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The following is a guest post by Alexandra Hayes. Alexandra is a social media and content marketing specialist from Orlando, Florida. She enjoys visual arts and yoga. Besides, Alexandra is a starting photographer and blogger. Meet her on Twitter!

When you’re trying to promote a brand, product or service, you’re engaged in many different marketing methods. The question is: are you doing everything in your power to make the marketing strategy successful? Today, we’ll talk about a technique many business owners and marketing experts neglect: webinars.

You might be wondering: what does a webinar have to do with marketing? Isn’t it a tool mainly intended for online learning?

Here’s your reality hit: the webinar is the current and the next big thing in marketing. It offers real-time connection and interaction between you and your audience. It’s a really convenient tool that allows you to present information and teach your audience about all benefits of your offer. The webinar is practically a live video, and you know that video marketing is a big thing at the moment. It creates strong customer engagement and drives purchase behavior.

So yes; the webinar can help you promote the brand and establish its credibility. The question is: how do you make it work? We’ll list 10 effective tips to make sure your next webinar is a win.

1. Set Your Goals

You’re not going to invest all that effort, time, and finances into a webinar just because it’s an online marketing trend. You’re going to do that because you can achieve great goals through a webinar. So you have to set those precise goals before you start the process of planning and preparation.

Here are some questions that will help you set goals:

• How many listeners do you plan to attract? How many of them do you expect to convert? These will be your ultimate objectives.
• How will the webinar help you strengthen the brand’s image?
• How will it help you establish yourself as an expert in the industry?
• How will you attract the listeners to subscribe to your email newsletter?
• What products or services will you highlight and how will you do that?
• What special offer are you going to present?

Think of specific goals that help you make your brand successful!

2. Set an Intriguing Topic

If you choose a boring topic that has been elaborated through blog posts thousands of times before, people won’t waste their time on your webinar.

As an example, let’s say you’re offering a planning tool that helps people beat procrastination. “How to beat procrastination” would be a lousy topic for it. It’s too general and overly common on the Internet. You have to think of something more specific, so you’ll intrigue your target audience to sign up. “The Brutal Truth Why You Procrastinate” would be a better option as a topic for your webinar. Here’s an example of a webinar on the procrastination theme: “NLP Webinar: Overcoming Procrastination Once and for All.” It’s a pretty general topic, but it has a twist: NLP – blog posts don’t offer clear info on that aspect. The webinar also works because it promotes something: the NLP technique.

Brainstorm! That’s a great way to come up with few topics and choose the most unique and intriguing one. You may invite your social media followers to ask questions, so you’ll turn the most interesting ones into webinar topics.

3. Make a Checklist

Planning is the key to success! You can’t schedule a webinar and just show up. The audience will have great expectations from this event, and you have to meet them all.

The Content Marketing Institute offers a great checklist that helps you plan the webinar in detail. The event’s planning and execution process should go through five main acts:

• Set the stage for a smooth production
• Attract the right audience
• Engage the audience
• Go live
• Convert the audience

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, each of these steps requires careful planning, so make sure to cover that stage before you take any actionable steps.

4. Make the Content Exceptional

The content is the foundation of your webinar. First of all, the script has to be exceptional! You must capture and hold the attention of your audience with your style and clarity of expression. The content you use for promoting the webinar must also be great! It must give some insights so it will trigger the interest of potential viewers.

Grammar and spelling errors are not allowed! Invest your time (and some finances) into editing so you won’t allow simple mistakes to ruin the impression you make. Here are some tools and services that help with editing:

1. Best Dissertation – a professional writing service with real editors in its team;
2. Grammarly – an automated tool that checks your spelling and grammar;
3. Ginger – another automated tool for grammar checking with more advanced features.

5. Practice!

Remember: you can’t just show up and hope everything goes well. You have to practice! The mirror is your best friend. Read the content, and then try to present it without reading. Write some reminders, which will keep you on track. Practice so much that you’ll be so familiar with the information and its flow that you’ll leave no room for a mental block during the event.

6. Make It Long (And Short) Enough

When a webinar is too short, the listener won’t be satisfied. Remember: they have really high expectations and they plan this webinar to take a significant part of their time. If it’s too long, on the other hand, you’ll lose their attention somewhere along the way.

According to the 2017 Webinar Benchmarks Report, an average webinar attendee says with the event for 51 minutes.

It’s best to make your webinar last around 45 minutes so you won’t lose your audience somewhere along the way.

7. Send Promotional Emails at the Right Time

The 2017 Webinar Benchmarks Report gives us another interesting detail: Wednesday is the most effective day for sending promotional emails. Obviously, weekends are not an option, since most people don’t like checking their emails then. Fridays don’t work either; most people are too tired and distracted by emails when wrapping up their workweek. Stick to Wednesdays!

8. Beat the Competition!

When you’re promoting a webinar, you have to pay attention to your competitors. If some of them has scheduled a webinar in the same week, you might want to reconsider your timing. Keep in mind that most people don’t have time for more than one webinar per week, so you’ll be losing a considerable part of your audience to your competitors.

This means that you’re competing against all webinars your target viewer might be interested in. You have to make your project more attractive and you’ll do that by choosing the right topic and implementing a smart marketing strategy.

9. Choose a Stable Platform

Technical errors will ruin the experience for your viewers. You don’t want any of that! Take your time to research and choose a reliable webinar platform. If you’re looking for an affordable but still reliable platform, check out WebEx, AnyMeeting, Livestream, and GoToWebinar.

10. Promote, Promote, Promote!

All that work will go to waste if you don’t promote the webinar in a really effective way. Remember: although this is an online event, you still have seats to fill. If you don’t attract enough audience, the ROI will be disappointing.

Promote the event via social media, email, content marketing, and paid advertising. Don’t forget to feature the details on your website, too!

These 10 tips are enough to get you going but remember: a webinar is a lot of work. You have to pay attention to each detail. Good news: the work will pay off when you do it well!

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