Hosting Webinars: A Start-to-Finish Checklist
I’ve hosted quite a few webinars now and thought I would share my checklist for planning and executing great webinars. Before you get started, you’ll need to decide on a topic.
Meet with your sales, product and support teams to find a topic for your webinar. A good place to start - questions that the sales team gets asked over and over again or questions asked multiple times in your support forum. These are great places to start because they represent a need for information in high demand direct from your customers. If your customers have these questions - pretty safe bet that others will be interested too.
☑ Schedule the webinar (at least 2-3 weeks out to give you time to prep)
☑ Create a landing page and registration form (don’t forget the social media sharing buttons)
☑ Send an email to your current customer base with link to registration
☑ Post the webinar announcement on your home page and blog
☑ Tell your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn group members about the webinar
☑ If you’re running Google AdWords, create an ad group to promote the webinar
☑ Feature the webinar in your monthly newsletter
☑ Send out an email to your company announcing the webinar and asking employees to share it with their networks (give ‘lazy tweet’ examples to make it easy)
☑ Ask relevant partners to share the webinar with their audience
☑ Post a thread to your support forum announcing the webinar
☑ Coordinate a follow up plan with your sales team (who will respond, how, when to leads)
☑ Prepare your follow up emails in advance (segment not only by attended/not attended, but other segments like current customers/prospects, etc.)
☑ Create a promo code if you’ll be offering a webinar-only discount on your product
☑ Host a practice session 2-3 days prior to the webinar (there should be 3 people at minimum: (1) speaker, (2) someone monitoring questions, and (3) someone recording the presentation)
☑ Send a reminder email 2 days before the webinar
☑ Send a reminder email 4 hours before the webinar (I set these early because some email providers send in batches that don’t go out exactly when scheduled)
☑ Execute a flawless webinar!
☑ Pause your Google AdWords campaign now that it’s complete
☑ Post the recording and a copy of the slides on your website
☑ Write a blog article that recaps the presentation and answers key questions from the webinar (of course include a link to the recording and slides as a call to action)
☑ Close the loop on your company forum thread with link to recording and blog article
☑ Email all registrants using the emails you prepared in advance with the promo code
☑ Analyze webinar performance and include key metrics (total registered, total attended, questions asked, recording video views, etc.)
Anything I missed? Share your tips for executing great webinars.
