16 Webinar Best Practices for an Engaging Event

We’ve all caught up with our emails or covertly scrolled through Slack messages during a boring webinar. So we know firsthand how generic, dry content which fails to engage its audience doesn’t move the needle when it comes to increasing sales.

But when webinars are engaging and tailored to the right audience, they remain a powerful tool to help businesses generate qualified leads with interest in their product.

So how do you turn your webinar from a simple lead gen idea into a purpose-driven sales machine with maximum engagement?

We’ve created a guide to 16 webinar best practices you can steal to convert your audience and boost ROI – all by mastering attendee engagement before, during, and after the event.

What makes a fantastic webinar?

Hosting a fantastic webinar should be part of any marketing communication strategy as it gives businesses the opportunity to create evergreen content, capture qualified leads, and establish themselves as thought leaders in their space.

Yet, for a knock-out webinar that gets you more leads in the pipeline, you’ll have to do more than simply test your webcam and microphone, put it out there, and hope for the best.

Since webinars are increasingly more popular, it’s harder to get an engaged audience to check out your specific webinar in a saturated sea of them.

That’s why it’s crucial to start engaging your audience before the event with strategic decision-making and marketing; during the event with a killer end-to-end engagement platform and engagement features, and after the event with media sharing and outreach strategies.

Let’s explore some smart webinar tips for maximizing webinar engagement and boosting sales.

5 Tips for Webinar Presenters

Webinars are more common than ever and in order to stand out from the crowd, optimizing your presentation and engaging your audience is key.

From incorporating storytelling into your webinar presentation, to finding moments to interact with your audience, don't miss these 5 tips for webinar presenters!

What are some webinar best practices?

• Define your target audience
• Create a topic that captures your audience
• Invite guest speakers who add value
• Use the best webinar end-to-end platform for marketing and registration
• Get the audience using fun engagement features
• Be mindful of body language
• Use humor
• Launch polls
• Share media
• Add call-to-action buttons
• Send follow-up emails
• Send the recording

16 webinar best practices to bring in the big numbers

During the three stages of your virtual event (before, during, and after), you’ll need to focus on how you can continually engage your audience to make them drop everything and tune in to experience your mind-blowing content.

What should you do before the webinar?

It takes more than choosing the best webinar hardware to successfully engage your audience.

You’ll also have to consider who they are and what matters most to them for maximum relevance and resonance.

This means you want to define your target audience, create a topic that adds value to that audience, invite relevant speakers, and choose the best webinar platform for engagement.

1. Define your target audience

Utilizing tools like Google Analytics can help you determine your target personas based on their demographics, pages they visit, and their buyer’s journey. Look at your website’s best-performing pages to help gauge interest and potential webinar topics.

It’s also important to dive deeper into potential challenges your target audience is facing and what they might be interested in learning more about.

• What products do your visitors care about?
• What are they looking for in said products?
• What problem does your product solve?
• Why is it important and what makes it exciting?

Use this data to make hyper-relevant connections between your product and audience, and to know what key webinar topics need to be explored for higher attendee interest and engagement.

2. Create a topic that captures your audience

Once you’ve determined your audience and what persona you’re targeting in your next webinar, you’ll have a few webinar ideas to pick from and an idea of what works. Make sure any new webinar topics successfully captivate your audience by answering their most pressing questions in a specific and targeted way. The more focused your topic is and the more value it offers, the more likely your audience will be to engage.

3. Invite guest speakers who add value

The right guest speakers can delight and engage your audience with their expertise and influence. But having a knowledgeable speaker doesn’t help with engaging your audience if they’re monotonous and making boring webinar mistakes.

Make sure you select an interactive speaker who involves the audience and varies their tone and body language. Assess your speaker’s ability to engage attendees with a test demo before the webinar, and frame your feedback as a member of the audience. Then, make sure your speakers have access to the perfect microphone and webcam for webinars to ensure a seamless experience.

4. Use the best webinar end-to-end platform for marketing and registration

There are many tools that can improve your webinar presentations. The most important? Finding the right webinar end-to-end platform.

Livestorm helps businesses increase their webinar attendance rate by engaging attendees before the webinar begins with targeted emails, reminders, and custom registration forms.

5. Make the most of webinar registration pages

Automated webinars are perfect when you're looking to put your webinars on autopilot. Whether you'd like to start, stop, or automatically redirect your webinar, they allow you to save time, be more efficient, and be sure to give a solid presentation. In this video, our Content Manager, Daniella shares what automated webinars are, how they work, their benefits, and how you can get started!

6. Set up webinar automations

Automated webinars are perfect when you're looking to put your webinars on autopilot. Whether you'd like to host a fully automated webinar or a partially automated one, they allow you to save time, be more efficient, and be sure to give a solid presentation. In this video, our Content Manager, Daniella shares what automated webinars are, how they work, their benefits, and how you can get started!

7. Promote your webinar

Before the big event begins, you'll need to do one last push to promote your webinar. Schedule automated emails to remind registrants of the upcoming event and make sure to promote your webinar on social media.

