Pushed for time? The top five takeaways from this eBook:

1. The three elements that can make or break a webinar are technical fluency, content, and delivery style
2. When deciding on the topic and creating content for your event, always ask your self this: “What’s in it for my audience?”
3. Planning and preparation are essential to ensuring that nothing goes wrong during your webinar — or that if it does, you can recover from any eventuality
4. Interaction, interaction, interaction — don’t talk at your audience, engage with them
5. Timely follow-up is essential — thank your audience for participating and share the presentation and any other related content within 24 hours of your event

When webinars go bad

You know you’re in a bad webinar — and we’ve all attended at least one — when you end up listening half-heartedly, catching up on email while the webinar rumbles on in the background or occasionally paying attention when someone mentions a chart or image. It’s a really bad webinar when you don’t even make it to the end. There are three main factors that can make or break a webinar: technology, content and style.

#1: You have gremlins in the works

As a webinar pro, nothing makes my toes curl like technical hitches during other people’s events — whether that’s loss of audio or visuals, the Internet going down or the webinar software not working.

Of course, some circumstances are beyond the organiser’s control, such as a power outage during a thunderstorm, but most glitches occur due to human error or a lack of preparation. Over the years, I’ve seen some right howlers, including:

• The presenter inadvertently closing the webinar window mid-event
• The speaker losing Internet connectivity during a presentation because an electrician turned off the power
• The speaker stopping mid-way through a presentation to answer his mobile phone
• The host presenting from an airport lounge, with all the background noise of a public place
• The speaker using a mic that provided audio quality nowhere good enough for a customer-facing event
• Police sirens wailing in the presenter’s vicinity, clearly audible through an open window
• The constant “bing” of notifications and alerts on the presenter’s PC throughout the webinar
• The moderator failing to rehearse, freaking out at the start of the live webinar, and putting down the phone

The other (preventable) show-stopping technical issue is when participants join at the last minute and discover they can’t install the conferencing software. Maybe they have insufficient user privileges, or their company IT policy won’t let them run Flash, Java or other third-party platforms. Either way, the technology you use should enhance the participant experience, not detract from it or throw up obstacles to joining.

Why do people abandon webinars?

A recent study by 1080 Group revealed that the top reasons people drop out of webinars early are (in order):

1. Content not as advertised
2. Boring presenter
3. Presenter reads the slides
4. Webinar run time too long
5. Presenter reads a script
6. Webinar begins with “about our company” content
7. Too much text on slides

#2: You present war and peace

As social media shapes our multitasking skills, social interactions and ability to focus, the human attention span, or the amount time we can concentrate on a task without becoming distracted, is rapidly dwindling. According to a 2014 study by the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, our average attention span is now eight seconds — yes, you read that correctly — which is down from 12 seconds in 2000. That’s particularly shocking when you realise that the average attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. Are you still with me, by the way?

So when it comes to a webinar, it takes a really compelling topic for an attendee to stick around for an hour-long presentation. And because your audience is remote, you’ll have little idea if you’ve lost anyone’s attention, especially if there’s no Q&A or other form of interaction (unless you’re using GoToWebinar, that is). And while I’m on the topic of content, webinar participants want to listen and learn — not read slides. If all the information they need is on the slides, what is the point of having a presenter?

Top Tip:

GoToWebinar’s dashboard shows the percentage of attendees viewing the webinar screen, giving you an idea of attentiveness.

#3: It’s your style (or lack of it)

Webinars are an experience, so the style is almost as important as the substance for creating an engaging event. There are generally three reasons why webinars miss the mark on style:

There’s not enough going on.

A lengthy webinar with a single person speaking the entire time will not maintain participants’ attention, unless you employ a wide range of engagement techniques. If there are no interactions or activities, such as polls, annotations or Q&A, participants will have a hard time focusing on slide after slide after slide.

There’s too much going on.

