How to create a webinar that engages and converts

Creating a webinar is a way for marketers and businesses to generate leads and attract customers. They can expand your reach, build your authority, and help you connect digitally in an increasingly distributed world.

The best webinars capture your audiences’ attention quickly, provide helpful expertise, all while delivering a professionally produced experience. However, the challenge for every marketer is to do all that efficiently with the confidence you can produce results.

So in this guide, we’ll demystify how to create a webinar: from ideation, promotion, rehearsal, and going live, all the way to post-event logistics and best practices. 

We’ll include helpful tips along the way to make sure you can focus on creating compelling content and stories to captivate your audience and ensure you can bring your most ambitious event vision live. 

Let’s dive in!

The secret to a successful webinar is great content

At the end of the day, the secret to a successful webinar is your content. Your video tools should help power your content.

Invest your time and resources when choosing a topic, source relevant and captivating speakers, and choose a platform that can showcase it all. With so much competition to keep your audience’s attention, it’s important that you can provide the most valuable experience for the time.

Need more tips? Watch Vimeo’s Webinar Confidential to hear real-life stories of virtual event mishaps and tips on how to run a great event. Watch now

How to create a webinar in 2022 (step-by-step guide)

The stakes can feel high when you’re creating a webinar. There’s plenty of logistics to navigate, creative to choose, and speakers to engage, but it’s all worth it once the show goes live.

If you’re feeling a bit jittery – don’t worry! You can embrace uncertainty with a few helpful steps. We’ve broken down the four main stages of webinar production:

1. Planning
2. Promotion & production
3. Going live
4. Post-production

Each stage will require different people for different roles. No matter how large, small, complex, or simple your idea is to go live, we do recommend reserving a production window between 4 to 8 weeks. 

This 4-8 week window will give you enough lead time to plan, recruit speakers, rehearse production, and go live with the confidence and professional bells and whistles to stand out!

Planning stage

1. Start with your goals.

It’s important to work with your team to identify the goals of your webinar or event. This will help you understand what impact you want to have and how you want to measure the performance of your webinar.

This can include key performance indicators such as: 

• Total number of registrations
• Number of live attendees or conversion of registrants to attendees
• Number of targeted prospects or customers that register
• Total closed won deals attributed to your webinar

Pro tip: Once you have a set of goals, build it out into a brief or project plan.

2. Assign roles to your team.

Depending on the size of your event, you may want to consider assigning roles to team members. For example, Vimeo designates a few “roles” that are key at different parts of the webinar production:

Promotions: This function is responsible for the promotion plan for a webinar. This includes email promotions, social promotions, onsite marketing, and other channels to draw your audience to register. 

Content programming: This function is responsible for determining the topics, speakers, messaging, design, and production of the webinar content. 

Operations: This function is responsible for building forms, creating landing pages, creating on-demand video pages, as well as managing the technical operations between webinar tools, marketing operations tools, and CRM tools to make sure data is accurate.

3. Host a kickoff meeting with internal stakeholders.

The kickoff meeting brings all stakeholders together to align on goals, identify your target audience, brainstorm topics, ideate speakers, and assign tasks and projects. The kickoff may also be a great place to start your promotional planning (more on that below).

Depending on the number of stakeholders, you may want a separate meeting with your production team to outline the scope of the production as well as a meeting with your design team to define the visual components for your webinar. Design elements may include slides, artwork, landing page design, and social promotions.

Promotion & Production Stage

4. Promote your webinar.

To build your webinar promotional strategy, focus on your audience. Once you have a grasp of whom you’re trying to reach, consider which marketing channels are most relevant to them.

As a best practice, plan for at least 3-5 weeks of promotion time before going live with your webinar.

Pro tip: Consider the following channels to help bring awareness to your event: 

• Email
• Paid and organic social
• In-product advertising
• Onsite promotions

Pro tip: Plan to loop in your creative team as far ahead as possible when planning your webinar promotions. Depending on the channels you plan to promote, you may need to allocate more time up front to finalize creative assets like design headers, landing and registration page creative, email invitations, and social assets before publishing promotions.