Find out more tips on the best email sequence to boost your webinar attendance.

What should you do during your webinar?

During the webinar, it’s important to keep the ball rolling and build on all your engagement efforts so far. Encourage the audience to use engagement features in your chosen webinar platform, like polls and surveys during the webinar.

So choose your webinar background tool, check your hair, and start streaming!

8. Encourage your webinar audience to use engagement features

Engage participants with live chat, and answer questions in real-time using our host of engagement features, to spark delight and get attendees to interact all from one place.

Video engagement features like live chat, Q&A, media sharing, whiteboards, virtual backgrounds, emoji reactions, and live polls create an unforgettable webinar experience.

9. Be mindful of body language

Body language is a powerful form of outward expression that can directly contribute to the speaker’s ability to engage your audience. There’s nothing less engaging than a speaker slouched in their chair, seemingly just trying to get through the webinar.

Make sure your body language doesn’t go against what you’re communicating verbally and matches your tone, topic, and energy.

10. Use humor during webinar moderation

Use an appropriate icebreaker or weave humor into your webinar to leave a lasting impression on your audience and encourage participation. It’s a great way of humanizing your brand and putting attendees at ease.

11. Launch polls and surveys during your webinar presentation

Engage your audience with polls during the webinar for a dynamic and interactive experience. If you’re using Livestorm, you can easily create webinar polls and surveys to get to know your attendees better and forge meaningful relationships.

Then, ask attendees how the event went at the end of your webinar with surveys. Gather useful feedback and insights to learn how to better engage participants for future events.

12. Share media and whiteboards during your webinar

Prepare videos, presentations, and visual media in advance and share them during the event to encourage participation. Livestorm’s platform makes it easy to share media during your webinar to seamlessly interact with and delight attendees.

13. Include call-to-action buttons

Strategic CTAs peppered throughout your webinar can boost engagement and add to ROI by enabling participants to carry out the desired action. If you’re using an end-to-end video engagement platform like Livestorm, you can launch CTAs at crucial moments during your webinar. You can direct attendees to a point of purchase, your calendar to book a demo, or a discounted offer.

What should you do after your webinar?

Engagement doesn’t stop after the event. Now, you want to connect with attendees directly, have them share what they enjoyed, and lead them towards converting into brand champions. This means thinking about your follow-up emails and sending the recording to everyone who registered.

14. Send follow up emails to webinar registrants

It’s important to keep your brand and webinar top of mind by sending follow-up emails with things like key takeaways, registration links, promotional offers, poll results gathered during the webinar, or webinar replays. With Livestorm, you can customize and automate emails to reach your audience at key moments pre- or post-webinar for heightened engagement and conversion.

15. Send the recording when the webinar ends

Send the replay to registrants who couldn’t make the event to spark interest. Then, use the recording to keep your pipeline growing by creating on-demand videos of your webinar, so users can discover it on their time – helping you generate targeted leads long after the event.

Use Livestorm to make recording your webinar simple – and send it as a replay or save it as an on-demand video event for future attendees to further nurture and engage them.

16. Track your webinar analytics

Finally, when your webinar is over, you will need to track how well it performed. Head to your analytics dashboard to track who attended and watched the replay. You may also want to see the results of the polls. You can use this data to improve your webinar - if you notice attendance began to drop at one point in the webinar, you can make sure not to cover that topic in your next presentation.

Pro tip: Use Livestorm to manage webinars with Salesforce for powerfully accurate contact, lead, and sales data all in one place.

Engaging webinars supercharge sales

Webinars are an effective way of reaching your audience, generating reusable content, and building up your pipeline with qualified leads. Use a video engagement platform like Livestorm to plan your event from start to finish, automate outreach, personalize registration, and foster an interactive experience for maximum results.

Frequently asked questions about webinar best practices

How do you structure a good webinar?

A good webinar structure contains the following elements:

• A warm and convincing introduction
• The main topics or points that will be addressed
• Guest speaker(s)
• Questions and answers
• A compelling close
• A call to action

How do I get my webinars to engage more?

To boost webinar engagement, try the following tips:

• Define your target audience
• Create a topic that captures your audience
• Invite guest speakers who add value
• Use the best webinar end-to-end platform for marketing and registration
• Get the audience using fun engagement features
• Be mindful of body language
• Use humor
• Launch polls and surveys
• Share media
• Include call-to-action buttons
• Send follow-up emails
• Send the recording of the event

How long should a webinar last?

A webinar’s length depends on the topic, the number of guest speakers, and the overall goal – but it should be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to ensure attendee engagement and sustained interest.

How do I start a webinar presentation?

You should start a webinar presentation by introducing yourself and any guest speakers. Then, introduce the topic or main points that will be addressed during the webinar to maximize engagement and spark interest.

What makes a good webinar presentation?

A good webinar presentation educates, convinces, and engages the audience by giving them detailed product information, expert insights, or answers to questions. For an excellent webinar presentation, use a video engagement platform like Livestorm to make it easy to market and host your event, while tracking event success all from one place.