On-Demand Webinar: Best Practice Checklist for Hosting an Effective Webinar

Were you able to attend our last Webinar, Best Practice Checklist for Hosting an Effective Webinar, with Chris Bechtel, Managing Partner at Growth Engine Labs? During the Webinar, we discussed how to make your next webinar great by using our Live Webinar Checklist.

If you couldn’t attend, don’t worry. We’ve posted this Webinar online to view at your convenience.

Click Here to Watch

Or click here to download the slides.

Want a copy of the checklist you can refer to when putting together your next webinar? Check out our previous blog post to prepare for your next Webinar.

4 Steps to Increase Audience Engagement

If you host Webinars regularly you are all too familiar with this scenario: You’ve delivered highly researched information in your area of expertise for about an hour, but when you ask if there are any questions the room is silent. Though there were numerous attendees in the Webinar, were they even paying attention? Were your attendees only using you as background noise?

When you develop a Webinar you want people to get value out of the information you provide. The best way to ensure that is to keep your audience engaged by encouraging active participation. Not only will active participation help your attendees get more out of your webinar, it will help motivate you to give a better performance.

Don’t Get Straight to Business.

To increase participation with your webinar audience you will want to do as little talking at your attendees as possible. Instead try to have a discussion with your audience. While the bulk of your presentation will be going through slides or having various guest speakers share their knowledge, opening the floor in the beginning of a Webinar can help keep your audience invested.

As you are waiting for more people to join the Webinar who may be late or you’re getting set up, open the lines of communication. Whether that is through audio, chat or polling. Ask questions of your audience about what they would like to learn from your Webinar or if any of them have any questions before you begin. This way you can call back to these conversations during the main portion of your Webinar. Even referring to the attendee by name when you answer their question during the relevant section.

Integrate Polling and Questions Throughout

Most Webinars include some type of polling during the event. What’s important with polling is not that you conducted one or will use the information after the Webinar concludes, but what you can do with that information live. Can you show your audience that the polls or questions you asked impacted their experience?

Give the audience a choice of what story or example to hear from a past customer experience you are sharing. Or get a sense of what your audience already knows so you can spend more time in certain areas and speed through others.

You can also increase engagements by following up on your poll questions in the Webinar chat. If a poll asks audience members to express their level of knowledge on the topic at hand, have your host ask what are the sources of information they received or if they haven’t had any experience what spurred their interest.

Have Your Producer Be Active in the Chat

It’s no secret that during office meetings or presentations that co-workers are often speaking with each other through their office chat system, whether its Slack, HipChat or another tool. Maybe they are strategizing how to bring up a topic or they could be sending funny GIFs to each other. In a one-way presentation, such as a Webinar, distractions like this can play an even larger role.

To keep your audience engaged, have your producer or another team member spark conversation in the chat. Your producer can answer questions directly, conduct an informal poll or share reference material. The goal here is to keep your audience engaged with the Webinar so that they don’t start don’t get distracted and have your Webinar become white noise in the background.

Pro tip: having a separate team member in the role of producer will help your Webinar run more smoothly, as your host or speaker may be too busy to keep the conversation going in the chat.

Fake Some Starter Questions

No one wants to be the first one to ask a question or speak up in a room of strangers, even if that room is virtual. But you also don’t want to end your Webinar 15-minutes early because no one asked any questions. To get the ball rolling, have someone on your team chime in with a few starter questions.

You can either do this by having your host say they received a question from the chat or have another team member on the line ready to ask a few questions. Chances are there are people in your audience with those same questions.

You may also turn these questions back to your audience. When you receive a question, ask if anyone in your audience has any experience and wants to share their story. These moments may have an extraordinary impact on your audience as your attendees’ answers will help validate the content of your Webinar.  

Increasing audience engagement is imperative when building relationships and trust with your customers and prospects. When you show your audience that their individual needs matter you are more likely to meet your goals whether that means making a sale or teaching your customers how to use a feature more effectively.

AnyMeeting infuses many features to keep your audience engaged during your Webinar. With powerful features such as polling, audience reactions, chat and live Q&A, you can keep your audience’s attention with ease to meet your goals. Read more about AnyMeeting’s features here or, if you aren’t already a customer, start your free trial to host your first Webinar.

