Now more than ever, people are finding themselves turning to webinar formats to deliver content. Whether you’re looking to train employees, deliver a class, or educate marketing leads, the webinar has been a historically popular choice due to its ease of laying out information.  

That said, delivering a good webinar can be tough – there’s always the possibility your audience will come away with nothing but the thought they’ve just lost a few hours of their life they will never get back.

When done right, the webinar is your best friend – when done wrong, it’s both you and your audience’s dullest nightmare: yet another Zoom call eating up your daily schedule.

Here’s just a few factors to think about when assessing whether a webinar series is right for you.‍

Content

First and foremost, you should be thinking about the suitability of the content you’re delivering. Is a webinar series the most inventive yet appropriate way to deliver your best-kept secrets to a captive audience?

Ask yourself this question from the get-go; if your content delivery feels like a high-school English lesson on a Monday afternoon, perhaps consider pursuing another avenue. But if you’re a charismatic presenter and have a range of tricks up your sleeve to keep the audience engrossed, then a webinar series sounds like it will work its magic for you.

Breaking content up into little sub-sections and keeping it as concise as possible is usually the best way to go, particularly if you are running a series instead of a one-off webinar event. This is particularly important if the content is relatively dense; your attendee’s attention span will drop like a fly if you’re dryly droning for hours on end.

‍Interactive or Non-Interactive?

This is usually highly dependent on your objectives for the given webinar series – whether or not you’ll make your webinar series interactive.

Once again, this largely links back to attention span: if you know realistically that your content is slightly on the heavier side of things, you perhaps ought to consider opening up the floor periodically to your attendees. This is not only to give them some respite but also to take a reading of how well they’re keeping up so that you can tweak pace and tone accordingly. If you go this route, Jumbo’s interactive audience can always tools can integrate video of your audience members broadcast television style, or moderate text Q&A easily with threaded discussions.  

With short and snappy content, as many webinar series’ hosted for marketing prospects tend to have, then perhaps it’s best that it stays non-interactive so you can deliver your content speedily and not risk boring your other leads when one pipes up with a lengthy question. Taking these questions on a one-on-one basis via email after the webinar also betters your chances of forming meaningful, long-lasting relationships with your leads to guarantee that they’ll keep coming back to you.

‍Planning

This may seem like a given, but perhaps the cardinal sin of webinar series’ is not putting enough planning into them beforehand.

Consider what your goals are prior to outlining the episodes. Are you trying to establish your brand as a thought-leader within your industry, be an educator, or trying to market to a new audience?

Whatever your goal is, ensure it’s your center of focus at all times, and use this goal to build the structure of your webinar.

This may depend on what your goal is, but at the very least, you should have some form of loose script prepared well ahead of time for each episode to keep it succinct and keep your attendees energized. Try and plan foreach episode to be roughly the same run-time, so your attendees can feel secure in your consistency. Finally, if you are going for an interactive webinar, try to brainstorm some possible answers for likely questions ahead of time to avoid any moments of awkward silence.

Is a webinar series right for me?

Using the tips above, you should be able to garner whether or not a webinar series is suited to your needs and goals.

Want to start a webinar series but feeling overwhelmed by the planning stages? Don’t worry. Jumbo’s got your back with its holistic event planning and production approach, to ensure your webinar series is more hot than not.

‍