For many business-to-business companies, the sales cycle is long. Offering a webinar series is an excellent way to keep potential and current clients engaged. In this article, we share how to create your own.

How to Create a Webinar Series

1. Make a plan. Before setting a date, meet with your team. Together, you’ll need to define your goals, the audience, frequency, and format. The answers to these questions will drive your decisions and guide you throughout the process.

One important component of this will be talking through your sales follow-up. Identify who you’ll contact and the kinds of messages and calls to action they should receive. For example, someone who registered and didn’t attend should get a different email then someone who listened to your presentation.

2. Identify the deliverables. While yours will vary based on the plan you’ve developed, there are a few items that should be on every list. At a minimum, you will need a registration form, a list of invitees, a slide deck, and a video conferencing platform. We also recommend thinking through how it will be promoted and creating a list of those items (i.e. social media posts, invitation, reminders, etc).

3. Create a project schedule. Based on your goals and organization’s offerings, select topics for each webinar. We recommend looking at your services for inspiration. Then, based on the cadence, make a repeatable plan. For example, if you’d like to host monthly webinars and you have six groups or service categories, create one presentation for each. Then, plan to repurpose that content again later in the year.

Give options. Depending on your client base, it might make sense to offer the same webinar twice in a month. This is a great strategy to use in the first month or two to dial in the best day of the week and time of day for attendance. It is particularly important if you have prospects in multiple time zones.

4. Assign responsibilities. With a schedule in place, outline who will be responsible for each item. Check to see if the timeline is feasible and works with their workload and upcoming availability.

5. Execute your plan. With the project defined, you can confidently begin generating materials. Leverage as many existing solutions as possible. For example, if your company already has Microsoft Teams, use it for your webinar platform.

Your registration form is a great lead generation tool. It should be short, but effective. Priortize the information you’d most like to have. A long list of questions could keep prospects from signing up. The form itself can be hosted on your site in a custom format, or you could use an existing tool, like Google Forms or Calendly, to track attendance.

6. Get the word out. There are a number of ways to promote a webinar series. We recommend sending an email invite and follow-ups, sharing social media posts, highlighting the opportunity on your website, and making personalized asks to those in your sales funnel.

7. Check it twice. There are always a lot of moving parts when creating a webinar series. As you work on your first one, build a simple checklist. It should have reminders to update the registration form and send out the invitation, as well as the other steps you’ve taken. Then, you can continue to use this tool with each new session, keeping you on track. Along with this, we recommend making a running list of the topics you’ve covered and when they launched for future reference.

8. Gather feedback. After the webinar, send out a short, less than five-question survey. It’s best to make this anonymous, so attendees feel free to share openly. It should use a combination of quantitative and qualitative questions. For example, ask attendees to rate the quality of the presentation and provide a comment box for things they’d like to change.

9. Follow-up. This is the most important step, but it is often the most overlooked. Follow-up could be as simple as sharing the presentation and requesting a short meeting. Don’t overthink it.

10. Review your series and plan. When you’ve done nearly all of the presentations at least once, sit down with your team. Talk through the survey results and content. Identify what should be updated for next year and what can stay the same. Look for ways to streamline your approach even further.

Time-Saving Tips for Creating Webinars

While doing the initial set-up is a heavy lift, creating a repeatable series is key for organizations of all sizes. Making a schedule, creating a registration page, and developing a registration form take time. But, when done properly, these are one-off tasks.

Instead of creating new content every time, we recommend choosing topics that are relevant to your clients and a part of your wheelhouse. Your team should be very comfortable with the information they’re presenting. For example, as an architecture firm, your healthcare team might discuss wayfinding strategies, ER design tactics, or equipment planning during their sessions.

Evergreen topics are another key to success. Presentations should be relevant for at least a year. Ideally, your team will spend time upfront preparing for their first webinar and then, less effort for subsequent presentations.

It’s important to keep in mind that not every client will be able to attend your webinar. Offering the same content at different times throughout the year gives them more options and is an efficient use of your time. The goal is to give new and existing clients in your pipeline an opportunity to interact with your brand and learn more about the services you offer.