On-Demand Webinar: Growth Hacking with Interactive Content

Were you able to attend our last Webinar, Growth Hacking with Interactive Content, with Randy Rayess, Cofounder of OutGrow.co? During the Webinar, we discussed how to apply growth hacking initiatives featuring interactive content such as dynamic surveys, calculators and more.

If you couldn’t attend, don’t worry. We’ve posted this Webinar online to view at your convenience.

Click Here to Watch

We also encourage you to sign up for our next webinar,  “The Best Practice Checklist for Hosting an Effective Webinar,” on May 31st at 11:00 am PT; featuring Ken Molay, founder and president of Webinar Success. Click here to register.

Live Webinar Checklist: Make Your Next Webinar Great

Successful companies hold webinars regularly, but preparing for webinars can be a daunting task if they aren’t part of your regular routine. While setting up a webinar, you may find there are lots of moving parts and it can feel like you are in a circus spinning plates.

You are more likely to forget something important or host a subpar webinar if you don’t commit to dedicating the time and resources to get it right and check off all items on your list. Forgetting a single item on your checklist can cause anxiety, and honestly, we’ve all experience a few snafus.

We’ve recently interviewed Webinar expert, Ken Molay, President of Webinar Success and combined with our own in house expertise; we compiled a Webinar Checklist. We hope this list will aid you in conducting glitch-free and engaging Webinars. To start, at AnyMeeting, we recommend giving yourself at least 30 days to create and prepare for a successful webinar.

“A good webinar requires investment of time and effort. Bad webinars are quicker and easier to do, but is that how you want to present yourself and your company? You wouldn’t throw together a trade show booth at the last minute… why would you spend less on a webinar that hundreds of potential customers will see?”

Ken Molay, President of Webinar Success

One Month Out

•  Secure speaker & confirm availability
•  Review your webinar title & description and confirm date & time.
•  Review your webinar registration/landing page to share with your audience!

Pro Tip: Get this information to your marketing & sales teams ASAP so they can begin talking about your webinar to create buzz and get sign ups. Even if the webinar isn’t completely scripted yet; a few talking points of what to expect will go a long way.

•  Schedule a time with your webinar team and presenter for a rehearsal.

Pro Tip: Host this rehearsal at least one-week prior to your webinar. It’s imperative to make sure you understand your webinar platform’s controls, discuss introductions and hand-offs, and run through your entire presentation start to finish, especially if there are multiple presenters to adjust time allotments.

• Create a survey that attendees will receive at the end of the webinar.
• Send your speaker an outline of your standard webinar format so they know what to expect.

Pro Tip: If hosting a pre-recorded webinar, it’s important to be transparent with your audience. Let them know you are playing a prerecorded Webinar so that you are available to answer questions throughout to offer a better, more engaging experience. Otherwise, your audience will figure it out and will be less likely to engage and may drop..

• Decide your Goals/KPI. (e.g. are you looking to simply add to your lead funnel and get names for an email list or are you hoping to engage and prove yourself as trusted resource in your industry)
• Identify all key players and their responsibilities. (Host, Moderators, Presenter, etc)

Pro Tip: For webinars with a large audience, have a dedicated moderator as most technical challenges and questions come during the beginning of a webinar while the Host is doing the introduction. For webinars with a smaller audience these roles can be combined.

• Complete Slides
• Ask your speaker to promote your webinar
  • Share registration page through emails and social media posts.
  • Blog post that provides an intro to your topic with a link to your webinar.
  • Have speaker guest blog on other outlets and blogs to get the word out. 

One Week Out

• Review & finalize slides.
• Send promotional emails with call-to-action to register for your webinar.
• Conduct webinar rehearsal, platform walkthrough & technical test.

Pro Tip: This is a good time to reiterate the timing of your transitions and poll questions or any details about the introduction.

Day of Webinar

• Send final reminders to your audience via social media & email about your webinar.
• Sign-in 15 minutes early to webinar platform.
• Once signed in, go over any last minute details while waiting in the “Green Room” before the Webinar begins.
• Press “Go On Air” to go live to your attendees.
• Have a great webinar!

After Your Webinar

• Send a Thank You email to those who had registered and attended your webinar.

