What Makes a Webinar Worth Attending (and Organising)?

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You may have noticed more businesses organising webinars (i.e. ‘web-based seminars‘) recently, usually to share knowledge with virtually anyone in the world. After all, companies are working hard to keep operations running and sales flowing amidst COVID-19. We’ve organised a couple of educational webinars ourselves, and would love to answer the question on everyone’s mind: What makes a webinar worth attending?

When it is people-focused, not business-minded.

After all, the key to running any business lies in what the people want, not what the business wants. Let’s say you want to take inspiration from Steve Jobs and showcase your product, and you want to do just that with a webinar to reach as many people as possible. This doesn’t just mean relaying new information about your product!

Just because the topic is centered around your product, doesn’t mean it should sound like a corporate instruction manual. Stories bring people together, so bring in genuine customer stories or personal ones that can:

Give more insight on how your product is for the people.
Show everyone exciting sneak peeks into your product roadmap.

Another thing to note is that information is a global currency. It is especially valuable when it’s educational and insightful. In our case, we reach out to our customers (i.e. users of Talenox) to find out what kind of questions they would love to have the answers to in regards to HR Processes.

Here were some questions that piqued our customers’ interest, which we turned into webinars:

How to Build A Paperless Finance and HR Operation?
What is the process to filing Employee Income Taxes (for Singapore / Malaysia / Hong Kong)?
How to Carry Out Payroll Processing Like A Pro?

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Giving your webinars an educational spin doesn’t just allow you to demonstrate your expertise and knowledge of the topic. We discovered through our educational webinars that they generally instil the audience with confidence in our expertise, our products and our services.

However, this only works when the speaker is genuinely proficient in the topic that he or she is talking about. The last thing you want is to see your speaker fumble to answer questions from the audience.

When it engages with the audience instead of operating as just a video tutorial.

A successful webinar is not just about the number of signups and a great attendance rate. It’s about really engaging with your attendees so the session is a dialogue instead of one-way communication. After all, you want to set your webinars apart from regular online courses that you can find on Udemy and Skillshare.

Here’s how we ensured that our educational webinar series, i.e. Human Resource Tech Courses (HRTC) are interactive and engaging.

Start off with multiple-choice polling

We’ve found that multiple-choice polling in Zoom really helped us break the ice at the start of the webinar. It also reminds everyone in our virtual classroom that they can engage with the speaker. On top of that, the polling gave us a chance to know more about our attendees and their interests.

Ease the shy audience into chat messaging

Don’t leave out webinar attendees who are too shy to raise questions that they need answers to! We realise that directing this particular group to the chat messaging function really helps ease them into interacting with us.

When the accessibility to the webinar and its contents is exclusive.

Try not to make your webinar entirely public. Keep your content exclusive by necessitating a Meeting ID and/or password key-in for your webinars. This gives your audience the incentive to keep coming back for your webinars. After all, some may need to get a refresher on certain topics; others may come back to get updated on certain topics through your latest webinars.