Hosting webinars used to be quite easy, and provided instant gratification. You just had to get the best webinar software, provide a slide presentation, with links to your web pages, and the attendee would be there and ready to purchase, right? Wrong! Nowadays, you have to deal with a huge audience who might not buy your products or services. How to Host a Webinar so that it is successful is becoming more challenging.
On this page, you’ll learn about the following:
How to Host a Webinar
Hosting a webinar nowadays means using a webinar platform, which is typically integrated into your online marketing system. The webinar platform can also contain a voting module so that attendees can cast a vote for the presenter they want to see. However, what if you want to change the presentation at any time; or worse still have multiple presentations?
Well, the good news is that you can do all this with a hosted solution. You can host the webinar on your own site so that all the attendees are able to participate. This is a great way to keep all participants in the same room at the same time and to avoid them having to travel. Plus, you can easily mute all of the other participants for the duration of the webinar. And if you have a great presentation, you will be able to extract value from all the attendees.
One of the big things that many marketers have got to get right these days is how to host a webinar that delivers the goods. There are a few ways to do this. If your audience is all in the same room, then you can have all attendees sign in to see the presentation. And then you can provide them with a link to a PDF copy of the slides, so they can quickly go ahead and download it. Another way to do this is to have all the attendees download a copy of PowerPoint. Either way, you will need a platform that allows you to do this.
Hosting a Webinar: Know Your Audiences
Once you have got your webinar platform, you have got to start thinking about your audience. This is where email marketing or social media might come into play. If your audience is mostly composed of small business owners who run their own online stores or eCommerce ventures, then your sales numbers can explode with the help of social media. By setting up profiles on both Facebook and Twitter, as well as on other high-traffic social networks, you can greatly boost your exposure to your audience. Also, by creating interesting content, you can attract more viewers to your webinar.
But the thing about these two methods is that they work best for smaller and informal gatherings. They don’t really work too well when you are trying to grow your business to include more attendees. So if you want to know how to host a webinar that grows your business, then you will need to consider taking your webinar online. You can even host it using Google Hangout – which is actually an extremely convenient service that you can use in the comfort of your own home.
Hosting a Webinar: Communicate With Your Audience
Now, if you are trying to grow your business and want to know how to take your webinars beyond the confines of your home, then you will need to think about some additional methods of communicating with your attendees. For instance, instead of sending out an email newsletter to all of your attendees, you might want to consider using a follow-up system.
With a follow-up system, you send out your information to every single email address that you have on your database. From there, you can give them updates on schedules, new products, and services, etc. When you make follow-up email campaigns more than just a bit annoying to your customers, however, they become less likely to opt-in to your list in the first place.
Another method of how to host a webinar that most people forget about is the lead generation portion of your event. Lead generation is all about putting your target audience in the front seat when it comes to learning about your product.
In other words, you have to make sure that you pre-sell before you ever deliver your webinar. And when you pre-sell, you should do so right from the very beginning. In other words, put the prospects at the forefront of your webinar events so that they feel like they are at the table with you.
The Bottom Line
Hosting a webinar is not so difficult. With effective webinar software, one can easily reach to their potential buyers. If you have hosted any webinars then you can share your experience with us. Leave a comment below.