Webinars can be a great way to publicize your expertise and reach a wider audience. But they can involve a lot of work, including research and planning, script development, getting the right partners involved, and marketing the webinar. Depending on your situation, a webinar might be the perfect next step for you—or it might not be the right time. Here are a few things to think about to help you determine whether you should host a webinar.
Your topic. How complex is the topic you’re choosing? Does it merit an entire webinar? If it’s not very in-depth, a blog post might be a better alternative. If it’s not a difficult or commonly misunderstood topic, or one a lot of people in your audience want to learn about, it may not attract a lot of attention as a webinar. Picking the right topic is often a large part of what determines a webinar’s success.
Your audience. How scattered is your audience? If they live all over the world, it will be difficult to schedule your webinar at a time when everyone can attend. If your audience is on the smaller side, the investment you put in a well-produced webinar may not bring you the benefits you want. If that’s the case, work on building your audience first.
Your potential for interactivity. How possible is it for you to make your webinar interactive? One of the benefits of webinars is the opportunity they represent to interact with your audience and get a conversation going. If your content is very dense with reading—if your presenter is just going to be reading from the slides—it may not make a lot of sense to do a webinar. A written piece of content may be more appropriate.
Your available time and resources. To really get the most out of a webinar, you’ll have to both develop great interactive content and promote it. This can be time-consuming, and difficult for anyone acting on their own. Unless you have the time to manage the whole process yourself—or have expert help or employees to pitch in—you may get more out of other forms of content.
Your partnership opportunities. Another great benefit of webinars is the opportunity you get to bring in established experts. These give a boost to your credibility, and also gives you access to their audience as well as your own. If you don’t have the partnership opportunities available yet, it may still be worth it to produce a webinar, but in many cases you’ll get less out of it.
Webinars can be an excellent way to showcase your experience, expand your audience, and promote your business. But they also take a certain amount of planning and work, and they aren’t right for every situation. Use these guidelines to determine whether you’ll get the most out of putting on a webinar
