50 Steps to Delivering Great Webcasts

The 2014 Marketing Resource Series
from WinGreen Marketing Systems
50 Steps to Delivering
Great Webcasts
50 Steps to Delivering
Great Webcasts
An Informative E-book from the
Marketing Resource Series Sponsored by
WinGreen Marketing Systems
An Informative E-book from the
Marketing Resource Series Sponsored by
WinGreen Marketing Systems
#contentmarketing
#leadgeneration

Introduction
Webcasts or web seminars (“webinars”) are an exceptionally valuable part of
the content mix for B2B lead generation in technology and industrial
companies. When used in conjunction with other content media such as white
papers, e-books, infographics, blogs, and video, webinars help attract specific
types of prospects at specific times during their evaluation process. They help
identify the level of interest of sales prospects. For example, did a prospect
register for a webinar shortly after registering for a companion white paper?
Did he attend the webinar, or just register? How many minutes did he view
the webinar? If you’re using lead scoring in your marketing automation, each
of those indicators accrues to the score. If you’re not, you can still judge the
prospect’s interest through the answers to those questions. Webinars --
better than any other medium in the content marketer’s toolkit -- allow for
deep, meaningful analytics. For this reason, they’re a critical component of
the B2B content marketing kit.
© Copyright 2009-2014, WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
WinGreen Marketing Systems, The WinGreen System of Marketing, and The WinGreen Systems Architecture are trademarks of WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their
respective owners.

Webinars are challenging to produce
But this value comes at a cost.
Webinars are time-consuming.
Webinars require teams of people
to plan, promote, produce, and
broadcast. Webinars demand
reliable, high-bandwidth Internet
connections and clear, predictable
audio connections. Marketing
organizations must find speakers --
“talent” -- who know their stuff,
know the company’s key messages,
can converse in technical or
operational detail, and perform
charismatic and articulate public
speaking (a set of characteristics
that rarely occur in a single
individual)...

… and then get those people to
outline 30 to 50 minutes of
presentation material, write a
compelling abstract, attend
planning meetings, meet deadlines
that probably aren’t assigned by
their own bosses, and eventually
create and deliver a professional
presentation on a potentially
worldwide broadcast.
Once you, the marketer, have all of
that covered, you’ll need to work to
a tight schedule, with many
interdependencies.
Sending out the invitations three
weeks ahead of the broadcast date
doesn’t sound like a big challenge...
until you realize you need the
abstract, HTML emailers to promote
the webcast, landing pages with
registration forms, auto-reply
emails with login instructions, and
the names, titles, bios, and head
shots of your speakers that you’ve
worked so hard to convince to
participate.

Run a complete dress rehearsal?
Sure, no problem at all… until you
discover that your three speakers
all have regular jobs and no one
mentioned to them a month earlier
that they’d have to spend all this
extra time on this. Or until you
remember that the main point of a
dress rehearsal is to test everything
exactly as it will occur at showtime,
and then discover that two of your
speakers are traveling and won’t be
in the same place for rehearsal and
live broadcast.
You also will discover that you
didn’t realize that holding a dress
rehearsal at 10:00 AM doesn’t show
you how your office Internet
bandwidth will perform during your
live broadcast at 1:00 PM. (Why
does this matter? Here’s a tip from
the pros: A significant number of
your co-workers eat lunch at their
desks and use the time to watch
streaming video, which is a
bandwidth hog. So if you’re hosting
a midday webcast, you’ll want to
know ahead of time that your
network can sustain enough
bandwidth for you to run webcast,
video, and audio. Otherwise, the
latency between your audio and
your webcast will frustrate your
viewers.)

Why not outsource webinar production?
At this point, we would imagine that you might think that outsourcing the
production of your webinar sounds like a terrific idea. And it is. It’s actually
a great idea. The authors highly recommend outsourcing your webinar
production while taking in-house responsibility for trained, on-point speakers
and delivering the key messages you hope will attract sales prospects. After
producing hundreds of webinars from both sides of the fence -- as executives
leading marketing departments and now as principals in our agency -- we
can tell you with no hesitation: Outsource it. Agencies do webinars all the
time. We stamp them out like a factory. High volume, high quality, no pain
for you.
If you want to contact us to help you with your webinars, you can do so at
www.wingreenmarketing.com/contact-us. If not, we’re still here to help, by
presenting this step-by-step process to producing great webinars.