Pro Tip: Segment your email list between these two groups. Include both a link to a recording of your webinar as well as a Registration link for your next webinar.

• Write a summary of your Webinar on your company’s blog including a link to the recorded version.
• Share the blog summary of your Webinar through your company’s social channels and in your next email newsletter.
• Repurpose the content of your webinar, poll findings and audience questions to maintain a strong content pipeline.

Hosting a good webinar always comes back to how prepared you were. With this checklist, you should be well on your way to hosting a webinar that’s both engaging and runs smoothly.Ready to host your next webinar? AnyMeeting has pioneered small business offering a completely free, full-featured and easy-to-use webinar and web conferencing service tailored for small business users. Start your 14-day free trial now

Maintain Customer Engagement Between Webinars by Repurposing your Content

Conducting your webinar is about a lot more than the 45 minutes or hour you spend talking into your laptop’s webcam. Your webinar can be a jumping off point to keep your customers and audience highly engaged until you host your next webinar.

Here are 7 Pro Tips to keep engagement high between webinars by repurposing the content you’ve already created:

1. Create an Infographic after polling your audience.

During your webinar, poll your audience. By asking a few questions you’ll quickly get enough data to make a short infographic to share on your blog and social channels. Make sure when sharing this data you mention that it came from attendees of a webinar so it is not confused with a scientific poll.

2. Write blog posts expanding on individual sections of your webinar or audience questions.

Each section of your webinar can easily be expanded on. Combine additional information and answers to your audience questions in a series of blog posts. Since you already know that people are engaging on these topics, it’s the easiest thing you can do to fill your content pipeline.

You can also transcribe the entire webinar and post it on your blog. At AnyMeeting we recommend using TranscribeMe!

3. Add registrants to an email nurture that reiterates key points and expands on your positions.

It’s fantastic that those who attended your webinar are already highly engaged. You do not want to let these people fall into the void. Add your attendees and people who registered, but did not show up, into a separate email nurture. Share additional information on the topics presented in the webinar and any other follow up content with them. Your last email in this campaign should be an invite to your next webinar.

4. Pitch yourself and your team as a Thought Leaders

To expand your reach and authority on the discussed topic, use your webinar as a basis to pitch publishers to write (or allow you to guest blog) on their websites. You can also pitch to be a guest on a podcast or speaker at an industry conference or Meetup.

5. Upload your webinar to YouTube, Vimeo or other video platform.

Leverage your webinar by editing a few highlights and sharing them as clips on social video platforms. Short clips cut from your full-length webinar may be highly shareable and help create buzz for your business with very little additional effort.

You can also use these clips to funnel people into your full length recording. With AnyMeeting records can live behind a login screen so this is a great way to collect more leads from past webinars.

6. Beef up your SEO by creating landing pages.

Creating a resource area on your website is a great way to boost your SEO. Take some topics from your webinar and create evergreen landing pages for visitors of your site to find. As a bonus, you will be able to use your webinar as content for SEM, display ad or remarketing campaigns.

7. Upgrade your onboarding and prospect drip campaigns with thought leadership content.

Adding thought leadership content in your prospect or onboarding email nurtures is a great way to keep everyone interested. Using your webinar content to spruce up this content to make it more engaging and share your expertise will only help those now learning about you and your business.

Webinars can be a time consuming endeavor, but their ROI can be exponential if you properly leverage your content by repurposing and introducing it through a variety of channels. By conducting a webinar each month or quarter you will never have to worry about filling your content pipeline.

Ready to host a webinar? AnyMeeting has pioneered small business offering a completely free, full-featured and easy-to-use webinar and web conferencing service tailored for small business users. Start your 14-day free trial now. 

Feature Spotlight: Webinar Survey

A survey can be a very powerful tool; especially when paired with webinar service, like AnyMeeting, to boost your business or conduct your training sessions. Attendee feedback is essential when it comes to measuring ROI or gauging if your message was received. Moreover, it’s important to gain feedback after each of your webinars, so you can improve and evolve as a presenter, and determine the direction you’d like to go when it comes to future online presentations.

