Event production
Webinar
A webinar is an online talk with registration, where the audience sees the speaker and can ask questions. It differs from a live stream in that registration gives you contact details, which makes it a sales tool rather than a reach tool.
What it means in practice
Technically you need a speaker, a decent microphone, a stable connection and a platform with registration. Corporate webinars usually add a second person watching the chat and sorting questions, so the speaker does not have to split their attention. A sensible length is thirty to forty five minutes, with the last third for questions. Preparation takes longer than the broadcast, mostly writing the content and testing the kit the day before.
Why companies run them: registration is the point. An hour long webinar leaves you with a list of people who made time for your topic, which is a completely different quality of contact from a website visit. An industrial company running a webinar about one specific technology reaches fewer people than an ad would, but those people have exactly that problem.
How to prepare: pick one narrow topic you can answer better than anyone. A broad topic attracts more sign ups and fewer customers. Build slides that are readable on a laptop, and above all test the sound in the actual room you will sit in. Afterwards edit the recording and send it to the people who did not turn up as well.
Where it goes wrong: a webinar that is forty minutes of presentation about your company. People came for the topic, not for you, and they leave after ten minutes. The second mistake is running them on a schedule with nothing to say. Two good ones a year beat one weak one a month.
Before every webinar we ask what the attendee takes away even if they never buy anything from you. With no answer to that, the webinar gets postponed. Try it today: write your next webinar topic as a question somebody would genuinely type into a search engine.