Still prefer to produce your webinars in-house?
If you’re committed to putting on
one or more world-class webinars
in-house, we’re very happy to
provide you with this primer on the
process of delivering great B2B lead
generation webinars, with 50
pointers on what to do and when to
do it. Follow the directions in this
paper, don’t cut any corners or take
any shortcuts, and you’ll be able to
produce successful webinars.

50 Things to Do to Produce a Great Webinar
Planning and producing a great webinar requires effective project
management and time management. Once you’ve committed to
broadcasting to a live audience on a particular date and time, you can’t let
any of your milestones slip, or you’ll find yourself unprepared when the
time comes to click the “Start” button.
Here are the things you need to do, in the order you need to do them.

One month ahead of broadcast
1. Choose a date and time. In general,
B2B webinars should be held on Tuesday,
Wednesday, or Thursday. If you’re
expecting a coast-to-coast audience,
schedule for sometime between 12:00
Noon and 4:00 PM Eastern Time, which
will allow your west coast attendees to
view between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM
Pacific Time. Alternately, you could
choose to broadcast two or three
separate live webcasts and schedule any
time of day within local times (lunchtime
and early afternoon are best), or you
could schedule for a live broadcast at a
convenient time in one time zone and
promote a recorded version to the other
time zones.
2.Choose a topic and a title. You’ll be
promoting the webcast just one week
after this, so you’ll need to have a final
topic and title at this time.
3. Choose your speakers. The best
combination of speakers for maximizing
registrations is one person from your
company, one customer, and one third-
party expert. We strongly recommend
that you do not use anyone from your
sales organization. (There are two
reasons for this: [1] Sales people can’t
resist selling and B2B lead generation
webinars should never sound like sales
pitches, and [2] effective selling is all
about the productive use of time, and the
hours spent participating in a webinar are
hours that are not spent selling.)

One month ahead of broadcast (cont.)
Company speaker: Choose
someone who can speak in detail
about your industry, the reasons
for choosing products or services
like yours, and, if you’re in a
technology industry, how specific
technologies support the benefits
your listeners might derive. The
usual source within an
organization for in-house speakers
is the product management or
product marketing organization.
Customer speaker: The people
that you want to sell to do not
want to be sold to. They do want
to hear how other people with the
same problems or challenges
solved them. Having one or more
of your customers speak on your
webinar in a “birds of a feather”
forum will attract the most
registrants and will give them what
they’re looking for from the
webinar.
Third-party expert speaker: If
you are a subscriber to one or
more industry analysts, we
recommend that you look into
having a “name brand” analyst or
consultant be one of your
speakers. Having a speaker from a
big name firm such as Gartner,
IDC, or Yankee Group will
significantly increase interest in
registering and attending from
among your targets. The downside
is that industry analysts charge a
fee -- typically thousands of dollars
-- for their time.
Make sure to choose speakers who have
some life and personality in them.
Spending 45 to 60 minutes listening to a
dreary, monotonous speaker is not
something that you want your
prospective customers to need to do.
4. Choose your host (or “master of
ceremonies”). Webinars sound much
more professional when someone other
than the speakers acts as the host. The
host will greet the attendees, do the
quick introductions and thank-yous, and
act as the seamless transition voice
between speakers.
5. Create an outline for what is to be
presented.
6. Write an abstract to describe what will
be presented.
7. Get headshots and bios of your
speakers to use in the email invitations
and the landing page. Keep bios very
short.

