Top Questions You Asked about Producing a Webinar

Webinars can be a strong lead generation tool for businesses. This month, for instance, we at HubSpot were able to attract 10K leads from our big webinars. So are you leveraging this channel for what it’s worth?

To help businesses get started on using webinars for lead generation, yesterday we hosted a session that extensively covered the webinar production process . We received some consistent questions that we wanted to discuss with our blog readers as well:

Should you charge for webinars?

In most cases, your webinars should be free. If you want to open up your content in front of a lot of people, you don’t want to create extra hurdles. A free webinar has a much greater chance to attract a lot of registrants and get shared than a paid one. That means you will generate more leads if you offered your content for free. Sometimes, the value of a lead is greater than what you might be charging for a webinar.

In what ways can you promote a webinar?

There is a variety of ways in which you can promote your webinar. Start with social media by posting updates to your active social media channles whether that is on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Then consider sending a webinar invitation to your email subscribers. Don’t forget to blog about your event and include it in calls-to-action on relevant places throughout your site. Lastly, consider promoting it on webinar listing sites. 

Should you post slides beforehand?

We would advise to not share the webinar slides before the event. You can always send them to your registrants in a follow-up email. If you decide to give them out beforehand, you increase the chances of having a smaller live audience. When people become familiar with your presentation on their own, they might feel less inclined to join you live. That, in turn, could reduce the effectiveness of your content: slides without voiceover might be taken out of context and understood incorrectly. 

Are there cost-effective webinar platforms?

There is a wide range of webinar providers one could use: some are free and others you will need to pay for. Usually, the price would vary based on the number of registrants/attendees you have. Livestream and AnyMeeting.com offer free versions of their product. Other affordable systems include GoToWebinar, Dimdim and WebEx. For larger crowds of attendees, you might want to consider ON24 and VCall.  

What types of interactive tools do you suggest? 

The major interaction points during a webinar include polls, chatting with your audience in the webinar platform and keeping up the conversation on social media. Often times the webinar platform doesn’t allow for interaction among attendees. That is why you want to shift some discussions to Twitter and encourage people to use a hashtag. After the webinar has taken place, you can write a blog post and continue the discussion in the comments section. Something like what we are doing right now. ;-) 

So do you have any comments that will continue our discussion about webinar production?