Webinars, webcasts, or virtual events…whatever you want to call them, they are all a lot of work!

In this comprehensive webinar checklist, we look at all the key steps needed to make your life easier in running a successful online event.

Checklist For Pre-Webinar Preparations

• Planning A Successful Webinar (Preferably 8 weeks prior)
  • Pick a date (mid-week tends to do the best for webinar times)

• Clarify your target audience (Are you mainly targeting your current clients or prospects?)
• What stage of the funnel is the webinar content? (eg bottom of the funnel product demonstration).
• Decide on your webinar goals (eg 50 registrations, 20 attendees, 5 new meetings booked, 2 SQO, 1 Closed Won)
• Plan who the webinar panelist(s) will be (if needed – adds some complexity)

• If you haven’t already, decide which webinar platform you want to use (eg Zoom Webinars, Goldcast, On24, Hopin, GotoWebinar, Welcome, Brella)
• Decide on the length of the webinar (30 minutes to 1 hour is the standard).
• Confirm the time you want to broadcast. (11am, 1pm or 2pm in your audience’s time zone is a safe bet.)
• Decide if you will allow time for Q&A or not, and if you do, then prepare questions for the webinar Q&A.
  
  
  
• Promoting Your Webinar (Preferably 5 weeks prior)
  • Create a landing page to capture registrations. Here are some things to include on your landing page:
    • Spend time thinking about your title
    • Create a short and succinct description of the event
    • (optional) Add a Hashtag. This is more common with one-off Summits.
    • Create a Registration Form. Best practice is to limit the amount of fields so as not to add too much friction to the signup process
    • Write out the speaker details and bios
    • If applicable, add sponsor logos
    • Build a Thank you page, which allows an attendee to add the event to a calendar.
    • Have an automated email go out after registration with the calendar details (some webinar platforms have this as an automatic function, or you can customize your own one).

• Prepare your marketing and sales outreach emails to go out over the course of the promotional period. Email is a major driver for webinars, so perfecting this channel is key.
  • Create promotional images for Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. These will be shared out over the run up to the event. Promotional images can vary from broad event visuals, to images that just focus on one of the speakers.
  • (Optional) Create a trailer video for the webinar where a host (or the hosts) talk about what to expect.

• Preparing the Webinar Content (Preferably 3 weeks prior)
  • Create an outline for your webinar content
  • Write out the following:
    • Intro track (welcome to..; here’s who we are)
    • Core of webinar (eg 3 things to learn about scaling a marketing team)
    • Outro track (thank you, you’ll receive recording in followup email)
    • Q&A: Prepare how long you want to run the Q&A, and maybe have some backup questions to pose if registrants are hesitant to engage.
  • Plan engagement during the webinar
    • Polls to run throughout
    • Q&A (as mentioned above)
  • Dry-run content
    • Do a test recording with the speakers fo get everyone comfortable with the format and content.

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Webinar Checklist for Day of Webinar

The day of the event can be a bit stressful, so having this checklist for the day can be extremely helpful for reducing nerves. 95% of your promotional efforts are done at this stage, so now it turns to execution of the event itself.

• Send a reminder email to participants
• Make sure room is quiet, and make sure your company knows that the webinar will take place today (eg send a slack to the office – or your roommates – to give them a heads up).
• Have the speaker call in 30 minutes prior to test the connection, and run through the slides quickly and reduce their nerves!
• Use a wired connection, so to avoid any potential connection issues during the webinar
• Schedule final social media posts (eg “Webinar starts in 1 hour”; “We are now Live with our webinar”)
• Mute all phones during the broadcast!
• Press “BROADCAST”! (and Record if it’s not automatic)

After The Webinar

Once the webinar is complete, the project is by no means over. In B2B sales, the post-event followup is a key part for booking meetings, so marketers need to have all the assets ready to go for their prospecting team.

• Download the webinar recording to your computer (and make sure not to lose your connection when doing so),
• Adjust the landing page time and call-to-action pages (eg RSVP > View the Recording)

• Upload the recording to Milk Video and clip the best moments to be shared out on social media and with your sales teaam
• Upload the full video to Vimeo/Youtube.
• Transcribe your video into text, and then add that to your on-demand landing page, or turn it into a blog post.
• Upload the webinar clips to Vimeo/Youtube, too (see how Retool repurposed their webinar into video clips using Milk Video)
• Share the webinar clips on Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Schedule them over the course of the next few days, with a call-to-action being to watch the full recording, or reading the write-up.
• Embed in a blog post on site (or add to your resources section)
• Send followup email as quickly as possible to registrants with the recording & CTA
• Followup with any Q&A that you didn’t respond to in the live session
• Review numbers (registrations, attendees, purchase % and decide how to optimize the next webinar) and look at your attribution data over the course of the weeks ahead.

The key to a good webinar is thinking about all three stages – before, during and after the event – and if you use this checklist as a reference, you’ve got a superb chance at taking it one step further and making it a great event.