The Ultimate Webinar
Planning Guide

Why Webinars? According to CMI,
webinars are the second most effective marketing tactics for B2B marketers. 2

The Problem Yet, they are
the one of the least used, ranked 12th out of 14 most-used tactics overall.

What Gives? We avoid webinars
because of the time, effort, and resources they take to put together.

It Doesn’t Have to Be
Hard This guide is all you need to be a webinar champ.

Here’s What We’ll Cover •
Webinar timeline • Speaker tips • Presentation best practices • Benchmark data

Webinar Timeline

Timeline at a Glance -6
weeks -4 weeks - 2weeks -1week -1day -1hour GO +24 hours Plan Promote Execute Next

Plan: 6 Weeks Before the
Webinar • Choose a topic • Choose your presenters • Choose a date • Schedule a kick-off call • Select your support team to monitor attendee questions and technical issues

Plan: 4 Weeks Before the
Webinar • Schedule your webinar and dry run • Create your registration page • Book a conference room • Schedule emails:  Invitation emails to targeted personas  Registration confirmation  2 Reminder emails (one week before, one hour before)  Thanks for attending (with recording link)  Sorry we missed you (with recording link)

Promote: 2 Weeks Before the
Webinar • Send invitation emails to targeted personas • Promote webinar via social media & blog • Promote via free webinar listing sites, including:  Webinarlistings.com  Webinarhero.com  Webinarbase.com  Eventspan.com

Promote: 1 Week Before the
Webinar • Send reminder email • Continue to promote via social media and blog • Send internal email to encourage promotion • Schedule a conference room

Execute: Day of Webinar 24
hours before the webinar: • Reminder email to registrants • Email registrants and encourage them to have a hard phone line, a hard internet line and to print out a copy of the presentation in case their internet goes down (that way, they can still promote • 1 hour before the webinar: • Remind your registrants again • Set up webinar room: hook up computers, paste a “webinar in session” sign on the door, etc

Post-Webinar to-dos • Measure your
webinar, focusing on metrics like:  Conversion rate  Attendance rate (33% is industry norm)  Leads  Registration number • Write a follow-up blog post including answers to the most common questions that came up in the webinar • Use webinar recording for future blog post CTAs

Speaker Tips

Audio Best Practices • Dial
in to the webinar 30 minutes prior to webinar start time • Turn cell phones on silent • Keep cell phones (especially Blackberries) away from the call in line to prevent audible feedback • Join from a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed • Use phone controls to mute your line when not speaking to mitigate background noise

Web Best Practices • Be
sure to have your laptop plugged into a power source • Avoid wireless connections if possible • Print the deck in case web connection fails

Presentation Tips

Deck Design Consistency • Just
because there are multiple speakers doesn’t mean there should be multiple templates. Keep the design consistent throughout the deck. Image-heavy • Like any presentation, webinar decks should let the images tell the story. If you don’t give attendees something entertaining to look at, they’ll tune out.

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