Sometimes, less is more. Overly frequent interactions, with polls every other slide or the moderator repeatedly interjecting with questions, disrupt the flow of the presentation. Busy slides with too many visuals look unprofessional and steal the audience’s attention away from the narrative. And a live video throughout the entire presentation is distracting — especially if the speaker uses lots of over-the-top hand motions.

You’re selling instead of educating.

Unless you specifically intend the webinar to be a product demo, nothing is more of a turn-off than a hard sell, especially if participants believe they are signing up for an educational webinar. Aside from initial dropout rates, being too pushy can result in lasting brand damage, so you should avoid it at all costs

Our Survey Said…

304 respondents in total from Europe say that:

• 30-minute webinars are the most popular, with almost half of all respondents saying this is the ideal length.
• of respondents attend one to three webinars per month so competition for participants is high.
• Despite the growing move to smartphones and tablets, 94 % of people still attend from a desktop rather than a mobile device.
• Almost two-thirds of people (61 %) find webinars engaging.

The top five features of a good webinar are:

• Sharing content post-webinar
• Having well-designed slides
• Giving attendees action points
• Using interactive tools, such as polls and virtual hand-raising
• An animated presenter

The type of content attendees find most useful is (in order of preference):

1. Webinars
2. Infographics
3. White papers/ eBooks
4. Video
5. Blogs
6. One-page guides
7. SlideShare presentations

People are most likely to leave a webinar early if the content is not what was promised/advertised.

How to create the ultimate webinar from start to finish

Planning your event

Webinars appeal to a relatively specific audience looking for content that addresses their needs. There are different types of webinars you can use to capture prospects at different stages of the buying cycle. They include:

• Positioning or awareness webinars
• Educational webinars
• Sampling or demonstration webinars
• Sales conversion webinars
• Post-sale webinars.

But webinars are no different from any other marketing activity; you need to define your objectives, target audience, desired outcomes and success factors up front.

Have clear objectives

Be clear about what are you trying to get out of your webinar — whether that’s positioning your business as a thought leader, raising brand awareness or generating sales leads. You should also consider these questions:

• What is your webinar’s participant ROI, or the “what’s in it for me?” factor, that will make attendance seem worthwhile in exchange for people’s time?
• What topics will make your audience more likely to consider the webinar a must-attend event, rather than merely interesting?
• What will be your key messages and how much detail do you intend to cover? (This will dictate the length of your webinar and whether it needs to be serialised.)

Pro Tip For Creating An Agenda:

We recommend a simple, easy to follow agenda that includes: Welcome, What to expect, Speaker introduction, Content delivery with interaction, Q&A, Wrap-up.

TOP TIP : Consider staging two or three half-hour webinars rather than one long session.

Target the right audience

If you’re talking to existing customers, ask yourself: Who am I talking to? What do I know about them? What are their priorities already? And if you’re trying to reach prospects, consider:

• Which industries, functions or job titles you should address, and whether you are pitching C-suite, management or individual contributors
• What size of organisation is your sweet spot in terms of revenue, turnover or headcount
• What your target geographies are, and if there are any other demographics that you can use to build a profile of your audience.

Determine desired outcomes and success factors

What is the call to action for your audience after the webinar? A few options include:

• Initiate a conversation
• Request a sales demo
• Start a product trial
• Download a white paper

You can’t measure success if you don’t know what success looks like. Depending on your objectives, there are multiple ways to track the response to your webinar, including:

• Number of registrants and attendees
• Number of sales leads generated
• Social media mentions of your brand or webinar hashtag

Kick off your planning properly

Ideally, you should start planning your webinar around eight weeks before your intended go-live date. Set up a project timeline and determine which people you need to help you deliver the event. Kick off with a cross-functional meeting — either in person or virtually — led by a strong project manager who will also double as the webinar producer. Your agenda should aim to:

• Identify who needs to be involved internally
• Discuss key messages, working title and content ideas for the event
• Choose a webinar format — will you use a PowerPoint-style presentation, run a live demo or show something else on screen?
• Identify speakers, panellists and a moderator
• Commit to get speaker biographies, logos and headshots
• Confirm dates for rehearsals and the live event
• Develop the execution plan for nurturing sales leads after the webinar

