📢How To Host A Webinar Successfully in 8 Easy Steps + New Tips?

“How to host a webinar?” is one of the most discussed questions in businesses and organizations today, as they view webinars as a crucial marketing strategy. This blog will provide a step-by-step guide to hosting a webinar in 2024, along with a list of best webinar platforms that support and facilitate streaming webinar to thousands of attendees at a time.

The responsibility of the host can be overwhelming, so you might need an assistant or co-host to help set up your live webinar efficiently. Above all, you need a streaming platform that streamlines your webinar hosting, allows you to pull in co-hosts to handle at any time, and automatically handles managerial tasks with the click of a button! Interesting, isn’t it? Yes, even your first webinar can be set up in minutes now! Let’s see how to do that!

Steps to Host A Effective Webinars

Ready to learn how to set up a live webinar? It’s time to explore the best practices and essential steps in a comprehensive guide that will assist you year-round. This section will help you host your webinar like a pro, even if it’s your first time!

• Select the right webinar topic
• Decide on the date and time
• Personalize with branding
• Add hashtags
• Send webinar invites
• Stream your webinar
• Track Attendees
• Circulate webinar recording

Step 1: Select the Right Webinar Topic

Pick informative topics or something that kindles interests among your attendees, if subject permits invite a popular guest speaker to make topics enticing.

Step 2: Decide on the Date and Time

Always choose popular days to run a webinars especially when you have a larger attendees group even the ones from different time zone.

Step 3: Personalize with Branding

Pick a webinar theme, and with the help of branding features customize it by adding your logo, overlays and background that reflects your brand in 360°.

Step 4: Add #️⃣Hashtags

Create a trending hashtag and use it for promotion to spread your brand across social media for maximum attention.

Step 5: Send Webinar Invites

Send personalized invitations to your email list, including detailed information that highlights your brand. Also, create engaging landing pages, send follow up reminder emails  and post banner images on websites to capture attention.

Step 6: Stream your Webinar

Once everything is set, record your webinar on the day of the event to repurpose it into various formats and use it for promotion across different social platforms.

Step 7: Track Attendees

Request for feedbacks or survey answers after the webinar to make sure what went right and what didn’t, to host better webinars the next time.

Step 8: Circulate Webinar Recording

Circulate your webinar recording to non attendees, or keep it in a downloadable file in your website or landing page to widen the reach of your webinar. Its a fact that 63% of webinar views are on-demand, so make sure to upload the recordings.

Aren’t these 8 steps simple and practical to host a webinar without any setbacks! 58.4% of registrants watch the webinar (live or replay), lets target such audience and strike gold.

🏆Best Webinar Streaming Market Players

We have a bunch of market tycoons that would help you host a webinar at once!. You do not need any special skills or experience to handle such platforms , all you need is the patience to go through the listicles that suggest the key features, and pick the one that aligns with your preferences !

1. OnTheFly

An unified platform to host and stream your webinars to 50+ destinations !

OnTheFly is a leading webinar streaming virtual webinar platform that lets you exquisitely live stream your webinar on Facebook page/profile/group, YouTube, and Twitch and more. You can host your webinar in 50+ social channels that support RTMP servers.

Add upto 8 on-screen guests at a time to your webinar stage and engage & equip your attendees on mind-blowing topics. Deliver professional webinar experience with branding and real-time chat features right at your fingertips. Enable recording option while live streaming your webinar and repurpose the recorded content by publishing it on various social media platforms.

If you are looking for a simple, affordable solution to streamline your webinar hosting with professional tools and built-in live chat to support viewer engagement and analytics you are in the right place.

✨Key Features

• Multistream in 50+ destinations at a time with a custom RTMP server.
• Customize your logo, tags, banners, overlay, background themes, colors,images, videos, HD music, layouts and overlays to the video stream and recordings with branding.
• Store hours of your stream recordings, with a maximum storage capacity of 300 hours.
• Real time chat to drive more engagement with audience with feedback and comments
• Live stream your webinar with high resolution quality with a minum of 720p to a maximum of 1080p HD quality.
• Invite up to 8 on-screen guests with a shareable link, and cohost your webinar with maximum engagement.
• Pre-recorded your stream and schedule a perfectly shot webinar.
• Enable recording and automatically record your live webinar and repurpose your content to publish it any social media.

