Learn about creating and running a webinar program

Okay, who here has ever attended a webinar? Who has found them useful? Well, you can’t really gimme feedback now but if you were in a webinar, you totally could.

Webinars are presentations, discussions, or workshops that are delivered on the internet. They can happen live, or you can pre-record them and offer them on-demand. They enable realtime feedback and discussion among participants while a topic is being presented. Participants in a live webinar can often even ask questions directly to the presenters.

Webinars can be extremely successful in generating interest in your products or services, and in boosting pipeline performance. They are relatively inexpensive to run and are a great way to share time-sensitive content. For attendees, webinars offer convenience because they’re typically short in length and can be attended from anywhere.

Marketo has a special program type called the Event Program, with a webinar channel that is designed specifically for running webinars. Also, Marketo has an extensive ecosystem known as LaunchPoint, where you’ll be able to find several webinar providers who sync to Marketo. This means you can market your webinar directly from Marketo, creating your own registration pages and follow-up emails, without having to send leads to your webinar provider’s registration page. Here’s an overview of how it works. First, you create and schedule your webinar using your account with a LaunchPoint webinar partner. Then you use Marketo to promote your webinar, register people, and send reminders. From Marketo, you send out an invitation to your webinar with a link to a page where your leads can register. Marketo also syncs your registration information to your webinar partner. Marketo sends each registrant a confirmation email with a unique link, which they will use to attend the webinar. You’ll run the webinar, using the services of one of our LaunchPoint partners. Because registrants use a unique link to attend, you will know who attended and who didn’t. Shortly after the webinar ends, the LaunchPoint partner syncs the list of attendees to Marketo, or sends it directly to you. If they attended the webinar, the registrants’ program status will be automatically updated to, attended. If they registered, but did not attend, their status will be automatically updated to, no show. You can use this information to track program performance and send follow-up communications. You can also invite attendees to a recorded webinar rather than a live one. When a registrant attends a recorded webinar, their status is set to, attended on demand.

You’ve decided you want to run a webinar program and are probably wondering what you need to do, and in what order. First, you’ll need to create an event in a LaunchPoint partner application. You’ll set up details, like the name of the webinar, description, date, time, and language. Next, you’ll manage registration settings like, max number of attendees and registrant approval settings. Keep in mind that we will use a Marketo form for webinar registration. So Marketo will share registering information with your LaunchPoint events registration list. After that, you will modify your confirmation and follow-up email settings. Because you are using Marketo to manage the email communications, be sure to uncheck any automatic confirmation reminder or follow-up email settings in the LaunchPoint app.

Over on the Marketo side, you will create an event program for your webinar, choosing the webinar channel. Then, you’ll create things like emails for invitations, confirmations, and landing pages with forms where invitees can register for the webinar.

Finally, you’ll need Smart Campaigns that automate the marketing activities for your webinar, manage the program status of your audience, and follow up with them afterwards. The follow-up should take into consideration whether they attended a live webinar, a recorded webinar, or any no-shows.

After the webinar is over, you can measure the impact by using Marketo’s built-in program performance report. You might be wondering what you can do to ensure that your webinar itself is a success. Here are a few ideas from our experts. First, always use webinars to educate, not to sell. Next, remember that practice makes perfect. Conduct a practice session at least a day in advance to get comfortable with a presentation and work out any glitches. The presentation itself should be light on text, not dense. This keeps people listening, rather than trying to read your slides. To encourage interaction during the webinar, include polling and questions for the audience, and always save a few minutes at the end for Q & A. Okay, now let’s move on and create a webinar in Marketo. -