Webinars have become very popular and successful ways to impart wisdom, market products by offering a valuable presentation, or providing internal training to staff members. But information overload has become pervasive across the board, and a webinar session can be just one more piece of information that the recipient’s brain just can’t hold. Because there is so much information available, there are several strategies for making your webinar session as successful as it can be.

Make Sure Your Webinar Session is Unique

The first strategy for hosting a successful webinar session is to pay close attention to the content. Offering something unique and valuable, that may be hard to find elsewhere, is a good way to get good attendance. Make sure that the information is useful and educational, and speaks to a specific issue. Avoid rambling or taking on too many tangential issues. If you have a lot of different issues to cover, a better strategy would be to break it up into multiple webinars, with each one focusing on a specific area.

Having useful information is important, but how that information is presented is of equal importance. You may consider having a well-known expert in the field present your webinar session. If you do the presentation yourself, you may wish to engage the services of a professional scriptwriter, who will be able to keep the information fresh and relevant, and exciting to your audience.

Make a Visually Interesting Webinar Session

Over the course of the webinar, keep the presentation visually interesting. It will be more successful if you deviate from the simple screen shot of yourself, and possibly include scenarios that use live actors to illustrate a point. Of course, everybody uses Powerpoint presentations in their webinars, and these do have their purpose. However, don’t be afraid to expand on your graphics. Simple lists of bulleted points are good for reinforcing the message, but they’re not exciting. Consider using more sophisticated graphics, or live-action footage. If your budget allows, you can obtain stock video clips that can be incorporated to reinforce a point.

Choose the Right Time for Your Webinar Session

Success is often just a matter of timing. Depending on your potential audience, your webinar session may best be held during work hours, in the evening, or on the weekend. If you’re delivering a webinar to internal staff, 4:30 pm on Friday is probably not the best time. A non-work related webinar held during the day will similarly get light attendance, as your audience will be busy at their own jobs, and you would get better attendance in the early evening or weekend. Of course, don’t forget the time zone factor. And speaking of time, it’s important to have plenty of lead time, plan for 6 weeks to adequately market your webinar session.

Promoting Your Webinar Session

Use webinar marketing tactics to promote your webinar session, and start accepting registrations with plenty of lead time to allow for the greatest audience participation. Don’t forget to send reminders, though. If someone signs up for a webinar 30 days away, they are likely to forget—send a reminder via email a week before the event, and on the morning of the event. Finally, prepare a recorded version of the webinar, so those who were not able to attend will still be able to view the archive.

Gauge your success with a follow-up email and a survey. Keep metrics on the leads that you have developed as a result of the seminar, and how many of those leads convert to sales.