✨Pros

• Exclusive OnTheFly studio room that acts as a waiting room where you can add external camera and mic, invite guests and live chat with your participants.
• Get instant updates and notifications for event invitations, webinar invitations, webinar attendee invitations, and invitations to add to teams.

2. Livestorm

One premium platform with endless possibilities for hosting dynamic webinars!

Livestorm is a finest webinar platforms certified by HubSpot, that can help you host engaging webinars in minutes.

If you are considering hosting webinars for your business, this platform offers other solutions like managing online events, meeting and conferences facilitating the needs of various industries like finance, healthcare, and technology with top-notch video engagement solutions.

Create engaging webinars and show case your strategies that optimizes the workflow seamlessly.

✨Key Features

• Simplified interface that lets you set up and manage your webinars in minutes.
• Instant updates analytics data and insights on webinars to help you track attendees behaviour and webinar performance.
• Maximize your engagement with interactive built-in tools like polls, Q&A, and chat to encourage participant interaction.
• A 3-step webinar hosting process includes scheduling, automated webinars, and replaying webinars any number of times to repurpose content.
• Popular CRM and marketing tools integration to enable smoother workflow and faster productivity.

✨Pros

• Safer data transfer and storage on EU servers, backed by ISO 27001 certification.
• Customizable email reminders and follow-up emails where you can use plain text or custom HTML.

✨Cons

• No multistreaming options available.
• No custom RTMP server to multistream in multiple platforms.
• The platform’s customization options for branding your webinar layouts is limited.

3. GoTo

An all-in-one virtual event platform to host powerful webinars !

This platform offers simple business communication and remote IT tools to host successful webinars and keep your attendees, teams and customers engage remotely.

No matter what you are dealing with in your business or organization, from training employees to conducting pre-recorded product demos to hosting multi-day conferences, this platform makes every events plausible.

It offers specified webinar solution to enable communication & collaboration solutions with features that supports instant conference calling, video conferencing, screen sharing to hundreds of participants simultaneously and more.

✨Key Features

• Deliver professional webinar presentation to offer unique experience for both hosts and attendees in one unified platform.
• Attendees engagement tools like polls, Q&A sessions, and others for maximum engagement and attendee participation.
• Comprehensive analytical reports & metrics to foster attendee engagement with results that measures the success of your webinars.
• Integrate your webinar streaming with CRM and marketing tools to streamline workflows automatically and save time.

✨Pros

• Offers cloud-base and management solutions with collaborative tools and support features as a complete business solution.
• Flexible pricing option to suit users needs.

✨Cons

• The website is not meant for multi-streaming, and can be streamed only from one platform.
• No custom RTMP server to multi stream in popular platforms.

4. Zoom Webinar

A trusted video platform to broadcast webinar content to a larger audience at ease !

Zoom Webinar is the most popular webinar platform, allowing you to streamline and broadcast webinars to up to 100,000 attendees at a time with a webinar license.

This platform enables the host to share their screen and offers excellent video and audio settings in a webinar. Attendees can chat, discuss and question hosts to interact in real-time.

It provides the option to host a webinars once, recurrently, in series, or to host the same session multiple times according to your convenience. This makes Zoom Webinar the best solution to promote your webinars endlessly.

✨Key Features

• Intuitive UI to let your webinar attendees easily join and participate without any hassle.
• Trustworthy, powerful and secure video technology to make your virtual session more compatible.
• Real-time chat and Q&A session during webinars to help you track viewer responses with downloadable full transcript..
• Customize each and every session with a branding option that lets you personalize your company logos, wallpaper, colors and virtual backgrounds.
• Easy integration with third-party applications, from CRMs, educational resources to games and training content, that you can fetch from the Zoom Marketplace.

✨Pros

• Become a licensed user and purchase webinar add-ons based on the number of attendees you expect, ranging from 500 to 100,000.
• Launch an instant feedback process by conducting polls or quizzes for your audience during the webinar.

✨Cons

• The website is not meant for multi-streaming, and can be streamed from only one platform.
• No custom RTMP server to multistream in popular platforms.