Three weeks ahead of broadcast
The steps to take at this point will require
the use of marketing automation and
mass email software. If you’re not using
marketing automation and you do not
have a mass email platform, it is still
possible to create email invitations,
mailing lists, and registration forms. But it
is cumbersome. For the sake of this
guide, we will assume that you are using
marketing automation, mass email and
CRM systems.
8. Create your invitations -- email, social,
advertisements. You’ll need to create
emails in both HTML and plain text
versions.
9. Create landing page with registration
form.
10. Create your emailing list.
12. Send first wave of invitation emails.
13. Begin to create the presentation slide
deck (and any audio or video you may
wish to use).
11. Set up auto-emails to be sent on the
following schedule:
● First invitation emails - 3 weeks
ahead
● Second wave of invitations --
1 week ahead
● Registration confirmations with
login instructions -- in real time as
people register.
● Reminders to registrants -- 1 day
ahead
● Third wave of invites -- 1 day
ahead
● Final reminders to registrants --
2 to 4 hours ahead of broadcast

Two weeks ahead of broadcast
14. Complete a near-final draft of the
presentation slides (and audio/video if
you plan to use them).
15. Complete a written script or speakers’
notes.
16. Create a set of staged questions to be
used in the Q&A session (if you’re
planning on doing live Q&A)
17. Send the presentation and speakers’
notes to the speakers for review.

One week ahead of broadcast
18. Send logistics and housekeeping to all
speakers and participants.
● Dial-in and connection information
● Instructions to use only a land-line
telephone (No mobile phones, no
computer
headphone/microphones). A high-
quality speakerphone connected to
a land-line is acceptable
● Conference room (or other room)
from which the broadcast will be
done. It’s best to have all speakers
in a single room. If they cannot
be, then remind all speakers to be
in a quiet area for the broadcast
● Instruct all participants to join the
conference at least 10 minutes
ahead of broadcast.
19. Send second wave of invitations.
(This should happen automatically if you’
re using marketing automation software
and set up your auto-send as noted in
#11 above.)
20. Complete the final version of the
presentation (slides, video, audio) and
email it in both Microsoft PowerPoint®
and PDF formats to speakers and
organizers.

One Day Before Broadcast
21. Do a full scale dress rehearsal. It's
preferable to have everyone participate
fully in the dress rehearsal from the exact
facilities and telephones/computers from
which they'll be doing the live broadcast.
The best time to do this is exactly 24
hours ahead of live broadcast in order to
identify any time-of-day issues with
noise, Internet connectivity, network
latency, etc. Set up at least 2 computers
with full speaker/moderator/organizer
rights. Computers still break or hang.
22. Record the dress rehearsal. (If you
want to use a recording of the live
broadcast for archiving, you can edit
parts of the dress rehearsal into the final
cut of the broadcast if any mistakes are
made.)
23. Send the third wave of invitations
#11 above.)
24. Send reminders to all registrants
#11 above.)

Day of Broadcast
25. Set up and test all computers,
telephones, and other required
equipment.
26. Send reminders to all registrants
#11 above.)
27. Log in to the webcast at least 30
minutes before broadcast time.
28. Load your presentation materials into
the webcast system and run through all
slides. Test any video or other embedded
media. If you’re using a camera to show
live shots of the speakers, test the
camera.
29. Conduct a sound check for all
speakers.
30. Have a scribe who can either write
down questions as they come in online or
through #socialmedia. Better yet, have a
printer in the room for the scribe to print
questions and comments to hand to the
speakers.
31. At approximately 10 to 15 minutes
before broadcast, put the broadcast into
“Waiting Room” mode. Webcast systems
allow you to customize what is shown to
attendees before you go to the live
presentation.
32. Almost every webinar has a few
attendees who log in a few minutes early.
At the -5:00 mark, the organizer or host
should announce “For those of you who
have already joined us for today’s
webinar, we will begin the broadcast at
two o’clock. Thank you for your
patience.” Then mute all microphones
(This should be done in the webcast
system console by the organizer).
33. If you are recording the webinar (and
you should be), click the “RECORD”
button at the -5:00 mark. You’ll be able
to edit out the five minutes of silence
later. This ensures that the additional
load on the computer created by
recording doesn’t hang or slow down the
primary computer used for broadcast.
Best to use the secondary computer
logged in as “organizer” to do the
recording.
34. At each minute (-4:00, -3:00, -2:00,
and -1:00), the host should again
announce “For those of you who have
already joined us for today’s webinar, we
will begin the broadcast at two o’clock.
Thank you for your patience.”