After the meeting, make sure you get commitments from speakers for specific dates and times, and set up a virtual repository for sharing project plans, presentations, images, biographies and other related assets. Lastly, schedule your webinar through your eventmanagement service, such as GoToWebinar, and choose your audio options, which are typically

• VoIP (attendees use the speaker and mic on their PC or other device)
• Freephone numbers (you pay for attendees to dial in)
• Toll-based numbers (attendees pay to dial in)
• Use your existing conference call service

Pro Tips On Choosing A Speaker:

Your webinar speaker should be a subject-matter expert, but ideally not from sales or marketing (unless the topic of the webinar is selling or marketing).

While luminaries, analysts and authors can be a draw, you don’t need “rock star” presenters to elicit a good response. But you can boost attendance by harnessing a wellconnected thought leader’s credibility and social network to promote the event.

Promoting your webinar

Sitting through a webinar requires a bigger commitment than downloading a white paper, so the value of the webinar must be both important and clear to attendees. With more and more webinar invitations landing in inboxes, there’s more competition than ever for eyes and ears. We know from our research that people typically attend only a handful of webinars a month, so yours has to stand out from the crowd to be among the chosen few.

Formulate your invitation list

Attracting a targeted demographic will increase the likelihood that your audience consists of only those who care about what you have to say. Identify prospect list sources that match the profile(s) you drew up in the planning stage. Make use of whatever combination of data you can get your hands on, whether that’s from in-house databases or lists from media partners, sponsors and brokers.

TOP TIP : Don’t have too many fields on the registration page — just capture essential intelligence.

Craft an email invite

Next, you’ll need to develop a compelling invitation that induces “fear of missing out” among your target audience. There isn’t a hard-and-fast template for this, but to maximise your chances of success, you should have:

• An attention-grabbing webinar title
• The date and time, plus time zone of your event (even if your audience is local, certain members may be travelling at the time of your webinar)
• A one- or two-page benefits-led description (leave out the product pitch and focus on learning)
• Three to five bullets summarising the key takeaways
• A brief speaker biography or list of credentials
• A few bullets describing who should attend, so invitees know if it’s relevant for them
• A conspicuous call-to-action button for invitees to ‘register now’ (the CTA link should ideally appear two or three times throughout your invite for maximum exposure).

When it comes to describing your webinar, you should be honest, accurate and realistic. The top reason people leave webinars is because “content was not as advertised.”

Develop your landing page

Next, you’ll need to develop an appealing landing page, which has the sole objective of getting people to register. Don’t pepper your registration-page form with too many fields, or people will abandon it. Just capture essential items: name, email, phone number, company, job title and industry. To help evaluate your proposed content against participants’ expectations and make any adjustments necessary before the event, consider an additional field also asking: “What would you like us to cover in this webinar?”

Tell the world about your event

You need to start promoting your webinar around three weeks prior to the big day. A well-timed series of email invitations works wonders. Try this set of three touch points for better exposure:

T-3 weeks: initial invitation

T-1 week: follow-up with a reminder to register

T-1 day: last chance to register/reminder to attend

Of course, social media offers a major venue for promotion, so publicise your webinar on all the channels where you’re active, as well as among your network of affiliates. Make sure your email invite and registration page include buttons for social sharing, and consider using a customised hashtag to raise awareness of the webinar and tie it in with any in-person events. Live tweet the event to engage attendees during the event, and encourage participants to continue the conversation afterwords on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Your website and blog provide obvious opportunities to draw attention to your webinar. But don’t overlook other free exposure opportunities. Include a link to the webinar registration in your company’s email signature banner, so your sales teams can spread the word effortlessly.