5. ON24

An Intelligent Engagement Platform powered by AI to transform webinars into next-generation events!

ON24 is a next-generation webinar platform that allows you to conduct virtual events with extensive content experiences in the AI era by offering the best attendee engagement solutions.

This platform lets you generate webinar content with the help of AI, so you don’t even have to prepare content; all you need to do is host.

Easily deliver branded webinar experiences to reach the masses and personalize attendees experiences, reflecting your brand in every aspect. Get insights on audience engagement data and know their touchpoints to measure webinar performance.

✨Key Features

• 24/7 audience interaction through AI-generated content too foster engagement.
• Branding option to customize your webinar console ,backgrounds, window styling and engagement tool icons.
• schedule, stream and record audio and video of your live to generate on-demand videos to let viewers watch at their convenience.
• Collect feedback from the audience to analyze their interest and behavior and build questions accordingly for surveys and polls.
• Integrate with CRM and marketing automation platforms to maximize productivity and reach.

✨Pros

• Manage buying decisions or customer journeys with content, to seamlessly prepare product collateral, presentations and landing pages.
• Built-in conversion tools to set up contact us page, Book meeting, Request demo and Start free trial landing pages.

✨Cons

• The website is not meant for multi-streaming, and can be streamed from only one platorm.
• No custom RTMP server to multistream in popular platforms.
• No exclusive pricing page.

Choosing one from the above five platforms is not a big deal. With the features, pros, and cons listed strategically, make your choice wisely, start hosting your webinar, and share your reviews online for others to benefit!

What are the Benefits of Hosting a Webinar?

You must have a few favorites by now to host a webinar successfully. If not, no worries, there is still time to conclude.

Let’s explore the benefits you would enjoy if you host a webinar effectively on the right platform!

☑️Reach and Qualify More Prospects, More Often

By hosting webinars, you are paving the way for reaching a wider audience without geographic restrictions at a preferable time, instead of worrying about being physically present on time.

☑️Engage Audiences with HD Video

High-resolution visual streams always have their own hype. Give your audience the best quality streaming in HD resolution, with a minimum of 720p to a maximum of 1080p, for both live and automated webinars.

☑️Build Greater Brand Awareness

Webinars help you showcase your brand and product strategy in the best possible way. Embrace the right hosting technique, and you will definitely create a greater brand awareness.

☑️Present to More People in Less Time

You can schedule a webinar in seconds, as most of the work is automated in the webinar platforms. With the click of a button, you can reach thousands of people to sign up for your webinar in no time.

☑️Conduct Cost-Effective Employee Meetings

Arranging employee training or meetings can be expensive and time-consuming. The cost to host a webinar is very low, and it’s a best practice if you’re looking for a cost-effective way to multiply your revenue in a shorter time.

☑️Expand Reach with Reusable Content

Record your webinar and repurpose the recordings into various digital formats to use across social media platforms for optimal reach.

☑️Streamline your Marketing Processes

Hosting webinars recurrently or at regular intervals can boost your marketing process and help you streamline your marketing strategy along with other winning plans you have mapped out for your business or brand.

Four Tips for Hosting a Successful Webinar

Here is a wrap up tip that will help you instantly host a successful webinar! Let’s see them one by one!

☑️Promote your Webinar Early and Often

Once you sign up with an intuitive platform, first try to host a webinar for free and then look for their paid plans that align with your budget. By deciding this, you can start promoting your webinars whenever possible without much manual work.

☑️Add Presenter Bios to the Registration Page

Exhibit the details and bios of your guest speakers. This will attract more attendees who are looking for professional and expert advice on topics relevant to them.

☑️Create Polls to Get Attendees Involved

Engage them and start interactions to get them excited about what they have learned and what they will be attending in upcoming events by circulating automated polls, which many platforms guarantee.

☑️Connect to the Internet By Cable

Most importantly, ensure that you have a stable and reliable ethernet connection to stream in HD quality to thousands of attendees at a time.

Conclusion

As we come to the closing part, we hope you have gained insights into how hosting a webinar works, the platforms that come in handy, the benefits it offers, and the tips to conduct one successfully. Isn’t this blog a wholesome guide for you to get started even today? We know you think the same. Waste no more time and get started immediately.

Frequently Asked Questions