The Complete Webinar Training Guide

It’s never been so easy to communicate as it is today. We have so many channels we can use to reach out to family members, people halfway around the globe, or even existing or prospective clients.

Businesses need to master the art of communicating online to see their plans through and achieve their goals.

Webinars are an essential tool that businesses can use for product or onboarding training and internal HR training. But only when they are done right.

In this article, we’ll be digging into how training webinars can help businesses scale up their interactions and the tips they can use to overcome any obstacles standing in the way of success.

What is Webinar Training?

A webinar training is any form of teaching or instructing an audience using webinar software. It is an online seminar hosted by one or several subject-matter experts that includes a presentation and interaction with a minor or more extensive audience.

It is a versatile form of training that you can use for employee training or corporate and marketing communication.

Apart from the teaching/instructive part, webinar training usually includes a live Q&A or a practical section.

Webinar pieces of training are versatile because they can be:

• held live
• recorded
• on-demand

Through webinar training, businesses can:

• educate their teams on achieving a specific goal
• explain how new products or services work to internal teams so that they can market the product better
• explain how new products or services work to customers or users, via customer onboarding
• provide essential information to new employees, helping them become familiar with the company’s goals and policies
• provide continual training to existing employees

To better understand what webinar training means, let’s take a closer look at the two main goals of webinar training – product onboarding and employee training.

Customer Onboarding and Product Training

Through product or onboarding webinar training, you can educate customers as well as employees.

Let’s take the first scenario. Say you have a product/service that is more complex. For example, you are selling green screen software (which is a popular combination with webinars).

On the one hand, this complexity will mean many potential customers are hesitant to buy it. On the other, you may have customers that have purchased the product but aren’t sure how it works.
In the end, this means they will either not buy the product or use it to its fullest. Either way, to you, it will be bad news because it spells poor product adoption and retention rates. Not to mention poor customer satisfaction levels.

This is where webinar training can save the day. By compiling a comprehensive seminar on what the product does and how you can use it, you will increase your customer satisfactionand revenue.

In the same scenario, you can use webinar training for customer onboarding even if the product is not particularly complex. Use this form of training to let customers know what they can expect from using your product and the multiple ways they can benefit from using it.

In the second scenario, you use webinar training to bridge the gap between your product development and marketing teams. Often, the marketing team fails to deliver better results because they are not adequately trained in understanding the product they are marketing.

A webinar training can provide essential information on a product and help target your marketing strategies better.

Employee Onboarding Training and Development

You can use webinar training as a tool to onboard new employees. Especially now, when work and hiring have moved online, it’s essential to create proper internal documentation as well as interactive learning and development space to introduce new hires to your company’s culture, policies, and goals.

On top of that, you can use online training to introduce and train new hires in their specific role in the company. Also called employee onboarding, this type of webinar training is an efficient way to centralize and teach everything a new hire should know about the departments, processes, and procedures your company employs and how they fit into the big picture.

Without proper guidance, new employees (especially those working remotely) will have difficulty finding their place in the company and correctly understanding what you expect of them. With webinar training, you can address any issues and obstacles they face and clearly explain what’s what.

The onboarding experience is often the one that dictates how productive an employee is and how long they will remain employed within your company. So, paying extra attention to this aspect will pay off in more ways than one.

Webinar training is also a cost-effective way to train existing staff and contribute to their ongoing development. They can cover any type of employee training. From specialized courses to skill and career development, you can easily tackle all aspects.

Offering high-quality training can help you develop and retain talents but also increase employee engagement in the company.

Why Should You Train through Webinars?

Webinar training has a host of benefits for companies.

For one, it is a very affordable way to centralize your training needs. One webinar training is all it takes to reach customers or employees no matter their location on the map. It also solves the issue of availability as organizing training sessions worldwide can take a lot of time and resources.

Second, having one tool to satisfy the needs of so many participants means that webinar training is very efficient.

Third but not least, webinar training can increase the productivity and engagement of your employees. That will quickly translate into better retention rates, more revenue, and more profit.

Cost

In-person training comes with a lot of baggage. From organizing the webinar to organizing the location and the participants, it can take a lot of time. And a lot of money.

Webinar training is easy to deliver and access. No travel expenses, no need for renting a space. Create it once and deliver it as many times as you want. To as many audiences.