Broadcast Time!
35. At precisely the broadcast time, click
the button to start the broadcast. The
host or organizer should announce
“Welcome to today’s webinar…” along
with the title.
36. Spend a minute or two to tell the
attendees what to expect
a. Today’s webinar is scheduled to
be xx minutes long
b. There will (or will not) be a live
question and answer session at the
conclusion.
c. (If there is to be a Q&A) Please
submit your questions to our
speakers at any time through the
“Question” or “Comment” box on
your screen.
d. All attendee lines have been
muted

40. Try to complete the webinar in less
time than what you’ve scheduled.
Attendees appreciate a well-managed
production and are happy to get those 10
minutes back.
41. If you’re doing a Q&A, have the host,
organizer, or one of the speakers read
each question that has come in. If no
questions have been submitted, then use
your pre-staged questions.
e. There will (or will not) be a PDF
version of today’s presentation
mailed to all attendees.
f. There will (or will not) be a
recording of today’s webinar
available.
37. The host should introduce all of the
speakers and provide a one-sentence bio
for each.
38. Hand it off to the first speaker. You
are on the air!
39. Don't sell. Inform. Educate. Interact if
possible and practical. But don’t allow
any sales pitches unless you have
explicitly promoted your webcast as a
sales promotion.

Upon Conclusion
42. Shut down your webcast, save your
recording, and thank everyone for their
participation.
43. Post the recorded version to whatever
video pages you use. If you don’t mind
having it open to the general public, post
it to YouTube. If you prefer to gate the
access to it in order to collect
registrations, you can archive it with your
webcast hosting provider, usually for up
to 12 months, and set up a registration
page. You can also embed it on your
own website.
44. Send emails to all attendees, thanking
them for their interest, and include the
PDF of the slides along with the URL for
where the recording of the webcast will
be. Use this email for a quick sales pitch
and call-to-action. If you have other
recorded webcasts and other assets
(white papers, a blog) available on your
website, put the URL for those into this
email. Finish with something that says “If
your interest in today’s topic is due to a
current need for [product, service, help],
we can help. Contact us at (xxx) nnn-
nnnn or www.website.com” (These
emails should have been set up for auto-
delivery early in the planning process if
you are using marketing automation.)
45. Send emails to any attendee who
asked a question that did not get
answered during the broadcast. (Leading
webcast systems log questions and match
them to the registrant who posts them.)
Offer to have a one-on-one phone call to
answer the question. Remember: anyone
who attends your entire webinar and
actively asks questions is most likely
more interested in your subject matter
and well down the path of research and
evaluation. You can turn a “Sorry we
didn’t answer your question,” email into a
sales phone call.

Upon Conclusion (cont.)
46. Send emails to all registrants who did
not attend. (These are also set up for
auto-delivery early in the process if you’re
using marketing automation.) Provide
them with the URL for the recording, and
invite them to check out your other
webcasts and white papers.
47. Send a final invitation to the original
complete list to invite them to view the
recorded version of the webinar at their
convenience. Make sure to point out that
the recording allows viewers to use
pause, rewind, and fast forward controls.
48. Post the slides to Slideshare.
49. Promote the recorded version through
social media.
50. Send us a note to tell us how it went!
(We’re serious.) Drop us an email to
webinars@wingreenmarketing.com or
tweet us at @WinGreen_Mktng.

Follow Up
It’s important to conduct thorough follow-
up activities soon after the completion of
the broadcast. Regardless of what type of
webcast you’ve completed, you’ll want to
review what went well, what went wrong,
and what you can do to improve.
Immediately after the conclusion of the
broadcast, set up a new conference
bridge and get your webinar team
together. Do not just tell everyone to
“stay on the line”. The team will be
discussing internal matters related to the
logistics, planning, and delivery of the
webinar. You will not want outside parties
listening to potential “dirty laundry”.
What went well?
Do a five to ten minute brainstorm on the
question “What went well?” Capture all
participants’ opinions on a whiteboard or
flip chart or Evernote in short, “bumper
sticker” format.
What went wrong?
Again, do a five to ten minute brainstorm
on what didn’t go so well. If there were
many negatives about your broadcast,
you’ll obviously want to take whatever
time is necessary to capture them all.
Remind the participants that this is a
brainstorm, and the intent isn’t to
discuss, debate, or solve any of these
items, but rather to capture them for the
next brainstorming section, which is…
What will we do to improve?
Now that the team has enjoyed the
“What went well” part, and endured the
“What went wrong” part, it’s time to take
what was learned from both of those and
apply it to “What will we do to improve?”
Take five to fifteen minutes with the team
to capture the key things that need to be
done for future webcasts, based on what
everyone learned from the one just
completed.
Document and Distribute
Copy all of the bullet points from the
review process verbatim into a single
document. Distribute this document to
the entire webinar team so that all
participants have the entire review. Set
up a short meeting or online chat to
assign tasks based on the “What will we
do” section.
Production Team