See who’s coming

Track your registration metrics in the days leading up to the webinar and tweak your strategy as necessary based on click-through and registration rates. Don’t forget that webinar registrations are affected by email deliverability, open rates and conversions on the landing page. Realistically, attendance on the day of the webinar will be around 30 to 50 percent of total registrants, but you can bump up the total viewings by another 10 to 15 percent if you make the live broadcast available as an ondemand recording after the event.

TOP TIP : To determine audience preferences for time of day, just ask via the survey or polling feature of your webinar platform.

Producing your webinar

Get the format right

Time of day

You should set a start time based on how convenient it is to your audience — not you, not your guest speaker. If you’re running a global webinar and you need to see what time would work best for your attendees, use a tool such as a timezone converter to see the time across a number of different locations.

Keep it short

Since your participants’ physical separation from the event invites their minds to wander, the length of your webinar is key to keeping them engaged and attentive. So remember that once you factor in the welcome and speaker introduction, audience polls and Q&A session, the actual presentation should account for no more than 30-35 minutes of the total run-time in an hour-long webinar.

But according to our survey, most people prefer 30-minute webinars. So take that hour and create two focused half-hour webinars — with 20 minutes each of presentations plus 10 minutes’ Q&A — to keep your audience engaged. For niche topics, tightly storyboarded 15-minute webinars are very popular since people can easily watch them at the start of the day or while they are eating lunch.

TOP TIP : Avoid using ‘About our company’ slides at the beginning of your presentation — the audience is there to listen to your content, not your corporate history.

Have the right format

Audiences universally prefer a dialogue to a speech. If you’re presenting solo, engage your moderator in discussion at the top and bottom of your presentation. While two speakers are better than one, don’t have any more than that; it’s a huge challenge to facilitate a seamless, effortless flow of conversation among a panel of three or more speakers.

Make killer content

A high-performing webinar is not (seriously, NOT) about selling. It’s about stimulating intellectual curiosity, teaching your audience something new and inspiring them to have a conversation about it afterwards. Start off with a strong hook, such as a fact, short story, personal anecdote or familiar challenge, to grab their attention and set their expectations for a high-impact webinar.

You must have relevant, timely information and demonstrate business or personal value. Popular presentations formats include: a cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end; an authentic use case or tutorial; or an argument for a new way of thinking. Be willing to share insights that took you or your business years to acquire the hard way; these gems will pay dividends. Focus on real-life examples, best practices, lessons learned, tips, tricks and techniques that speak to your audience’s daily challenges.

Structure your story

People retain structured information much more reliably and accurately than information presented haphazardly. So make your point or tell your story with clear purpose using these formats:

• Past, present, future
• Compare and contrast
• Cause and effect
• Problem, solution, benefit
• What? So What? Now What?

Produce stellar slides

Presentation slides aren’t just something for people to look at while the speaker is talking — they’re also a way of managing the audience’s expectations and bookmarking the delivery to make sure everything runs smoothly. We recommend the following placeholder slides form the bones of your presentation.

Have a structured list of placeholder slides

• Pre-webinar: Give attendees that join the webinar early something interesting to look at, or even something to do, such as a quiz
• Agenda: Let the speaker and audience know exactly where they are along the presentation. Put a few bullets at the beginning for the basics, but why not really grab attention by providing a visual map of your webinar’s content instead?
• Title: Create a slide for each speaker with the presentation title, date, speaker’s name, job title and company (but not their biography – this isn’t the time or the place)
• Housekeeping: Explain the different features and tools of the webinar platform that the audience can use, as well as any social information, such as a hashtag that people can follow
• Poll placeholder: These will act as handy prompts for you to launch polls at the right points during the webinar
• Q&A: Kick off the question and answer session and include any necessary contact information
• Wrap-up: Summarise the key takeaways from the webinar and include the call to action
• Thank you: Include a final slide to signify the event is over and thank the audience for participating

Keep primary content slides short

To keep the momentum going during your presentation, try to spend no more than one minute per slide (even less is better!). If you need longer to cover a point, split it into two or three slides.