Being convenient to attend also means that webinar training can help you raise the number of participants. Reaching more people with an already affordable product doubles its cost-efficiency.

Efficiency

Webinar training is ideal for delivering expert knowledge wherever and whenever it is needed. You can get ahead of the needs of different departments or locations and centralize all the required data in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-deliver package.

For instance, if the webinar training is for employee onboarding, you can create a training program that centralizes all of the different aspects of the company and a specific job. This way, you will ensure that the employee is put on the right track from the very beginning and waste no time.

The same goes for product onboarding. Take out the need to repeat the same things over and over again. All you need is to put together a webinar training on a specific topic and grant access to anyone who needs it.

As for attendee participation and engagement, webinar trainings are very successful. First of all, because they allow people access to valuable knowledge from the comfort of their home, second, because they can be very interactive and highly engaging.

Availability

Another major obstacle in training, no matter its type, is availability—both on the side of organizers and experts and the side of attendees.

The remote delivery of webinar pieces of training is very convenient for everyone involved and increases participation. In addition, once you create a webinar training, you can repurpose it. You can easily make it an online course or a series of on-demand videos.

And all of this with the cost of one regular training course.

Tips for Webinar Training

Format, participants, structure, and promotion; here are some tips you should know when you start planning your first webinar.

Format

Your webinar training format will depend on your specific needs. Your options are live or pre-recorded.

The main difference is that real-time webinar training is available at a specific date and time, while a recorded webinar training is available at any time. Of course, a live webinar training can always be recorded and transformed into an on-demand video or a video course.

Live webinars have the benefit of being more engaging for the audience. They usually include Q&A sessions, surveys, screen sharing, or practical exercises. This type of webinar is ideal for employee onboarding and training on the job because it can be more personalized and engaging.

Recorded training is more convenient because it can be accessed and re-watched anytime. They are ideal for customer onboarding or product onboarding.

Participants

Next, you’ll need to choose who you want to attend your webinar. You can host webinar training for internal participants such as your employees. Or, you can allow access to anyone inside or outside your organization.

Remember that the main benefit of webinar training is that people from anywhere in the world can attend it.

Once you know who you want to invite, map out your training content to fit the audience. If it’s aimed at people inside the organization, you can use more specific language and go into subjects that the participants are familiar with.

If the webinar training is for a general audience, structure the content and the language in an easy way to be understood by everyone.

Structure

Depending on your webinar training’s subject and who will be attending, you’ll need to structure your content to address the main issues participants may be facing and create a foundation that will help them achieve their goals.

Your primary focus should be to answer these questions:

• What specific characteristics do your attendees have?
• Are they students, employees, customers?
• Are they young?
• Are they already engaged with your company?
• What are their reasons for attending this webinar training?
• What are your goals for organizing this webinar training?
• What fundamental information/ideas should attendees leave with once the training is over?

Once you have these details clear in your mind, make sure the webinar is relevant to your audience’s needs. Then, adapt the duration of the webinar training to this. You want to deliver all the relevant information. But you don’t want to provide too much information and end up confusing participants even more.

Try to create an interactive space where you engagingly address topics. You can involve participants in the story by:

• letting them ask questions
• asking them to take surveys or polls during the webinar
• holding Q&A sessions at the end of the webinar or the end of a topic

To increase engagement, you should also:

• set up an agenda for the webinar and distribute it among participants. (This way, they can follow along.)
• add visuals like charts, graphs, infographics
• create a summarized version of the webinar that participants can download after
• make a collection of videos on FAQs that participants can re-watch whenever they need to

Promotion

Last but not least, to succeed, you’ll need to promote your webinar training.

For this, you can:

• leverage email marketing strategies and create an informative email or newsletter and distribute it to subscribers or your email list
• use your social media channels and social media promotion tools
• promote it through industry or market influencers and thought leaders
• use paid online advertising platforms like Facebook Ads and Google AdWords
• advertise through your industry network

Final thoughts

When work from home is a new norm, it is increasingly difficult to keep connected and communicate.

Webinar training allows you to do exactly that. With minimal costs and high efficiency, you can have higher attending rates than if you would organize regular training, all thanks to the seamless webinar technology that seems to be used by every company nowadays.