Sales leads
Since the entire purpose of the webinar
was to generate quality sales leads, the
critical step after the conclusion of the
webinar is the contacting and
qualification/disqualification of the
registrants and attendees.
Process decisions
There are two organizational process
decisions to be made prior to undertaking
any lead generation webinars.
1. What organization conducts initial
contact and lead qualification? Will the
marketing group be assigned, with the
objective of delivering marketing qualified
leads (MQL’s) to the sales group? Or will
the sales group take immediate
responsibility for follow-up, with
ownership of the lead from first contact
through closure (win or lose)? Each
company has its own strengths and
weaknesses in follow-up and qualification,
so there is no standard answer. The key
is making the process and responsibility
decision before conducting the lead
generation activity.
2. At what point in the process should
registrants first be contacted? Do you
want to try to engage a registrant at the
point at which they register (which could
be weeks before the broadcast)? Or do
you want to wait until the webcast has
been completed and begin all phone
contacts at that point? Similarly to the
previous point, this really is an
organizational decision. There is not
much evidence to point toward either
choice. The one factor that might sway
the decision is that waiting to contact
registrants until after the webinar
provides the follow-up caller a
conversation point and ice-breaker. “How
did you like the webinar?” “Was it
informative and useful? Do you have any
suggestions I can take back to the
webinar team?”
Different levels of interest among
webinar registrants
Unlike other content marketing tactics,
such as white papers, e-books, or
podcasts, webinars present the marketing
organization with deeper statistics and
analytics. Most importantly, your webcast
reports show you not only who
registered, but also who attended, and
the amount of time they were logged into
the broadcast. From these statistics, you
can derive an implied level of interest for
each registrant.

Registered -- Interested in the topic.
May or may not become an MQL or SQL
Attended -- More interested in the topic.
Took the time out of their busy day to
watch and listen. Will almost certainly
become an MQL.
Attended and remained online for
the entire broadcast -- Significantly
interested. Took an entire 45 to 60
minutes out of their busy day to watch
and listen. Will become an MQL and
probably will become an SQL.
Attended, remained online, and
asked one or more questions -- The
most interested lead. Took an entire 45
to 60 minutes out of their busy day to
watch and listen. Paid enough attention
and has a high enough degree of topic
interest to form a question and expect an
answer. Will become an MQL and almost
certainly will become an SQL.
The follow-up call
Make sure your follow-up callers --
whichever organization they’re in --
understand that they are not conducting
cold calls. They are calling individuals
who have expressed interest in the topic
of the webinar, which means they have
some level of interest in what you sell, if
you’ve chosen your webinar topic
correctly.
Follow-up callers should have all of the
webinar stats at their fingertips. It’s best
to script something at an outline level for
each of the levels of interest described
above. Leads who attended the entire
webinar and posed questions should be
prioritized and perhaps even handed
directly to outside sales (or account sales,
or whoever is ultimately responsible for
closing). They’re ready to be qualified in
or out and their specific questions during
the webinar Q&A present opportunity to
generate very specific sales discussions.
The tone and “voice” of the initial follow-
up calls should be helpful and supportive
rather than probing and pushy. “I’m
calling as a quick follow-up to our
webinar that you attended recently. I just
wanted to make sure that you were able
to see and hear our broadcast alright,
and answer any questions you might
have.” After the person has responded to
this question, one might ask “I’m curious
about what may have led you to register
for this. Are you working on a current
project? Facing some immediate
challenge?” If they answer affirmatively,
then you have yourself someone with
whom you can proceed into a
selling/buying process. If they answer (as
most people do) that they are

just researching or learning, you should
ask if it was helpful, and mention that
you have a “resource center” on your
website with white papers, e-books, and
other relevant webcast recordings.
“Would you like me to send you that
link?” Then update your CRM system to
reflect the outcome of this conversation
and move forward with whatever tickler
or lead nurture process you use.

