The Ultimate Webinar Checklist for Growth Hackers in 2021

Where would we be without webinars?

They’re powerful, engaging, and one of the best ways to bring in new clients or nurture them.

But, they’re not exactly the easiest thing to pull off.

We’ve got you covered.

In today’s guide, we’re baring our webinar checklist for scoring real conversions this 2021.

Are you ready for growth?

Planning Stage

Subject Matter

First of all, identify your theme.

Are you having a product launch? An interview? A virtual conference among industry leaders?

After you’ve determined what you’re going to do it’s time to pick a subject that you’re going to tackle in the event.

Here are a couple of tips for picking out a good subject:

• Core competency – pick a subject that your company has a core competency in. If you’re in B2B Coaching, it doesn’t really make sense if you have a webinar on cooking skills.
• Relevancy – your subject matter has to either be about a topic that directly affects people in the present. This makes the webinar actionable.
• Interesting – for goodness sake, pick a topic that’s interesting. There are a lot of webinars out there that cover the same subject-matter, although that’s fine, you need to be able to put out a new spin on things.

Goals

Next, identify your goals.

What’s your bottom line with this webinar?

Do you:

• Want to nurture existing leads?
• Showcase new products to the general public?
• Use it as the start of your lead generation by gaining more leads with the invite process?
• Want to leverage it for brand awareness and establish yourself as an industry leader?
• Use it for remarketing to your existing clients to cross or upsell?

This helps you tweak your subject matter to be able to meet your objectives for the webinar, and it ensures that you’re using your resources well.

Targeting

Next, you need to figure out who you want to target.

This should be easy if you already have target customer profiles ready.

If you don’t have target customer profiles ready, you could be in trouble. We strongly advise you to check out our ideal customer profile guide here.

Pick out your targets well – don’t worry you can use more than one.

This allows you to make more adjustments to your goals and subject.

Speakers

Make sure that one of your speakers is from your organization.

This allows you to establish your ownership of the webinar.

Make sure that you have a shortlist of speakers at the earliest, and that you have backups just in case.

How do you pick a speaker?

Pick someone that won’t bore an audience to death.

Make sure that you get them on a video call – especially if they haven’t spoken on a webinar yet – to determine if their online demeanor suits the theme of your upcoming webinar.

Start putting out feelers at the soonest. The worst thing that could happen to a webinar is missing a speaker before the event.

Also, try inviting industry leaders, they might cost you money, but they can help with promotion.

Host

We always advise on getting yourself an in-house host, unless you can get an actual personality to be the emcee during the webinar.

You need someone that’s fun and that’s quick on their feet to facilitate discussion and guide the energy.

Hold auditions if you have to.

Hosts are responsible for the flow, and if your webinar won’t flow well, you’re in heaps of trouble.

Coordinator

Pick a lead coordinator to preside over everything, this will help simplify the chain of command and keeps things streamlined.

They’ll also be responsible for making sure the speakers come in on time, and that you don’t have any other smaller hindrances come the day of the webinar.

Activities

You can’t just have talking heads.

Yes, they work well.

But, webinars don’t just limit you to speeches.

You can integrate activities such as games, quizzes, or quick polls to engage with your audience.

Although this is something you should visit in detail later on in the checklist. It’s good to have an idea of what you want to do now so that it’s easier when it comes to timing the overall flow.

Metrics

At BAMF, we’re all about tracking whether it be LinkedIn marketing campaigns or your webinar because it helps with the creation of better things in the future.

So, as early as now, you need to be able to determine what your metrics of success are: the number of newly onboarded clients, your attendee-registrant ratio, etc.

This helps with your goal-setting and figuring out if you’ve hit your KPIs.

Read: 11 Things to Do After a Webinar Regardless of the Results

Webinar Specifics Checklist

Webinar Title

Think of your title the same way you think of your LinkedIn headline.

It needs to attract attention while giving as much information about the event as possible.

A good way to create a webinar title is to use the semicolon format.

For example:

Catchy 4-5 Word Title: Quick Summary of the Webinar

Why Your Lead Generation Sucks: How Organic Campaigns Are Leading The Way 

This lets you have the best of both worlds, you get to sneak some marketing copy in to lure your prospects into reading the summary.

Webinar Summary

You need a quick blurb about the webinar.

It doesn’t have to be a full schedule of events, but rather a paragraph of what’s to come.

You can use this in your invites and social media posts.

Webinar Date and Time

A good starting point is to have your webinar before or after lunchtime. Don’t pick high-pressure days such as Mondays.

But, here’s the thing.

Take into account the time zones.

If you can predict that most of your attendees will come in from the East Coast, you need to adjust to their time if you’re coming in from PST.

This maximizes the number of people that join.

Also, you want to make sure that you conveniently put timezone conversions for your other attendees to plan accordingly.

Here’s our guide on when is the best time to have a webinar!

Webinar Schedule

Make sure you plan your webinar schedule in advance, this leaves you time to make quick adjustments when necessary.

You need to make sure that there are allowances for quick question and answer sessions, technical issues, and transitions.

There is no such thing as a perfectly orchestrated schedule. There will be speakers that will take too long, there could be interruptions and even the audience could become a factor.

This also comes in handy when you do your dry run, but more on that later.

Length of the Webinar

Shorter is definitely sweeter.

And, the sweetest spot for a webinar is 60 minutes.

45 minutes is also a good option, but you won’t be able to integrate a lot of audience engagement if you cut it too short.

Anything over 60 minutes is considered a no-no, you don’t want to keep people in for more than an hour because they start to lose focus and you could experience a high dropout rate.

Towards the end of your webinar, you can keep people in for an afterparty or additional questions if you have to.

Vendor

There are plenty of Webinar vendors out there, and you can always use a familiar platform like Zoom if you don’t want to look any further.

