I’ve organised – and hosted – a lot of elemental webinars since I started at Lyrical back in February 2022, and I like to think I’ve perfected the art over the hundreds of minutes of broadcasting live.
I’ve learnt, for example, that it’s wise to not organise webinars to take place during the school holidays. Not only because it makes it harder to align diaries with speakers, but with so many people (both the audience and the speakers) working from home these days, when children are there too they might be using all the broadband bandwidth on Fortnite.
I’ve also learnt that if you’re expecting a delivery at any time between 7am and 7pm, then of course it will arrive as soon as we hit the ‘go live’ button on our webinar.
Here are the top five pieces of advice I give to everyone we work with to deliver webinar content, to ensure we have an enjoyable, informative and stress-free session.
- Know what you want – do you know why you want to do a webinar? Is it to raise brand awareness or to launch a new product? Or present some of your work in a particular area? Or to further establish one of your team as a thought leader? All of these scenarios will need a different approach from us and will lead to a different type of webinar and, crucially, come up with different results. It helps enormously to be crystal clear on your objectives from the start, so that the messaging is correct and the webinar marketing campaign can get off to a flying start attracting the right type of audience.
- Say goodbye to slides – the most engaging webinars we run usually involve a conversation around a topic, with speakers offering their different perspectives and expertise. Sometimes there might be pictures or stats shared by the panel, but the sessions that get the best feedback from our audience stay away from hundreds of slides. Presentations have their place, of course, but nobody tunes in to an online webinar to hear somebody reading aloud from slides, they tune in to hear a lively discussion that offers something more.
- Put a speaker forward who understands the brief – go back to point 1 of this list and make sure whoever is speaking knows this too, so that we all know what the angle of the session should be and who is likely to be in the audience. It’s important they see it as a way to share knowledge, rather than a sales pitch. Again, few people tune into a webinar to watch a sales pitch, they tune in for information and expertise. And don’t be afraid to get other members of your team involved in speaking, the most important thing is a thorough knowledge of the topic rather than experience delivering talks. An elemental webinar is a fairly gentle way to try public speaking (before we throw you to the crowds at InstallerSHOW 🙂).
- Prepare reading material – we can share links and documents with the audience during the session so do have a handy list of URLs to add to the discussion to point people to further information on any projects or reports that come up. We can also send documents out after the webinar, but it’s much better to be responsive and share them while live if possible.
- Sort your tech out – there are few things as frustrating as tech issues on a webinar, so do make sure you attend the test call and read the information that is sent over (it’s not loads, promise). Those two things should ensure everything goes smoothly on the day and we can all concentrate on hosting a brilliant session.
Visit the elemental crowdcast channel for access to watch previous webinars on demand.
