B2B Marketing: How to Host a Webinar

Hosting webinars can be an excellent tool to engage your customers, share knowledge about your offerings and brand, and launch any new products or services. While in-person events are out of the question at the moment, engaging your new and existing customers is increasingly important to maintaining your business. As part of your B2B strategy, learning how to host a webinar can be a lucrative tactic, if properly planned and executed. Here's how to host a webinar in 6 easy steps.

Step 1: Pick a Platform to Host Your Webinar On

There are some great options out there when it comes to selecting a platform to host your B2B webinar. First off, it's important to make sure you choose one with all the features that meet your needs. Do you want to conduct live polls during the webinar? Are you planning on making a recording of the webinar available afterward? How many attendees are you expecting? Do you want to try a free version for your first webinar, or are you willing to pay for more features?

Figuring out the answers to these questions can help you decide which platform may be the right fit for your business, your budget, and your B2B marketing plan.

Step 2: Choose a Relevant Topic

Picking a topic for your first webinar can be tricky, and you may feel like you want to cover a LOT, but try to narrow it down to a specific subject that will resonate with attendees. The key is to provide value, so select a topic that you have in-depth knowledge of and run with it. When putting together your presentation, make sure it's visually appealing and not too text-heavy. Being on camera can go a long way to engaging your audience, so try to put the nerves behind you, and give it a shot!

As a general rule, people tend to trust speakers more when they can see them.

Step 3: Schedule Your Webinar

Choosing the right date and time for your B2B webinar depends on your target market and when you think most attendees will be available. If you're targeting night owls, for example, it's probably not wise to host an 8am webinar! While this may vary, studies have shown that Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days for hosting webinars.

Step 4: Promote Your Webinar

Use all of the tools at your disposal to promote your webinar. You're spending time putting this masterpiece together, so make sure that people listen in! Most webinar platforms will allow you to create a landing page for prospective attendees to go to when they sign up. The landing page should be clear and informative (if you're unsure of how to do this, the Bloomtools team can help).

Promote your webinar through email campaigns (and later- email reminders, so people don't forget to attend). You can also try posting about the event on your social media channels, and even making a catchy hashtag that people will want to engage with online!

Step 5: Practice Makes Perfect!

Yes, just like your speech contest in the 5th grade, practice, practice, practice! Running through your webinar a few times can make it flow more naturally when you're presenting in real-time, and help you pick up on things that you may have missed if you didn't practice out loud. This way, you also won't need to refer to your notes as much during the presentation, and you'll know your points a lot better.

Step 6: Follow-Up with Attendees

Thank your attendees for joining you in an email after your webinar ends. It always helps to have a value-add in this email, for example, a recording of the webinar that they can refer back to, or a one-pager with more information or tips from the webinar itself. You can also take this opportunity to present attendees with an offer, or even ask them for feedback.

Once you start conducting webinars, you'll realize how engaging and fun they can be, and you'll probably want to start conducting more of them!

Ready to get started? Speak to one of our Bloomtools experts to discuss your B2B marketing strategy, including webinars, and more.