Our partners at Multilearning provide valuable insights into managing a series of educational webinars.
Organizing a webinar with a platform such as Zoom is relatively easy. However, when you have a mandate to manage a series of educational webinars, that’s another story.
It became apparent that, even if the focus of your webinars is of great interest to your audience, people are less available than they used to be and the disappointment of missing a webinar has decreased over time. In the setting of a series, your webinars will suffer from this new reality.
Your approach should assist the audience:
● Target the right people and monitor the impact of your promotional strategies.
● Make it easy for your audience to pick and register through a series of upcoming webinars.
● Send reminders at the right time with easy-access links.
● Opt for a user-friendly and visually-pleasing interface for your webinars, to demonstrate the investments & efforts behind them.
Audience engagement is key to success:
● Enable audience engagement from the start (chat, polls, Q&A) and with your on-demand content
● Encourage feedback through evaluations.
● Optimize traffic to webinar replays by sending alerts when they become available.
● Depending on your industry, issue certificates for participation (live or on-demand).
Once you host the second and third webinars in the series, the echo they create will boost interest and awareness within your field. Therefore, it is critical to think about the optimal ways to centralize your webinars and take this unique opportunity to easily promote upcoming ones across all the channels at your disposal.
Nowadays, people do not have the patience to search through a long listing of webinars. It’s all about snappy visuals, minimal clicks and integrated components.
The optimal webinar library evolved through in-depth discussions with our clients and a model for best practice was established.
The first step was the creation of strict banner design guidelines to promote webinars to ensure a homogeneous way of displaying all the information needed. This design made it easy for users to instantly see and select webinars related to their specific series of interest.
By displaying all webinars together, users were prompted to register for upcoming webinars via an integrated custom form with built-in notification system to streamline the process.
We then came up with the concept of a content filter bar at the top with eye-catching branding specific to each series, where users click to instantaneously filter the ones of most interest.
After launching this innovative webinar library, it became apparent that centralizing upcoming and past series of webinars was raising awareness of our clients’ efforts in education far more than the sporadic webinars that were previously the norm.
With accurate Search Engine Optimization of this growing number of activities, our clients’ webinar libraries quickly appeared higher on internet search rankings, resulting in more views and participants.
Finally, and most importantly, your stakeholders will understand that the success of a webinar is not dependent solely on the number of participants that attend live. Success hinges on the cumulative viewers of the webinar replays, plus the interactions that both audiences generate.
Our clients often experience double the views thanks to webinar replays combined with an optimized viewing experience and self-paced learning through replays with slide navigation and search functionalities.
All these efforts towards building your optimal webinar library will enhance your users’ experience, grow your audience, and generate new partnership opportunities thanks to education.
For a great example of a webinar library, experience the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis: ISTH Webinar Library
Article written by Joël-Zvi Chetzroni, CEO of the Multilearning Group Inc.