Send speaker videos teasing the content

• Promote on social media

• Offer exclusive content that can only be accessed if registrants attend the live webinar

• Have your speakers promote to their networks for broader visibility

• Encourage attendees to answer a survey or submit questions for speakers

Once you’ve acquired your registrants, how do you use your promotions to get them to attend?

We know that, for webinars, 65% of our registrants convert to live attendees; we also know that most people suffer from something called “registration remorse.”

So, how do you get the other 35% to come along?

• Craft your messaging to registrants with an assumptive voice, for example “When you submit your questions to the speaker…” vs. “If you submit your questions…”

• Remind registrants that access to the speaker and other participants is exclusive to the event; this moment will never repeat, even on demand.

• Offer an incentive or reward that registrants have a chance to win but only if they attend the live session.

• Have your technology work for you. Make it as easy as possible for registrants to participate in involvement opportunities like submitting questions, polling, and connecting with other registrants.

Webinar Content and Engagement

When it comes to content and programming, all our experts agree that you should ask the audience. Find out what their pain points are and build your content accordingly.

When you do this, your audience will feel heard, and you will have a good chance of keeping your audience engaged.

• Start with credibility, not excitement. No matter how excited you and your speaker may be about your topic, your content needs to be useful. Share real numbers. Talk about real experiences. Build credibility and bring value.

• Once you have your topic and your speaker, ask the speaker to articulate the three things the audience absolutely needs to do after the webinar.

• Demonstrate, don’t display. If you are introducing a product, don’t run through a slide deck about it, show it!

• Tease out your content—don’t give it all away at once. Save some of your story for Q&A and post-event follow-up. Keep them coming back by always having more stories to tell.

Level Up Your Webinar Execution

The bar has been raised on webinar execution, from making sure there are zero technology issues during the event to today’s expectations of an elevated, immersive, broadcast-quality experience.

At Notified, we practice what we preach. During our live webinar on this topic, our participants experienced some of the elevating techniques employed by our experts:

• DJ Cisco dropping the beat to kick off the webinar

• Competent, engaging, knowledgeable, credible speakers

• Real-time questions submitted to the audience or speakers, with real-time reactions

• Spontaneous debates and “workshopping” among the speakers to illuminate content

• Encouraging attendees to use the chat to share more detailed information

• Giveaways

• Encouraging the audience to connect with the speakers after the event

Keep the Conversation Going After the Live Event

Once the live event is over, how do you keep the conversation and sense of community going?

• If appropriate for your business, create an after-party in the form of a community on Facebook, LinkedIn, on your site, etc., where you can continue the conversation.

• Break down your asset into smaller digestible bites that you can share more broadly after the live event has happened. Integrate new content to make the offering even more robust and unique.

• Share the link to your next webinar in your follow-up. Our experts agree that webinars convert from webinars at a higher level than other channels. Use exit actions and the post-event lobby to recruit for your next webinar.

What to Focus On for Your Webinar Strategy

We hope you enjoyed some of these best practices shared by our amazing panelists!

Watch the on-demand session here to learn more tips and best practices from our experts that you can incorporate into your upcoming webinar strategy.