Your vendor will be dependent on how many people you’re expecting in attendance and the features that you need for your event.

However, here’s a major consideration – especially for growth hackers.

You need to pick a webinar vendor that has the most intuitive UI and the easiest UX.

Your attendees should have an easy time getting into your webinar, not only does this help with engagement, but it also shows them that you are a company that’s easy to deal with.

Dry Run (3 Days Before the Webinar)

Conducting a dry run is critical to the success of a webinar.

Think of it as a rehearsal dinner, but for your event.

You want things to go over smoothly and the only way to assess that is by doing a practice session.

This lets you find any technical hiccups, but more importantly, helps you find ways of improving webinar transitions.

During this time you can take out a stopwatch and see if things are going on as timed, if they aren’t this is the best time to make adjustments.

Important note: make sure you clarify with the speakers that there will be a dry run, it would be best if they were present.

Webinar Marketing Campaign Checklist

5-6 Week Mark

Once you’re done with your planning and webinar specifics stage. It’s time to start creating marketing materials.

Your sixth-week mark is where you start warming up.

Some marketers decide to start the marketing process here, but you really don’t have to.

This is still your preparation stage and you should be using this time to perfect your marketing materials.

You want the following:

• Get an initial list of prospects ready to be marketed to, this will form your base invites.
• Segment that list.
• Get customer profiles ready and – if possible – plan alternate marketing campaigns for them.
• Decide which social media outlets to use: we strongly advise LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is also a good candidate if you need a fourth medium.
• Pick a design theme.
• Get headshots of all speakers.
• Get summary of webinar ready for use with marketing materials.
• Get important details such as time/date, etc. ready for integration.
• Start creating templates for social media posts.
• Start designing the landing page for registrants.
• Initial email drafts for invitations and reminders.
• Topic selection for blog posts that cover your webinar topic so that you can use them to link to your upcoming event.

This should take you about one or two weeks to get ready. 

The reason you need to get this ready at this point is to make sure that everything is ready for launch and that you have an easier time moving forward.

Webinars can get hectic as they approach the date, so getting all of this stuff out of the way is great.

4 Week Mark

• Preregistration – this is the part where you can offer freebies to early birds or give them discounts if you’re having a paid webinar.
• Landing Page – has to be ready for preregistration to start, you need the link to the landing page so that you can start sending out invitations.
• Social Media Syndication – teaser posts should be released by this time.
• Start Sending Out Emails – make sure you start the preregistration process by emailing your current list of prospects. You can include your current clients as well. This allows you to have a base of participants to make sure you have people coming to your event.
• Blog Post Coverage – make sure that you have a couple of articles that deal with the subject matter ready to add a little background to the webinar.

2 Week Mark

• Registration – it’s time to inform everyone that’s preregistered that the event is two weeks away. You can send RSVPs at this point. This is also where you should start intensifying your marketing.
• Social Media Posts – start targeting specific demographics with your posts regarding the webinar.
• Your Website – add a banner or sticky to your website promoting the webinar.
• Direct Messages – if you’re on LinkedIn and Facebook, you can start with a more direct campaign of asking people if they’re interested in joining your webinar.

1 Week Mark

• Social Media Posts – You can start integrating a countdown of the days to come before the webinar and offer sneak peeks of what’s to come. We also advise that you offer posts that are valuable at this point such as notes and case studies, that they can use to brief themselves before the webinar.
• Content – add links to your webinar through the content that you’re releasing for this week. When the webinar is over you can redirect those links to a recap of the event.
• Registration – RSVP time!
• Email – send out your first email reminder that the event is just one week away. This will help create buzz. You can send out speaker bios at this point. 

3 Days Before

• Countdown – you can now release a countdown by the hour on your website itself.
• Email – This is your second email to them, make sure they RSVP’d if they haven’t already. This is especially important for free webinars.
• Social Media Posts – you can post videos of your speakers or short interview snippets telling people that they’re excited.

Webinar Prep (Day of the Webinar)

Internet Check

First, you want to check the stability of your internet on the day itself.

Run a quick internet speed test on Ookla or a similar app if necessary.

Restart your router if necessary and make sure you have a backup internet facility.

Technical Checks

Your event is basically a production and technical checks are a critical part of your webinar checklist.

Make sure that you look at the following.

• Software/webinar vendor app is up and running.
• Speaker notes and decks are loaded and good to go.
• Lighting is great.
• The “set” is clear and free from obstructions.
• Background or generated backdrops are ready.
• External noise is controlled.

A/V Checks

Audio and visual checks are highly dependent on what type of equipment you’re using, and it doesn’t even have to be fancy.

Here’s your standard A/V webinar checklist:

• Microphone tests.
• If you’re using a mixer make sure there’s an audio feed coming through to the stream.
• Video cameras are setup and recording on the correct format.
• Batteries are ready and spares are prepped.

Resource Speaker Check

Apart from the equipment, you need to make sure that all your speakers are ready.

In webinars, there are instances where your speakers might be hosting WFH-style, so make sure that they’re on call.

Ask them if their notes are ready and if they have any changes to be made.

Coordinate with your tech team if necessary.

Also, make sure that they’re mentally hyped for the webinar, you’ll know this with the amount of energy that you have.

Test Stream

A test stream is an absolute must before the webinar.

Regardless of how solid your vendor is, problems do happen with streams and you want your attendees to be greeted with nothing when they come in.

Takeaways on this Webinar Checklist

This particular webinar checklist is a general guide of things to come.

There are still a couple of tweaks that you can do, especially with your marketing campaign.

However, this is as exhaustive as it gets.

Remember a successful webinar is planned out.

The better the plan, the more connections you make.

The more connections you make, the more you grow.

And, that’s the goal.