5. Begin speaker outreach.

Once a clear content programming outline is in place, it’s time to source your talent!

Your speakers are key to bringing the topic and content to life. This can include internal team members or in-house experts or external speakers like industry leaders, customers, or other professional speakers who can talk to the subject at hand. 

Pro tip: Spend time researching other events and webinars that cover your topic area or industry to see who else out there is speaking on the topic. This is a great way to see how speakers may act live during your webinar.

Once you’ve identified any potential external speaker, find their contact information and start your outreach.

No matter how you plan to reach out to speakers, remember to set expectations in your outreach by including important information like:

• The expected time commitment for speakers to participate in the webinar (ex. 1-2 meetings and the go-live date)
• What do they need to do for the live production? 

The goal is to make it easy and non-intimidating!

 6. Speaker onboarding and kickoff call.

Congratulations! Once you’ve confirmed your webinar speakers, be sure to ask for any important media that will help facilitate speaker introductions and promotions. This can include:

• Speaker headshots
• Exact titles
• Release forms or contracts
• Sizzle reels

Speaker kickoff is an opportunity to allow your speakers to meet, establish expectations, and share the webinar outline.

7. Prep your content and build a run of show.

As you get closer to your event date, you’ll want to finalize your event content. Content might include:

• Agenda or outline
• Scripts or welcome notes
• Videos
• Images or graphs

Depending on the complexity of your event, you may want to script out an outline of the content or build a run of show.

Plan visuals such as presentation decks, graphs, videos, speakers, or engagement tools like polls or live Q&A prior to the event so you have a clear idea of your production.

Pro tip: If you can, plan to prep all your content and upload it in your webinar or virtual event platform beforehand.

8. Run a full rehearsal.

Rehearsal is a great opportunity to connect with speakers, troubleshoot technical issues, and walk through both topics and content. 

As a best practice, try to dedicate an hour with everyone involved in the webinar to go through the full run-through of content, answer any technical questions related to audio, framing, or questions from speakers, and help mitigate potential technical issues like internet disruptions.

9.  Go live!

It’s finally here! Plan to have all your speakers available and on set half an hour before going live. This will help with troubleshooting any last minute tech issues and ease stage jitters.

Post-production

10. Send your follow-up messages.

After your webinar, be sure to send follow-up emails to your audience expressing gratitude for their attendance. For registrants who signed-up, but did not attend send a separate follow-up message encouraging them to check out the on-demand video

If you have a sales team, provide some context for next steps/follow-ups so you can provide a smooth handoff between marketing and sales.

Don’t forget to provide a thank you note to all your speakers!

11.  Prepare your on-demand content.

Be sure to save your webinar content! After the live event ends, use an editing tool to trim the video, and then upload it for a piece of evergreen content. 

Don’t forget to send a link of the on-demand video to your webinar registrants and attendees. Also consider gating the on-demand content with a lead form, so you can maximize your hard work.

12. Optimize for the future.

Check out your core webinar analytics like registrants, live attendees, polling and Q&A data to better understand your webinar engagement. Also consider sending a follow-up survey to understand how you can do even better next time!

How to produce a webinar with Vimeo

In this article, you’ve learned key considerations for creating a webinar. Specific instructions between webinar platforms may vary. You may want insights on how to leverage your webinar platform of choice. 

If you’re exploring Vimeo Events, here’s a quick breakdown of how to produce a webinar (minus the headache). For more information, check out how to create and configure your webinar.

Create an event

If you’re a Premium or Enterprise Vimeo user, you can create a webinar by heading over to the video manager > click the New video dropdown, then select Create a webinar.

This will bring you to the webinar management page where you can name your webinar, add a description, and schedule the date and time to go live.

Build your registration form

To convert potential visitors into leads, you’ll want to build out a registration form. On the webinar management page, click the Registration button to the right of the preview player.

You can create specific form fields like email address, first name, last name, role, company, or other information you want to collect from webinar registrants.

Plan your content

The name of the game is keeping your audience engaged throughout the event! Be ruthless and leave out any unnecessary content or activities. Make content clear, actionable, and directly related to problems or learnings your audience wants to invest in.

