Scenario: You're the corporate event organizer, and your executive team has tasked you and your small-but-mighty team with creating and implementing a webinar series covering a variety of topics related to your company goals and initiatives for different audiences.
Ideally, you want to build a future-proof webinar program that withstands the test of time and can survive any corporate storms such as restructuring, personnel changes, and layoffs. With a well-designed and documented webinar series, coupled with competent and flexible program management, you'll grow your webinar empire and build a legacy, too. Advance your career? Yes, please!
The challenge: where do you begin? Good news! Webinar programs like this just happen to be our specialty. Read on and we'll give you a road map that guides you right to your destination.
Define the Purpose and Goals
First, get clear on the project's purpose and goals. In this example, we're using a fictional corporation with a franchise business model.
- What's the Point, Here? - Draft a purpose statement, such as, "Create and maintain an on-going webinar series for:
- new franchisee onboarding,
- continuing franchisee education regarding product lines and offers,
- business success tools for all owners and employees,
- regularly scheduled, informational webinars for current and prospective customers."
- What Do We Want to Accomplish? - Next up, define your program's goals. Example: "Deliver vetted, highly qualified leads to franchisees, and support franchisees with product education and updates to help ensure lead generation, conversion, and customer retention."
Build Your Foundation
You've nailed down the point of your webinar series project and defined your goals. Next up, start building your program's foundation.
- Define Your Audiences - Segment your target audiences - this will help you build and organize your content.
- Analyze the Competition - Check out your competitors with similar programs - what are they doing right? What can you do better?
- Choose Your Tech and Tools - Look closely at your budget and whether the platforms you're considering offer what you need, such as security, automation tools such as event templates and reminder emails, recording and cloud storage, engagement tools, and robust analytics. Another key to choosing the right tech stack: scale. Will it seamlessly support your program's growth?
Strategize and Develop
Now it's time for strategy, content, and asset development.
- Your previously-decided on target groups will have their own content geared toward them. For example:
- New Franchisees: A "getting started" series of training webinars with company experts providing Q&A and completion certification. This is a perfect opportunity to create your on-demand knowledge library.
- Current Franchisees: Live and on-demand training webinars detailing your core products, adding to your recording library as you introduce new lines and/or updates. Other types of webinars for this segment could include Town Hall-style virtual events PDF: Complex Town Hall EventBuilder Case Study. and announcements from management, marketing and promotion strategy workshops, regional 'fireside chats,' and panel discussions to keep franchise owners up-to-date on the industry and company.
- Current Customers: Informational webinars to introduce new products and offer insights into maximizing their purchase, thus increasing trust and adding value. Simulated live webinar delivery is a good fit, here.
- Prospects and Leads: Live webinars centered around your marketing initiatives, featuring industry thought leaders and company experts.
- Schedule It Out - Develop a 6-month content calendar for each audience segment; consider frequency, timing, a consistent schedule, and how your content and program goals align.
- Break Down Audience Segment Goals and Design Program Reports - Map out goals for each segment and decide what data you need to determine what's working and what isn't to refine and improve your program over time, and design your webinar assets with those goals in mind. Through your analytics, you'll be able track trends with metrics such as attendance, engagement, and conversions.
- Engagement Strategy - Nail down what engagement tools you'll use for your webinars by audience segment; polls, live chats, Q&A sessions, and surveys are all solid ways to make your attendees feel heard. Standardizing the tools used to engage your audiences has the added benefit of offering you a treasure trove of data for long term, big-picture insights over time.
- Standardized Reports - Lay the groundwork for analyzing your webinar metrics by deciding on the data you'll need to measure your success and on-going strategy, the type of reports that best fit your needs, and a setting up a schedule for them to run automatically on a recurring basis.
Design and Promote
Time to line up your marketing, promotion, and registration page design and copy.
- Unify Branding and Messaging - Keep your messaging simple and your visual branding consistent with your audience-facing assets. Consistency is key.
- Event Templates - Lay the groundwork for consistency by leveraging the power of event templates for each type of webinar you are delivering. Your attendees will see the same branding, disclosures, and general information across all audience segments, and you only have to set it up once instead of every time for every event. Templates also automate many of your event build tasks, streamlining your webinar production process.