Here at Citrix, we try to discourage the use of bullet points in favour of more visual slides. Use pictures and diagrams with a clear purpose to illustrate your point. But don’t clutter them up with too much detail. If you must use text, limit yourself to just a few key words and make them BIG AND BOLD! And if you really feel that bullets are best, use absolutely no more than three or four per slide.

Wrap things up with a summary of your main points and a clear call to action. The audience should have no doubt about what you want them to do next.

Use visual aids properly

Visual presentation tools such as Keynote, PowerPoint and Prezi can help you get your point across. But remember these tools are merely aids and not the substance of the presentation itself. Don’t let fancy slide transitions and animations distract or detract from your expertise.

Use a webcam to add live video to your webinar, but don’t turn the entire presentation into a series of talking heads. Simply use the video as a way to bring a human face to the introduction, Q&A session and closing address to connect more personally with your audience.

TOP TIP : To really connect with your audience, smile when you’re telling your story and keep your voice animated — no one wants to listen to a monotone voice for an entire presentation.

Make the presentation interactive

Your audience doesn’t want to be “talked at” for a half-hour solid, so interactivity is key. Polls with multiple-choice questions provide a welcome opportunity for audience participation, although two or three in a one-hour webinar is plenty.

Don’t forget to make use of the questions pane in your platform to encourage audience interaction. And towards the end of a presentation, you can gauge information recall by throwing down a challenge and incentive. For example: “Earlier in this presentation, we identified the single biggest challenge to [webinar topic]. The first person to correctly tell me what that is gets a [free trial, copy of your book or whatever you have up for grabs].”

You can also ask the audience to virtually raise their hand and get them to take a photo of something relevant and post it on Twitter using your webinar hashtag.

If you have reserved the last 10-15 minutes of the webinar for Q&A, you don’t want to run the risk of embarrassment by having no questions to answer. To avoid this, prior to the event, solicit two or three seed questions from the speaker, producer or other stakeholders. These prevent “dead air” and getting the ball rolling can inspire or encourage shy participants to venture their own questions. Unless you’re flying solo, have a plan in advance for the moderator to handle live questions and pose them to the speaker.

Have the right delivery style

Lead like a tour guide

In any webinar, the content is the hero. So don’t open with a long-winded introduction to your company or speaker credentials — get straight to the good stuff. Set expectations of where you intend to lead your participants, so they’re confident of the value to come and are willing to follow. Help your audience stay with you with these transitioning techniques:

• Paraphrase your previous point before moving on: “Now we’ve seen how our competitors do this…”
• Ask a question that hints at what’s coming next: “So how can we go beyond what our competitors are doing?”
• Use an agenda slide with your current position highlighted to visually indicate where you are in the presentation.

Vary your delivery

One of the most important elements in delivering a webinar is your voice. Vary volume, tempo and inflection to give your voice authentic energy and avoid the monotony that will otherwise cause your audience to tune out. If you’re not used to speaking for long periods of time, you may find you need to use muscles you didn’t know you had! If that’s the case, build up vocal stamina and regulate your breathing by reading out loud for 10 to 15 minutes a day. This will also help you find your natural tempo and rhythm. It may help to record a few sessions to play back, so you can hear what you sound like objectively and make adjustments to your style as needed.

Focus on attention and retention

Without some form of audience involvement, you’re effectively delivering a monologue. One way to make a webinar interactive is to ask your audience to do something, such as answer a poll, submit a question or comment via the chat function.

However, you don’t want to break the flow of your presentation with too many diversions, so apply simple neuro-linguistic techniques to keep your audience engaged. Use analogies to describe a challenge to activate mental constructs and enable faster information processing and better comprehension. Or get your attendees to mentally participate by asking them to imagine, remember or picture a scenario in their mind’s eye, rather than just listening you to describe it.

And keep your topics a two-way conversation by focusing back on participants’ pain points. If your attendees are in a particular industry or line of business, underscore why the point you just made is especially relevant to their interests.

