You have to reach geographically dispersed audience, but you cant afford to stretch your budget. You have decided that webinars are the best way to reach your target audience (which they are!) and now that you have made this big decision, you are faced with lots of other seemingly smaller decisions.

Is Webinar the right choice? How can you ensure people attend your webinar? Can you use it to raise your company's profile? Can you make a HIT? And many more such. Simple questions. Can prove to be more challenging than you think though. So how do tackle them, you ask? Well, our answer is careful planning. That's right. Planning plus some.


Make it relevant

If you want people to rate your webinar highly, let your moderator and presenters know what they must focus on so as to make it most relevant for your target audience. It’s good practice to not overtly support your organization or its products.

It is worthwhile making sure that your webinar speaks about something new to the audience. No one wants to learn about something they already know. Do you want to listen to an hour-long advertisement on how good a partner company is? Probably not. A webinar your customer considers valuable is advertisement enough. That, in itself, will generate word-of-mouth publicity.


Work out an effective schedule

A series of webinars spread across a few weeks on related topics is more effective than a series of webinars on a single day or a single long webinar. Separate webinars are more focused. A single webinar flowing from one topic to another does not guarantee a captive audience. It merely ensures that webinar attendees move on to other important issues in their workday quickly. Spreading webinars across a few weeks increases valuable word-of-mouth publicity and raises the public profile of your company. A company known for organizing a series of webinars over time will be regarded more highly than a company, which makes a big splash and has nothing to follow it up with.


Get expert speakers

When it comes to getting noticed, names do matter. Choose recognized experts and well-known authors to moderate and speak at your webinar. Preferably, do not have more than one speaker from your organization as it might undermine the credibility of your webinar before it starts. It is good to have a credible webinar, even if you have a captive audience, as it will help you engage your audience effectively.

But, big names matter only during your first few webinars. If you host good webinars, then all you have to do is get experts for subsequent sessions. They no longer have to be recognized experts and their expertise will be sufficient to guarantee that what they speak about in the webinar is of value to the audience.


Time it well

You might have the best webinar on the best possible topic, but if you host it on the wrong date, weekday or even time of day, you will lose most of your target audience.

Ever wondered why most of the webinars you have attended are in the middle of the week and especially on Wednesdays. It is a simple question of time. Research has discovered that people have most time in the middle of the workweek. When you schedule your webinar, make sure it is not on a holiday or on a day immediately preceding or succeeding a holiday. Mondays are too busy spent catching up on e-mails and other work. Too many projects end on Fridays and people are too busy with their weekend plans, often leaving early—and forget the Thanksgiving weekend too!

Consider the time zones of your target audience. Most attendees prefer to attend webinars from their desks, particularly during lunch hour. If your audience is from coast to coast, 11 a.m. Pacific Time is a good time to start.

If your target audience is truly global, then aim for a time, which would give you waking hours for most of your target audience. To cater to your entire target audience, you may want to record your webinar, so that interested webinar attendees can review it later. An alternate and a highly effective one at that is On-demand webinar which is pre-recorded and can be played back whenever the attendee wants to.


Promote it well in advance

As soon as you schedule your webinar, start promoting your webinar from your website. If you are using more expensive forms of promotions, such as advertising in trade magazines and journals, start using those three weeks before the webinar. Anything longer, and people will forget about the webinar. Anything less does not give time for word-of-mouth publicity to build or for people to schedule their regular work around your webinar.