- Grab Their Attention - Give your landing page(s) and registration page(s) eye-catching graphics and/or video, and write compelling copy to describe what value your webinars offer. Make registration for multiple events as easy as possible with event listing pages.
- Keep It Simple - Collecting data is great, but please exercise some restraint. Five to seven fields on your registration form is the magical maximum to keep your registration conversion rate from dipping.
- Registrant/Attendee Communication Strategy - Create automated registrant reminder emails and set a timeline for automated delivery to keep your webinars top-of-mind for registrants. Event reminder emails have been shown to increase attendance by up to 20% External link: Influno Webinar Statistics..
- Incentivize - Offer early bird discounts/coupons, exclusive content, or giveaways to boost registrations.
- Spread the Word - Create marketing campaigns that utilize different channels: internal communications, email outreach, social media, and, budget allowing, paid ads to get the buzz building. Track referrals for insights into which channel is giving you the most bang for your promo buck.
- Collaborate - Your fellow employees and loyal customers are an energetic resource for continued promotion and content. Invite their participation!
- Build Relationships - Partner with influencers, thought leaders, and complementary businesses for additional promotion and reach.
Write Your Playbook
Since part of your project's plan is to build a webinar series and sustain the program, consistent, standardized documentation and reports are must-haves for success. Create a webinar program manual with processes and protocols that cover your bases ahead of your launch, including templates, production, pre-event procedures, presenter standards, staff training, and more. Be sure to include:
- Tech Testing - The best content in the world won't matter if your tech fails when you need it the most. Document a pre-event testing procedure to ensure smooth audio, video, and presentation transitions are ready.
- Rehearsal - Schedule run-throughs to help presenters familiarize themselves with the format, tech, and flow.
- Staffing - Decide on the roles and responsibilities for your webinar staff and train them accordingly.
- Disaster Recovery - Create a backup plan detailing what to do in case of emergency, including scripts for your staff to follow for consistent messaging.
Pro tip: Use an AI tool to quickly and efficiently create scripts for your hosts and event support staff. You can also leverage AI to spin up additional supporting content!
Keep It Fresh and Future-Proof
Since this is an on-going project, regular reviews and data-driven program adjustments, in addition to fresh content, will keep your webinars on top.
- Record and Create - Build your webinar knowledge library for on-demand viewing, and tease out key takeaways to create supporting content such as blog posts, infographics, and guides. Capturing compelling quotes from the webinars for social media is another possible avenue for your webinar series marketing strategy.
- Analyze and pivot - Take the data you gather, adapt to feedback, and tweak your programming accordingly. Experiment with topics, formats, and a variety of presenters to continually refresh and improve. Regularly review your event templates, automated webinar reminder emails, and recurring reports to keep them up-to-date. Remember to refresh your program manual accordingly.
- Schedule Audits - Stay on top of necessary updates to your software, webinar content, and supporting assets. Outdated, stale stuff isn't the recipe for program success.
Questions To Ask
You need a village to launch a successful on-going webinar series. It takes an average of 20 hours to produce one webinar or virtual event. If your initial goal is to produce just two per week (100 events per year), you're looking at 2,000 hours a year on webinar management. Ask yourself:
- Do you have the internal resources to design, implement, deliver, and support this program both initially and into the future?
- Do you have the technical infrastructure to manage delivery, storage, distribution of recordings, and updates?
- Do you have sufficient staffing to support the program, including event staff, content updates, and technical support?
Did you know that customers who use EventBuilder's Professional Services spend less than 5 hours per week on event management? Look at all the time you'd have for content and promotion! Download our infographic and find out if you're ready to save time and money with an experienced backup crew: When to Outsource Virtual Event Management.
Feeling Overwhelmed?
If the answers to any of those questions above gave you an "uh-oh" feeling, good news! We can help. Webinar program management is what we do best. Together with your dedicated EventBuilder expert, you'll develop and customize your webinar program series to your specifications, from your first discovery call with us, through implementation, and beyond.
Let's talk and build the solution you've been looking for. Schedule a consultation today!