The easy-to-use and integrated AnyMeeting survey tool provides the opportunity to collect attendee demographics, gauge the performance of the webinar presenter, content, and technology, plus any other custom questions you may have for participants. Never used our survey tool? No problem. Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started:

1. When setting up your meeting or event in the AnyMeeting app, you will be guided through the following 6 steps: Invitation, Registration, Survey, Preview, and Finish. Once you have provided basic information for your webinar invitation, you will have the option to create an attendee registration form, followed by a prompt to create a survey for your webinar audience.

2. The AnyMeeting survey form allows presenters to customize the following fields:

• Survey Header Text – Text to appear at the top of your survey, usually like an intro
• Standard Fields – Common fields like address, marketing information, and rating scale for the presentation
• Custom Fields – Allows you to add your own questions to the survey, with an option to score the custom questions as if it was a test.  
• Footer Text – Text to appear at the bottom of your survey, usually like a thank you
• Additional Options – Receiving email notifications every time someone fills out this survey, or providing a link for attendees to visit after the survey is completed. 

3. Once you have completed survey customization, you will be able to preview the survey, and if it’s good-to-go, simply click “Finish.” Keep in mind, your webinar attendees will be taken to your survey immediately following your webinar, but you also have the option to send the survey link to individuals manually — like in a follow-up email. 
4.  The results are in! Ready to check out your survey data? Locate the completed webinar in your Account Manager, and click the meeting header text to be taken to a “Meeting Details” page. Click the “Survey” tab to view survey data. From here, you have the option to view or edit the survey, and more importantly, export and download the data as a CSV file to create your own spreadsheet. Apply this information to help shape your next meeting, presentation, or training session. 

 

As a presenter, it’s important to keep your audience engaged, to know what they really thought of your presentation, and measure what they have learned. AnyMeeting’s survey feature empowers you to do just that, and it’s included with your Webinar Pro subscription — so be sure to take advantage of it!

For more information about AnyMeeting’s webinar service and robust features, visit www.anymeeting.com.

 

New Trigger For Your AnyMeeting Zaps: Recording Is Available

A few months ago, AnyMeeting  announced its Zapier integration feature, available to AnyMeeting subscribers on Meeting Pro and Webinar Pro plans. If you are unfamiliar with Zapier, it is a service that interconnects business apps by enabling users to specify triggers and actions between apps using a simple point-and-click interface — for example, allowing AnyMeeting customers to increase lead generation and customer engagement, in a matter of minutes.

In addition to connecting webinar registrants to your email marketing lists and scheduling meetings automatically from any Zapier connected app, you can now create Zaps for whenever your webinar recordings become available for viewing. This is especially valuable when it comes to post-webinar attendee communication. By simply creating Zaps to automate emails about your recorded content, or emails that include surveys for valuable feedback, you will be working more efficiently and saving time.

You can now trigger Zaps for when your webinar recordings are ready for viewing!

 

Our CEO, Costin is super excited: “It’s really exciting to be able to offer this integration to our customers because it’s given them the freedom to use AnyMeeting in ways we never considered. They are able to integrate our platform into their other business processes, which allows us to deliver value in lots of interesting and new ways.”

Other AnyMeeting triggers currently available include:

• New Webinar Scheduled – Fires whenever you create a new webinar, so you can maybe automatically post it to your social media
• New Webinar Registration – Fires when a new attendee registers for your webinar, so you can maybe send them a custom email, put them in a Google Sheet or add them to your CRM
• New Attendees – Trigger when a meeting ends, and sends you a trigger for each attendee that was in your webinar.  Again, this is great for adding them to your CRM, sending an email or other fun activities.

Actions available include:

• Schedule a Meeting – Creates a new meeting with information provided
• Schedule a Webinar – Creates a new webinar
• New Webinar Registration -Register a person for your webinars, for example like when they sign up for MailChimp

Again, the Zapier integration feature is available to AnyMeeting subscribers on Meeting Pro and Webinar Pro plans. Check out this useful integration feature by logging in to your AnyMeeting Account and choosing the “Integrations” tab. Click here more information about the new AnyMeeting recording updates to Zapier.

