6 Ingredients You Need To Create A Great Webinar

As marketers, we are always looking for ways to generate leads. Whether it be by writing blogs, running social media campaigns, etc.-we are constantly looking for ways to reach our target audience. A great marketing tactic that can do all that and more are Webinars.

Recently, Penguin Strategies held a webinar on tackling the challenges in telecom marketing. It was the first webinar I ever attended and I was behind the scenes live tweeting the event.  Even though I was working throughout the webinar, I finally understood why webinars have the power to generate leads.

So what are the ingredients to hosting a successful webinar? Here are six helpful tips:

Include Speakers Outside of Your Company

A great webinar doesn’t just feature Speakers from your company alone. A great webinar includes speakers from outside of your company. According to Forbes, a useful tactic for a successful webinar is to develop a partnership with another company.

Co-presenting with someone who's brand complements yours or is also targeting a similar audience will not only help you strengthen your message, but will also increase your company’s credibility.

Design a Killer Deck

Market the Webinar

Do what you do best; market your webinar across every platform. Although you want to be interacting with your audience before the webinar, a heavy marketing campaign is important to get people to attend your webinar.

Before our webinar last week, we at Penguin Strategies posted a blog discussing the details of our webinar. Not only did we promote it with a cross-platform campaign, we also created a separate social media campaign for the blog. The campaign included a hashtag for the webinar, which we used before, during, and after the webinar.

Although, email marketing is an effective method for most marketers trying to promote their webinars, you should also consider creating social media marketing campaigns as well as positing blogs about your webinars.

Cater Your Webinar to Your Audience

How can you make your audiences really care about your webinar? Make it about them. According to Forbes,, in order to produce a webinar that can generate leads, your webinar should focus on offering your audience something worthwhile.

Your webinar shouldn’t focus on forcing a message onto your audience; it should portray your company as the expert and make audiences believe that they can rely on your company for the answers.

Before the webinar, try interacting with your audience. Let them ask questions or post comments before the webinar, and then you can use their inquiries to better design your webinar.

Follow a Script

Having a script for your webinar is a must. Even though your'e speaking to your audience through a screen, you are nonetheless, speaking to your audience at a live event.

Even the best public speakers get nervous and make mistakes. So why not prevent that? Albert Costill from Search Engine Journal said it best, your script is your roadmap. Create a script that can guide you through the webinar with greater ease.

Have A Run Through

Before our webinar the other week, my Co-Worker Ally came in and said that we were having a dry-run of the webinar. It was three days before our actual webinar, and I was confused as to why a full dry-run was needed.

It wasn’t until the actual webinar when I realized the importance of the dry-run. There are so many things that can go wrong during a webinar - the slide deck might not translate well onto mini webinar screen, people have a hard time joining, or something as simple as your computer’s microphone could be broken.

Trust me when I say that it's better to work out all the bumps in the road before your webinar is live.

So there you have it, 6 ingredients that’ll help your next webinar be a great success. Have any other suggestions? Leave your comments below!