Pro tip: Add an intro slate, or webinar introduction, and agenda at the start of the event so your audience knows what to expect. Also reserve time at the end of your live event to go through Q&A.

Create a timeline composed of different scenes

Once you’ve nailed down your content like presentation decks, videos, images, graphics, and speakers, upload your assets to your event to create a timeline or run of show. To do this, head to the webinar management page and click manage production and stream with Vimeo. To learn how to add and switch scenes within your stream, check out our help article.

Pro tip: You can manipulate individual scenes to create the perfect production timeline. Plan to rehearse your content beforehand to make sure the flow feels natural and engaging.

Invite your speakers

If you have more than one speaker, you’ll want to create unique speaker links for each of your guests. This makes it easy for each guest to join your event easily and on time. 

You can add speakers to your timeline by clicking add to scene.

Pro tip: Add graphic elements like lower thirds for each of your speakers so it’s easy to distinguish who’s who in the event.

Rehearse your webinar content

Once your content has been added to your event timeline and your speakers have been onboarded, it’s time to test, test, test! 

Schedule time for a technical review and rehearsal so that speakers are familiar with both your webinar tool and content before going live. In the broadcaster view, you can go through your scenes by clicking an individual scene and clicking Send to stream.

You can see on the top left hand side what is pushed live to your event, so that you, your speakers, and any production crew members can get a feel of how the event will flow.

Go live!

You’ve made all the necessary preparations, now is the fun part! Queue up your webinar scenes or slides, have a glass of water at the ready, and make sure everyone involved is ready to go. 

To go live, hit the green button Start event on the top right hand corner to start sharing with your audience. 

As you go through your webinar, you can click on each individual scene and click Send to stream to live stream each part of your production.

Trim your video for on-demand

Congratulations on a successful event! Once you’ve ended your event by clicking End, be sure to edit and trim your content to its final form. After you end your event you can either click Manage webinar, mark it “Complete,” and trim the content, or you can close the modal,allowing you to load the content of the webinar up again. 

Be sure to send over to your webinar attendees and registrants within 24 hours.

Three important webinar statistics

While webinars have been around for a long time, the patience for watching them is waning. We recently reached out to our community to better understand what’s happening with webinars in 2021 and beyond and sifted through our events research to bring you the best intel to make your events better.

Content and quality of speakers matters when driving event registrations.

You probably remember that 2020 was the year of virtual events. From virtual happy hours, marathon summits, and one or two awkward family dinners, we all had the experience of coming together digitally.

While the demand is still high for events online, quality over quantity matters. 64% and 63% of our survey participants say that the quality of speakers and relevance of content respectively drive them to sign up for events.

Participants are most likely to switch off an event early due to technical issues or boredom.

Getting your audience to your event is only half that battle. Do all the work up front to mitigate any technical hiccups that could cut your audience short as more than half (59%) of survey participants are likely to drop off a live event due to technical issues.

Online events are here to stay!

Without a shadow of a doubt, virtual events have made a lasting impact on the events industry. Your video know-how will come in handy for years to come.

The majority (72%) of participants said they anticipate attending just as many, if not more, online events than they currently do once in-person events are back.

Wrap up

Sure there’s a lot of brainstorming, preparation and planning involved with launching a webinar. However, the benefits are nearly endless. Plus, having the video replay available on demand means that your webinar will keep working hard to raise your profile and help you generate even more leads well into the future. The best part? The more you do it, the easier the process becomes.

As you plan your big show, just remember the following 4 tips:

• Focus on your audience. Who they are, what questions they have, and what their daily routines might look like should inform your webinar production strategy
• Choose the right platform. End-to-end solutions offer the most flexibility, but be sure to choose the ones that work best for you and your audience.
• Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!
• Conversions are a long game. The work doesn’t stop once the webinar is over—leverage email marketing and other campaigns to capture leads while the iron is hot.

Go live with your next webinar

Originally written by Jessica Wei on June 8, 2021. Updated by Julie Bergstein on March 2, 2022.