The Chicago HubSpot User Group (#CHIHUG), which takes place roughly every other month, is always a great opportunity for Diagram's team to connect with other “HubSpotters” and learn more about Inbound Marketing and how to get the most out of the HubSpot platform. This week, I attended this month’s HUG along with my colleague Sarah Corley, and it was another great experience.
This Month’s Topic: Are Webinars Worthwhile?
This month’s HUG featured a presentation by Erin Wasson and Erin Borgerson on how to get the most out of webinars. It was a great look at how to prepare for your webinar, how to make sure a webinar runs smoothly, and what you can do to continue to promote your webinar and connect with attendees after it is finished. Here are some of the tips that I found especially helpful:
Before the Webinar
- When preparing for your webinar, make sure to involve your sales team. Make sure they have an overview of what you’ll be covering, and send them your list of talking points so they can discuss them with their prospects. Make sure they have everything they need to help you promote the webinar and connect with the leads you expect to generate.
- When writing the script for your webinar, you can use one of several methods, ranging from a full, word-for-word script, having a list of talking points, or going completely off the cuff. You’ll want to cater to your presenters’ strength and experiment to find out what works best for your company.
- When creating the slides for your webinar, their design is just as important as their content (you can download some great PowerPoint templates from HubSpot here). Make sure to include an agenda slide at the beginning so people know what to expect, stick to a common theme throughout the presentation, and use your slides to tell a story. Inserting interactions like polls throughout the webinar is a great way to keep people engaged and demonstrate the points you are making.
During the Webinar
- Make sure everyone who is participating or helping out is ready 30 minutes before the webinar starts. No exceptions!
- Make sure your phones, computers, tablets, etc. are 100% on silent. This includes vibration; you don’t want any interruptions during the webinar. For Mac users, make sure to use Do Not Disturb to keep any notifications from popping up on your screen.
- Have a backup plan in case your internet connection goes out (one option is to have a phone ready that you can use as a Wi-Fi hotspot). Make sure your plan is documented so everyone knows what to do in such a crazy eventuality. If you do lose your internet connection but still have listeners who have called in to the webinar on a conference line, keep the call going and let everyone know that you’ll send them the slides for the presentation later.
After the Webinar
- Make sure to send a list of the webinar attendees to your sales team so they can follow up with them.
- Even though it’s over, continue to promote your webinar, letting people know where they can view the recording. Use your webinar as an evergreen piece of lead-generating content!
These are just a few of the great webinar tips that were shared during the HUG; if you want to know more, contact us, and we’ll help you plan and execute great webinars as part of your own digital marketing strategy.
As always, we had a great time at the Chicago HUG, and we’re looking forward to the next one, which, unfortunately, won’t be taking place until 2017 (boo!). In the meantime, we're looking forward to meeting up with other HubSpotters at the Inbound conference in November. If you're going to be there, please let us know in the comments below!
