Enough has been said about the need for clarity, consistency, and a deep understanding of your audience for the growth of webinars as an outreach medium. So, to get the best from your webinars, it is advised to create and stick with a result-driven webinar calendar.
The calendar will not only bring clarity to the ongoing process of publishing webinars, but it will also reduce the pressure and give content creators the necessary time to plan and come up with epic content for pre-defined topics.
Importance of a Webinar Calendar
Puts One in Control: No matter how well you plan your webinar schedule, there are going to be last-minute changes that inevitably would be required to be accommodated. With a webinar calendar, you will be provided with flexibility and enough room for maneuverability to accommodate changes at the most critical junctures.
Keeps Everyone on the Same Page: Putting together a webinar is teamwork, and there will be different individuals in-charge of different aspects of it. This makes it even more critical to have a document that seamlessly shares information to everyone about any changes to the content of the webinar. Having a webinar calendar keeps everyone within the team better informed about changes and streamlines the process of webinar creation.
Cohesive Webinar Content: One may believe that a calendar is just a scheduling tool. But there is more to it than meets the eye. By having a webinar calendar, you would be able to publish a series of webinars in a manner that feels cohesive and with purpose. The audience would not be simply bombarded with random content. Rather the entire set of published webinar content would have a common theme and a cohesiveness associated with it.
Content in a Time Bound Manner: You might have created a monthly schedule for webinar content, but a plan is only useful if it is feasible. Given the need for different types of webinar content over a fixed period, it becomes necessary to have defined deadlines for the creation of each webinar. A content calendar makes the entire process seamless because a calendar takes into account the time needed to create webinar content. Hence, every planned webinar gets accommodated into the monthly schedule without any lapses.
A Strategic Tool: A webinar calendar allows the creator to strategically plan content both at the macro and micro level. The calendar can give you a bird’s eye view of the entire monthly schedule. It also gives you the flexibility to accommodate specific content that could enhance broader themes or topics planned for a specified time. In total, a webinar calendar places the creator in an advantageous position to strategically drive content creation.
Creating a Result-Driven Webinar Calendar
Start with a Goal: At the initial stage itself, you need to chalk out the goals on why you are doing this series of webinars every month. Once the goal is in place, content creation or scripting a webinar becomes easier and more focused. There could be multiple goals but to start with, it is recommended that a brand focuses on a small set of goals to get better traction.
Create a Mechanism for Measurement: Once there are goals in place, the success of the webinar would be directly related to whether there are metrics associated with the goals. If yes, these must be measurable. This is essential because only a measurable entity can be tweaked and improved going into the future.
Create Benchmarks for Performance: This practice might require you to wait until you have a set of results from past webinars. Based on these past results, you must have a set of benchmarks or minimum level of performance for your webinars. Another way of setting benchmarks is to closely monitor your competition and observe their performance metrics. This would give you an idea about what the minimum level of metrics required is to call a monthly schedule of webinars successful.
Determine Performance Metrics for One Webinar: Till now, our focus was on a series of webinars in the monthly calendar, but it becomes important that we can measure how a single webinar contributes to the totality. Hence, it is essential to understand the efficacy of one webinar and how it cumulatively contributes to the performance of the monthly webinar calendar. It could be one badly done webinar that spoils the strike-rate for the entire month, hence, keeping a check on the granular picture is crucial.
Individual Performance Metrics Goals: In the beginning, we mentioned the creation of goals, but these overarching goals are tied to the business objectives of the brand. Apart from generic goals, a webinar must have goals for individual performance metrics such as views, number of attendees, and so on. By having a predefined set of individual metric goals, a brand would be in a much better position to succeed with its webinars.
Benefits of a Webinar Calendar
Frequency of Webinars: A calendar puts you in control of the optimum number of webinars that should be hosted for an intended audience, without being haphazard about the entire process of putting out webinars without any planning.
Knowledge of the Best Time: With experience with the webinar calendar, you will be more knowledgeable on the best times to publish a webinar with optimum consistency that does not saturate the audience in any manner.
Repurposing Old Content: Once you have a webinar calendar in place, you will be required to hunt less for new content, as the calendar will give you enough flexibility to accommodate old content, such as blogs that would have enough potential to be repurposed into webinars.
Measurable Results: With a webinar calendar, it is easy to get a bird’s eye view of the performance of the webinars throughout the month. This kind of measurement of performance will give you enough insights into creating more effective webinars with added consistency.
Webinars have exploded recently as a marketing tool, and it has become a favored medium among marketers to generate prospects and leads. Having said that, creating a webinar does take a serious amount of planning, and one of the tools that are essential for good and effective planning is a webinar calendar. Any marketer that is serious about webinars should never undervalue the utility of a webinar calendar; it not only puts you in control but it also gives you the flexibility to make adjustments at both the macro and micro levels. Above all, you can make your life much easier as a marketer and content creator if you have created a simple yet effective webinar calendar.
Frequently Asked Questions
Once a webinar is in place, the brand should promote and market the webinar with a mix of organic and paid marketing techniques. The former could be SEO, email marketing, and reaching out to online communities. The latter would include publishing paid ads on social media platforms and so on.
A successful webinar is a combination of a handful of individuals working towards a common purpose. The initial stage would consist of planning for the topic and rendering the script for the webinar. Secondly, it would involve the technical aspects of choosing the right platform to publish the webinar. Thirdly, there should be an emphasis on promoting and marketing the webinar to get the maximum attendance. Lastly, post-webinar, there is an equal need to look into the analytics associated with the webinar, which could enumerate the opportunities for improvement.
The success of a webinar is entirely subjective, depending on the kind of predefined goals a brand puts in place. That said, there are primarily two kinds of goals – business and performance metric goals. The former is related to how the webinar is going to enhance the reach and popularity of the brand. The latter pertains to relevant metrics that would make a webinar successful when compared to the benchmarks predefined by the brand.