Exploring The AnyMeeting Public Profile

If you are an existing AnyMeeting customer, you know the value AnyMeeting brings to you and your business with its simple, affordable, and state of the art webinar and online meeting platform. What’s more, AnyMeeting’s smart features, like the “Public Profile” (located in the Account Manager), can be a very powerful marketing tool when utilized to its full potential. Whether you are an existing AnyMeeting customer who hasn’t had time to explore your profile, or a new AnyMeeting customer, take a moment to learn more about the AnyMeeting Public Profile, why it’s valuable, and how to leverage its power to boost your business.

Features

Your public profile and its URL are customizable so you can maximize the benefits of using AnyMeeting, and promote your online events at no additional cost. Once you take a moment to fill out the profile prompts, you will be able to view your personalized page by clicking “View My Profile.”

As you can see, your name appears at the top of the profile page, followed by the details you have chosen to provide, such as: About Me, Interests, Upcoming Webinars, Past Webinars. The far left side of your AnyMeeting profile showcases your selected profile photo, as well as a homepage link and any social media integrations you desire to enable (your website, your blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Benefits

Taking a few minutes to complete your AnyMeeting Public Profile is one of the easiest and quickest ways to market and promote your webinars.  Use this profile as your webinar landing page by directing interested prospects to the page with your personalized URL. To make your webinars show up on the Public Profile, when scheduling your upcoming webinars, scroll down to “Public Profile & Social Notification Settings” and select the box that reads: “Make Public.” This way, your attendees will be able to register for your event directly after visiting your personalized landing page.

Your AnyMeeting account is more than just a platform for broadcasting your message — it’s also a robust marketing tool for your webinars. Be sure to log in to your Account Manager, and take advantage of this quick and easy-to-use promotional tool.  For more information about AnyMeeting’s free webinar service, visit www.anymeeting.com.

Recorded Webinars Make Great Content

Content from your recorded webinars is a valuable tool for marketing, training or customer support. In fact, studies reveal that visually appealing content, such as video, is more effective in marketing and generating leads than traditional written content. So why not make the most of your webinars? AnyMeeting’s recording feature can record almost every aspect of your webinar, including the screen sharing, video conferencing and the audio, so you can reuse your presentation or demonstration again and again.  (But keep in mind that YouTube videos can’t be recorded due to copyright issues!)

Once your webinar has concluded, AnyMeeting provides you with a link, and download option, so you can upload the video to a desired destination (your website, YouTube channel, etc.) and start directing folks to your content via blog entry or social media post. AnyMeeting also provides settings to enable your recordings to be password protected, if that suits your needs. This video content can be easily repurposed for multiple promotions or training sessions.

Ready to build a whole library of content and create a valuable resource for employees, customers or prospects? Just press “Start Recording” and AnyMeeting does all of the work for you. For more information about AnyMeeting’s free webinar service, visit www.anymeeting.com.

Top 5 Tools For Webinar Attendee Engagement

Does your webinar service provide the right tools for attendee engagement? The folks at AnyMeeting know that webinar attendee engagement is what drives an online presentation. That’s why AnyMeeting offers a variety of tools to facilitate awesome online presentations. Here are the top 5:

1. Handouts: A lasting impression with a compelling handout will further carry your message and brand. The AnyMeeting platform enables attendees to download your presentation and handouts directly during your webinar.
2. Polls: Engage attendees while gathering useful information. AnyMeeting’s polling feature allows you to gather information, increase engagement, and generate live insights related to your webinar topic.
3. Text chat: If attendees have questions or comments during your AnyMeeting webinar, they are able to communicate via text chat. This flow of communication between you and your attendees ensures engagement and encourages attendee participation.
4. Video: Whether you are video conferencing or presenting a YouTube clip during your AnyMeeting presentation, your attendees are sure to pay attention to dynamic visuals — versus a dry slide presentation.
5. Interact Feature: Audience members who are truly captivated will react to your presentation in real-time. AnyMeeting makes it easy for attendees to share those reactions — and  for presenters to assess engagement with the smart “Interact” feature. Interact icons include hand raising, thumbs-up for “Yes,” and requests like “Speed up” or “Slow down.”

When it all comes down to it, YOU hold the key to engaging your online presentation audience. The good news is, AnyMeeting provides an array of robust tools and dedicated support team to help make your webinar a real success. For more information about AnyMeeting, and its turnkey online meeting service, visit www.anymeeting.com.