Figure out logistics and technical requirements

Much of your credibility and competence in delivering a webinar relies on being able to run a technically flawless and fluent session, so don’t even contemplate winging it. You should be familiar and comfortable with the technology you’re using, but you’ll need to ensure you have a ‘Plan B’ in case of a technical problem. Ideally, you should have:

• Copies of slides so the show can go on if your computer crashes
• Your webinar software log-in credentials, dial-in number and access code written down on paper, in case your Internet or landline connection goes down (having a mobile phone as back-up is also worthwhile)
• The support number for your webinar software provider written down in case of support issues
• Your presentation saved on two computers so you can easily switch presenter if needed.

And make sure your speakers have the moderator or producer’s mobile number in case of difficulties before or during the event.

Check your sound quality

Think of your webinar as a radio show with pictures: it needs broadcast quality. Find out where your speakers intend to physically be on the day, in case their location or choice of equipment is likely to affect sound quality. Remember, if you can hear it, the microphone can too! Poor sound from open mics and PC speakers can detract from your webinar, and you should avoid using speakerphones or any wireless or battery-operated devices. Presenters should avoid breathing directly into their mic, or they’ll end up sounding like Darth Vader!

TOP TIP : However you connect, have a high-quality headset, for either VoIP or landline, and a working USB microphone.

Prepare in advance

Test your technology ahead of time to understand the features available and get any speakers or panellists to do the same. Show them how to mute themselves in case they have a sudden coughing fit or other unanticipated background noise.

If at all possible, have speakers rehearse their presentation in the presence of a remote audience and record it. That way you can play it back, objectively review the delivery and identify any snags or areas for improvement.

If you have multiple speakers, things can get a little more tricky, so it’s best do a table read a couple of weeks beforehand. This should include:

• Reviewing the agenda
• Introducing the speakers to one another and the moderator
• Covering housekeeping issues
• Sound checks
• Reviewing each presenter’s slides
• Agreeing on whether the host or speakers will share their screen and be in control of the presentation
• Rehearsing the session
• Practising cues and transitions between slides to eliminate awkward silences.

Know what you need the day of the event

Double-check that your crucial supporting infrastructure — phone lines, Internet connections and so on — is available. If you haven’t done so already, designate someone to be responsible for any technical challenges that might arise, so the speaker can focus on the presentation without skipping a beat. Make sure whoever is sharing a computer screen disables all popup notifications and sounds.

After a sound check to confirm volume levels and optimise equipment settings, you’re all set to go! Immediately following your event, have attendees rate the webinar using an exit survey so that you can gather feedback while the content is fresh in their minds. You can even get insight for future events in this space by asking what topics they might like you to cover in future webinars, or whether they’d like a free trial of your product.

Keep your webinar working after your event

Make your webinar on-demand

Get long-term value by putting a recording of the webinar online in an easy-to-view format, such as a Windows Media Player file. To keep the run-time down, you may also want to edit out content that isn’t relevant to your on-demand audience, such as housekeeping or details on how to vote in a poll.

Say thank you

Sustain the momentum you’ve worked so hard to build by sending out thank-you emails to all registrants, both attendees and no-shows, that include a link to the webinar recording. Add any extra resources, if you have them, including white papers or eBooks, to further reward the audience for their interest. Make sure you do this as soon as possible — certainly within 24 hours — while the event is still fresh in attendees’ minds.

Follow up with leads

Assume that registrants are probably in the market to buy what you sell. So follow up with those who watch the recorded version in exactly the same way as you follow up with live attendees. However, it pays to single out highly engaged attendees – those who not only registered and joined but who showed signs of sustained interest throughout, whether by participating in polls, hand-raising or asking questions. They’re likely to be your hottest prospects.

Analyse key metrics

Analyse registration, attendance and performance to determine whether you met your event and business objectives. And don’t forget to check the exit survey results. These statistics provide valuable insights that you can apply to your next webinar. Send a thank you note to all speakers and the moderator and let them know how the webinar performed so everyone involved can do even better in future. And finally, identify and segment sales-ready leads from those that need longer-term nurturing.