Six Tips for Creating an Engaging Webinar

Webinars have become popular among healthcare marketers. Hosting webinars helps to engage your audience and distribute helpful information to healthcare professionals (HCP). Here are six key tips for creating an engaging webinar that establishes your authority and brings in more qualified leads to your brand.

1. Start Promotion Early

Getting registrations is a crucial yet stressful part of hosting a webinar. No matter how well you prepare and execute your webinar, it will be unproductive if no one shows up. And building your attendee numbers can be challenging with the high number of opportunities HCPs have to choose from.

Because competition for attention is so heavy, you’ll want to promote the event within weeks of the webinar launch. Promoting too early may cause people to lose interest. On the other hand, announcing your event a few days in advance may result in low attendance numbers. Generally speaking, begin your promotion around a month before the date. This will give you time to get the word out and remain relevant until your webinar is launched.

2. Pick the Right Time

What is the “right” time for a webinar? The right time is the best time for maximum attendance, so you can have the highest potential engagement. However, global access to online webinars enables audiences to log in at different hours of their day. 

To ensure the maximum number of people will attend, you need to understand when most HCPs will be available. For non-emergency personnel, the general rule for hosting a webinar is to launch between 11 am and 2 pm local time. But some audience members may need to attend during the evening or early morning. So you must understand your audience and the time demands put upon them. It’s impossible to meet everyone’s needs, but you can set a time that will work for the majority of your target audience. 

3. Use a Moderator

Moderators play a crucial role in webinars, from time management to follow-up activity. They help smooth the entire process, introduce presenters or panelists, and moderate Q&A sessions. A moderator also provides audience members with a contact who can help connect them to your brand.

4. Break Webinar into Stages

Keeping audiences engaged is paramount to increasing lead volume and avoiding early drop-offs. Having presenters lecture for an hour straight will likely lose people’s attention. So instead, aim to break up the event regularly to hold their interest. For example, you can use polls, play videos, and respond to comments/questions throughout the event to “shake things up.”

5. Don’t Skip the Q & A Session

Question and answer sessions are a great way to engage directly with the audience and show your expertise. On the other hand, ending the event without a Q&A session misses an important opportunity for further engagement when the event is over.

In many cases, participants will have questions already or come up with them as the webinar progresses. However, it can be a good idea to have your moderator prepared with some seed questions to start a conversation. Be sure to give your audience adequate time (15-30 minutes) to ask as many questions as possible.

6. Make it Downloadable

In order to capture as many leads as possible, make the recording available after the event is done. Different time zones, various work or family demands, and busy schedules can all prevent an HCP from logging into your live webinar. So share out a link to your webinar video via social media, email and other channels.

You can also write blog posts on the webinar topic and embed video from the event, so others can experience what the audience did and hear the same information.

To sign up the largest live audience, you can wait until the event is over before sharing the webinar. Conversely, you can mention a shared recording during your promotion to get a higher number of interested contacts.

Create a Webinar that Stands Out

While medical device webinars are often technical in nature, they can still be engaging, interesting, and even fun. Breaking things up, leveraging a Q&A session, and offering your webinar video later are all key ways to get the highest engagement and attention.

Article Written by Alex Brown