Conclusion
B2B webinars are an outstanding tactic
for cost-effective lead generation.
Registrants and attendees are usually
people from your target market who have
a higher level of interest than those from
other lead gen tactics. Content creation,
setup, administration, and follow-up can
be conducted with internal resources, if
they are experienced, detail-oriented, and
able to meet tight deadlines.
For those with limited resources or a
desire to keep the marketing team
focused on strategic initiatives, webinars
can be outsourced to experts in
marketing agencies who conduct them all
the time. Outsourced webinar production
and campaign management actually cost
less than in-house production when all
costs are considered, and the time to do
all 50 steps in this paper is returned to
the marketing organization for more
strategic tasks like brand, promotion,
marketing communications, product
marketing, and field marketing. The
sponsor of this paper, WinGreen
Marketing Systems, can run a
comprehensive webinar program for you,
whether you want just one webinar per
quarter or 50 webinars over 12 months.
Contact them at
webinars@wingreenmarketing.com.
For those of you who remain committed
to in-house production for your own
organizational reasons, we do hope you’
ve found our 50 step process to be
helpful and informative. We’ve honed it
over the course of delivering hundreds of
webinars for dozens of companies over
the past 15 years, so we’re confident that
if you follow these steps, with no
shortcuts and no missed deadlines, you’ll
deliver world-class webinars every time.

This e-book is part of the 2014 Marketing Resource Series
sponsored and brought to you by WinGreen Marketing Systems.
WinGreen commissions original new e-books and white papers and
curates informative, well-written content on topics related to
content marketing, email marketing, and inbound marketing.
Do you have a topic you’d like to see covered in a future e-book or
white paper? Send us your suggestions to
support@wingreenmarketing.com
Are you an expert on content marketing and lead generation?
Would you like to be a contributor to the WinGreen Marketing
White Paper Series and have your writing be seen by tens of
thousands of marketing and sales leaders? Contact us at
www.wingreenmarketing.com/contact-us.

About the Sponsor
WinGreen Marketing Systems is a content marketing agency specializing in inbound
marketing, email marketing, and high-impact lead generation programs for
technology companies in the United States and Canada. Headquartered in
Philadelphia’s suburban technology corridor, the company was founded in 2009, and
is a business partner of Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Ringlead Inc., and a member of
the Google Engage for Agencies Program.
WinGreen’s content marketing services include authoring and publishing of client-branded content in all digital forms, including white
papers, e-books, articles, blog posts, social media posts, webcasts, videos, and podcasts. WinGreen delivers compelling content that
attracts target buyers and influencers across the entire spectrum of buyer personas and buying phases.
The company’s inbound marketing services utilize WinGreen-authored content in its many forms to attract and engage target buyers
and influencers to its clients’ websites. WinGreen uses leading marketing automation to manage content, campaigns, and analytics.
The combination of content published by WinGreen and inbound marketing methods and tools is unbeatable for building prospect
pipeline and revenue growth.
WinGreen also provides email marketing services for predictable, reliable, cost-effective lead generation. In addition to authoring all
required content, WinGreen also builds target email databases, delivers mass email marketing, plans and executes regularly
scheduled campaigns, and utilizes its own commercial-grade, cloud software infrastructure for all marketing automation. WinGreen’s
outbound content marketing is the perfect way to get immediate lead generation results while building long-term inbound marketing
engagement.
Contact WinGreen at www.wingreenmarketing.com/contact-us or call (650) LEAD-GEN (650-532-3436).
Learn more at www.wingreenmarketing.com.
© Copyright 2009-2014, WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
WinGreen Marketing Systems, The WinGreen System of Marketing, and The WinGreen Systems Architecture are trademarks of WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their
respective owners.

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