1. The Ultimate Webinar
Planning Guide

2. Why Webinars?
According to CMI, webinars are the second most
effective marketing tactics for B2B marketers.
2

3. The Problem
Yet, they are the one of
the least used, ranked
12th out of 14 most-used
tactics overall.

4. What Gives?
We avoid webinars because of the time, effort, and
resources they take to put together.

5. It Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
This guide is all you need to be a webinar champ.

6. Here’s What We’ll Cover
• Webinar timeline
• Speaker tips
• Presentation best practices
• Benchmark data

7. Webinar Timeline

8. Timeline at a Glance
-6 weeks
-4
weeks
-
2weeks
-1week -1day -1hour GO
+24
hours
Plan Promote Execute Next

9. Plan: 6 Weeks Before the Webinar
• Choose a topic
• Choose your presenters
• Choose a date
• Schedule a kick-off call
• Select your support team to
monitor attendee questions
and technical issues

10. Plan: 4 Weeks Before the
Webinar
• Schedule your webinar and dry run
• Create your registration page
• Book a conference room
• Schedule emails:
 Invitation emails to targeted personas
 Registration confirmation
 2 Reminder emails (one week before, one hour
before)
 Thanks for attending (with recording link)
 Sorry we missed you (with recording link)

11. Promote: 2 Weeks Before the
Webinar
• Send invitation emails to
targeted personas
• Promote webinar via social
media & blog
• Promote via free webinar
listing sites, including:
 Webinarlistings.com
 Webinarhero.com
 Webinarbase.com
 Eventspan.com

12. Promote: 1 Week Before the
Webinar
• Send reminder email
• Continue to promote via
social media and blog
• Send internal email to
encourage promotion
• Schedule a conference room

13. Execute: Day of Webinar
24 hours before the webinar:
• Reminder email to registrants
• Email registrants and encourage them to
have a hard phone line, a hard internet line
and to print out a copy of the presentation in
case their internet goes down (that way, they
can still promote
• 1 hour before the webinar:
• Remind your registrants again
• Set up webinar room: hook up computers,
paste a “webinar in session” sign on the door,
etc

14. Post-Webinar to-dos
• Measure your webinar, focusing on metrics like:
 Conversion rate
 Attendance rate (33% is industry norm)
 Leads
 Registration number
• Write a follow-up blog post including answers to
the most common questions that came up in the
webinar
• Use webinar recording for future blog post CTAs

15. Speaker Tips

16. Audio Best Practices
• Dial in to the webinar 30 minutes prior to
webinar start time
• Turn cell phones on silent
• Keep cell phones (especially Blackberries)
away from the call in line to prevent audible
feedback
• Join from a quiet place where you won’t be
disturbed
• Use phone controls to mute your line when not
speaking to mitigate background noise

17. Web Best Practices
• Be sure to have your laptop plugged into a
power source
• Avoid wireless connections if possible
• Print the deck in case web connection fails

18. Presentation Tips

19. Deck Design
Consistency
• Just because there are multiple speakers doesn’t
mean there should be multiple templates. Keep
the design consistent throughout the deck.
Image-heavy
• Like any presentation, webinar decks should let
the images tell the story. If you don’t give
attendees something entertaining to look at,
they’ll tune out.

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