How to Host Webinars and Marketing Events for Your Online Course

Zoom webinars are one of the best ways to engage your audience and bring awareness to your product. This is especially true for online education businesses, cohort-based courses, and online communities. 

Zoom webinars offer an opportunity for potential leads to get to know you, experience your expertise, and decide if your course or community could benefit them. It allows them to dip their toe in the water of your offer without having to commit to it right off the bat. 

As valuable as these events can be for your organization, running them takes quite a bit of planning in order to maximize their effect. 

Not only is it important to make sure that the content of your webinar is engaging, but there are also a ton of logistics involved in making sure people know about your event, can access your event, and receive relevant follow up information after your event. 

Then there are the logistics to make sure you capture juicy data from your event that you can use as you grow your business. It’s essential to collect emails for future outreach, review attendance to calculate your conversion and overall effectiveness of your event, and collect feedback to learn how to improve moving forward.

Already overwhelmed? Don’t worry - below we break down key tasks to ensure that your webinar or marketing event is a success and how to get it all done.

Logistics Before the Webinar: 

Schedule your Zoom Webinar - This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s important to get your Zoom Webinar details all squared away ahead of your event. Generate your Zoom webinar link, block off your calendar, and create your calendar invite with your event description. 

Collect Registrations - Once you’ve set the foundation for your event, it’s time to spread the word! The best way to do this is through sharing your event across multiple networks and collecting registrations. Those registration emails are gold, since those are your new potential course or community members that you can nurture after your event. This is why having people register for an event is much more valuable than simply providing an open event link. 

Send Reminders - People are busy, and with so many free events and work obligations fighting for our attention, it’s important to give your registrants an extra nudge so they don’t forget about your session. Sending reminders is a great way to do that - via email, Slack, or whatever tool you know your potential attendees will use. We recommend sending two reminders: 1 hour before your event and 10 minutes before your event to maximize event attendance.  

Logistics After the Webinar: 

Send an event recap and recording - Make sure your potential leads don’t forget what they learned in your session! Share an event recap and your event recording to all attendees and registrants. Having information about your program in multiple forms - writing, video - can help you appeal to different types of learners, as well as give your potential participants a place to go back and review what you shared. It also doesn’t hurt to throw in some sort of discount or offer to your webinar attendees. 

Send out a survey - Get a sense of how your attendees enjoyed your event by sending out an event survey. It’s best to send this survey only to people that actually attended in order to make sure that your response rate is as accurate as possible. Front there, you can leverage these insights to improve your event programming for future webinars. 

Aggregate attendee data - Pull together your attendee data for individual events and across multiple events. How do your attendance numbers compare to your registration numbers? What event times seem to garner the highest turnout? Use these insights to tweak your event schedule, notifications, and reminders.

Export your data to a CRM or database - Export your attendance and feedback data to your CRM or member database to gain a deeper understanding of your leads and nurture them moving forward. Visualizing your data in a dashboard can also be extremely powerful to help you understand what you can do better next time - whether it’s changing the event time, content, location, or something else entirely. 

Learn how to leverage event data to find course-market fit here. 

How to Coordinate All These Logistics:

As essential as these logistics are to hosting a successful webinar or marketing event, they can easily get buried under the mountain of other tasks involved in putting on a live online event. 

Here’s how you can go about tackling these tasks: 

Using Multiple Tools

• Use Zoom to create a Webinar link and registration page
• Use Email Marketing Software to spread the word about your event and start collecting registrations
• Use Spreadsheets to track attendance 
• Send out reminders and feedback forms manually 
• Automate email invites and reminders using Zapier 
• Manually import data into your CRM or database

Using a Virtual Event Manager (VEM) like Virtually

Using a Virtual Event Manager (VEM) can help you set up all your Webinar logistics from a single place. For example, with Virtually’s VEM you can: 

• Create your Webinar registration page 
• Automate notifications and reminders via multiple channels (Google Calendar, email, Slack, etc.) 
• Automatically track attendance and send out feedback forms
• Auto-export your registration emails, attendance, and feedback data to your tool of choice (Airtable, CRM, etc.) 

Curious to learn more about VEMs? Get fully up to speed here. 

Schedule a demo call with a Virtually team member to learn how to simplify your event management or get started for free.

Read next: Automate Your Zoom Events with No-Code