The Complete Guide to Understanding and Hosting Webinars

Definition: A webinar is a live event held online with a purpose to teach or inform virtual audience members about a topic. More specifically, a webinar is a real-time presentation with audio, video, and/or multimedia components. It’s a popular format for information sharing across various industries and fields from B2B marketing sessions to classroom lectures.

In the context of businesses that support employees, customers, and partners across multiple locations and time zones, webinars can connect everyone at one time, in one place. Since they’re virtual, they can efficiently scale to thousands of concurrent attendees, helping organizations reduce travel and venue costs while broadening their opportunities in areas such as sales.

Webinar vs. Virtual Meeting

Often people wonder what is a webinar, and how is it different from a video conference? While similar to video conferencing, a webinar's purpose is usually instructional or educational in a one-to-many format. While webinars and video conferences can be highly interactive, video conferencing usually describes regular meetings, discussions, or brainstorms. Video conferencing is what you might attend with your colleagues multiple times each day, whereas a webinar is a unique event you may have signed up for months before it happens.

How a Webinar Works: The Three Main Steps

There are three main steps any webinar participant will need to complete before they can view the session. To ensure success, the organization hosting the webinar can manage these details within their webinar software:

1. Receiving the webinar invitation

Holding a webinar begins with creating and sending an invitation to the intended audience, typically through email. A webinar solution can enable automated email management, with customizable HTML and text templates for invitations as well as for confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups. Email isn't the only channel to promote a webinar, however. Social media updates and blog posts are also common methods for raising awareness of either an upcoming webinar or the existence of a recorded webinar.

2. Registering for the webinar

Once someone accepts the invitation in their inbox or clicks on a link elsewhere, they're taken to a webinar-specific landing page where they can enter key details like email address and phone number, as well as credit card or PayPal information if the webinar is monetized. This collected participant information is often used to score and track leads. Overall, the webinar landing page is pivotal. It should have a compelling headline and concise copy that communicates the webinar's value, duration, and some background on the webinar presenter(s).

3. Joining the webinar

When it's time for a webinar to begin, attendees click or tap on a link to view the proceedings within a webinar software client. Modern solutions make it easy for attendees to join and participate in webinars from any desktop or mobile device, as long as they have an adequate internet connection. Ideally, the webinar experience will be seamless on any device. Attendees should be able to hear the presenter's audio clearly, view any live streaming video, see any shared content such as annotated documents or slide decks, and take advantage of features such as polling, live chat, and threaded question-and-answer functionality. How these three steps are handled is crucial because webinar attendance rates hover in the range of 40% to 50% of those invited.

Webinar Platforms and Presentation Types

A webinar platform is the kind of technology that is used to host virtual events. For example, Webex Webinars is built to reach and engage global audiences of any size. When selecting a platform, remember that the interface of the webinar software itself can be the difference between someone joining and getting something out of the webinar or not showing up.

Webinar formats come in all shapes and sizes. A presenter can choose from many possible types of webinars that are suitable to a wide variety of use cases. Here are a few possibilities:

• Panel discussions: Moderated conversations between panelists, especially ones with different perspectives on the same issues, are good for sustaining audience interest while also giving them useful information. Plus, they work well with interactive webinar features such as real-time polling to gauge viewers’ reactions.
• SME interviews: An interview can be useful for a nurture campaign, as the subject matter expert being interviewed can provide deep insights about a particular product, service, or market.

In summary, the design of an email invite or the landing page determines if the audience benefits from the event. By following webinar best practices, organizations can broaden their opportunities in areas such as sales and education.