Just like writing a blog post, you have to recognize who your audience is before you start plotting your webinar. You have to know what their occupation is, what challenges they face, what skills they want to learn, and other desires they possess. This will help you produce a webinar that’s on a specific topic and will most likely to become well-received by the audience. After all, you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to create, plot, and produce a webinar that isn’t pertinent or valued by your audience. This will not only waste your advertising expense, but also damage your reputation.

Clearly, some people present better than others. People such as Scott Harrison of charity:water and Sir Ken Robinson, an English author and advisor on education are prolific story-tellers who can sway people’s emotions at their will. To leverage this, you should find someone in your team that is powerful speakers who have a strong voice. Though you’re only engaging your audience digitally via Google Hangout, Skype, or other communication channels, you nonetheless need to find a presenter who’s capable of arousing your listeners’ excitement. Moreover, you need someone who can clearly convey your content to your attendees. This will help you connect with your audience closer and induce them to develop a more positive attitude towards your brand and offerings. This will also help you encourage positive word-of-mouth regarding your company.

Once you’ve selected the topic and the right speaker, it’s time to promote it. Generally, your promotional channels depend on your audience’s activities. For instance, if you’re targeting marketing professionals who are on their computers and checking their phones and emails all day long, a combination of emails, tweets, and Facebook status updates would be an optimal way of promoting your webinar. Conversely, if you potential attendees are lawyers who only check their email after 6pm, you may want to forgo social media and only use email to advertise your presentation. Regardless of the platforms you utilize, they should always correspond to your audience’s digital activities.

After you’ve finished the webinar, you need to give directions, or call-to-actions on what your audience should do next. It could be subscribing to a mailing list, signing up to trial your product, or purchasing your items. Nonetheless, you must signal actionable steps your attendees should take following your presentation because if you don’t, your audience will unlikely engage in any desirable actions (i.e. purchase your product). This subsequently will cause you to be unable to generate any financial or even tangible returns (i.e. signing up to your mailing list) from your webinar. In other words, you’ll lose money. To avoid this, ensure to present call-to-actions at the end of the digital presentation so that your audience will know what do once the webinar is done.

Webinar creation is costly. You have to dedicate one of your team members to come up with the content for the webinar, have a presenter to take the time from his or her regular work schedule to prepare for the presentation, and lastly produce the webinar. To maximize your return from the webinar, you can repackage it as a blog post, white paper, or other content collateral. This enables you create “new” content based on your existing content, which wouldn’t require too much time or resources, and distribute it to other prospective clients. This will help you provide assistance to more prospects and increase your chance of converting potential leads into sales.