6 Tips To Help You Create An Effective Webinar Script
Webinars are an essential aspect of modern businesses’ marketing, sales, and customer retention efforts. A successful online webinar improves brand awareness, generates new sales leads, and turns your existing customers into loyal fans. But to achieve your expected results, you need an effective webinar script.
Online webinars have become extremely popular. Around 73% of B2B businesses cite webinars as one of the most effective lead generation methods. Writing an effective webinar script is one of the best practices for keeping your target audience engaged throughout your session.
What is a webinar script?
A webinar script is a pre-written dialogue of what you’ll discuss during your webinar. It could be just a basic outline of your presentation or a record of your exact dialogue for your online event.
Here’s an excellent example of a webinar script template:
A webinar script can also include additional features. Timing details, for example, will help keep your guests focused on the topic and within their time limit. Meanwhile, navigational instructions indicate when to share a screen or direct attendees to a specific website.
A script gives you a structure for your webinar presentation, ensuring you mention all points and manage the time correctly. Finally, a webinar script can work as an inspiration for your webinar marketing. You’ll save time and effort when creating content promoting your webinar via emails or on social media.
You can also promote your webinar in your own online community. If you don’t have one just yet, you can create one. There are online community platforms at your disposal.
Here are the best tips to help you create an effective webinar script:
1. Define a goal and purpose
The first step in creating an effective webinar script is to think about what your brand wants to achieve in publishing the webinar. Webinars are highly effective tools for teaching, selling, and raising awareness among audiences. Here are webinar conversion rates depending on their type:
So, for example, your company might hope to strengthen the bond between the brand and the target audience plus build customer loyalty. Another purpose of releasing a webinar is to attract new clients and generate more contacts for the sales team. Perhaps you’d like to educate your potential customers? Educating your prospects could speed up the buyer’s journey.
Defining the webinar goal and purpose of your webinar will help you with the other steps listed in this article. Write down your webinar ideas before writing your script. This will also contribute to the development of strong writing habits. This way, you’ll know exactly what you want to achieve by running your webinar.
2. Know your target audience well
Make sure you know your target audience well before you create your script. When you know who your target audience is, you can create a script that resonates with them. Getting to know your audience will let you speak their language and, as a result, convey your message successfully.
For example, knowing the knowledge level of your audience could influence the terminologies you use in your script. So, if you know you’re speaking to beginners, you would include in the script explanations of specific terms. You wouldn’t have to do that when speaking to an expert audience.
One way to find out more about your webinar’s target audience is by defining your buyer/client persona. A buyer/client persona is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer. Your sales data will come in handy when creating the profile.
You can also manage your business’s multiple social media profiles in one place to analyze information on your followers. Social networks provide detailed information on your audiences, like their gender, age, location, habits, and interests.
Knowing your target audience will help you communicate more efficiently. You’ll know who you are speaking to and what content people engage with.
3. Create webinar agenda
The next step in creating a good script for your webinar is creating the agenda. When creating an agenda, you can explain more of what your target audience will see and learn during the webinar.
Include who the presenter is in your script. Outline what your guest speakers will be discussing. Go into detail on how long sections and presentations will take.
Let’s say you’re planning to publish a lead generation webinar. This type of webinar usually focuses on educational content. The webinar content has to be relevant to your brand to nurture relationships with new customers. Here’s the overall structure of a typical agenda for a lead generation webinar that you could follow:
- Introduction
- Speaker’s presentation + live poll
- Call To Action
- Q&A
- Survey
A webinar script aims to keep your presentation on track. Otherwise, you may go over the set time limit or waste your audience’s time. A webinar agenda will help you stick to the plan.
Releasing your agenda before the webinar helps your target audience know what they’ll learn from your event. Inform your webinar attendees about what the session will cover. You can do this during the registration process. Speaking of your registration process, make sure you make this simple. Including a scannable QR code will help you simplify just that. You can use an online QR code generator to convert URLs to QR codes.
4. Emphasize visual branding
Your webinar script should detail how your webinar should look. With webinar branding, you get an opportunity to increase your brand’s awareness. If all your visuals stick to your brand’s style, there’s a big chance that it won’t disappear into the ocean of information people get every day.
Detailing the best format for presenting your content in a script can help you pitch it more efficiently. Your script will ideally also include notes indicating where the webinar host should change webinar slides.
Webinar branding helps with consistency and uniqueness. Apart from the primary goal of your webinar discussed earlier, you want your audience to recognize your online event and connect it with your brand. Your visuals should match your corporate branding style but have some unique features that will make them original.
5. Include story-telling elements
Using personal stories in promotional publications to highlight the value of a product or service is an effective way to earn new clients. Think about how self-development podcasts or personal social media posts resonate with people. Webinars are no different. You should include in your webinar script story-telling elements. That will help you get your audience’s attention and genuinely engage them.
Share a story to connect your webinar topic with the audience before going into the main webinar content.
Most stories are built around people. Your product or service comes into the story when a character (or characters) encounters a problem. The role of your company is to solve the issue. The problem in your story is what your audience will find interesting. For example, a middle-class father of two has a limited budget, and your brand can help him save money on a product. Your target audience will understand the problem and empathize with the characters.
Provoking emotions is a strong marketing strategy. If you don’t want your stories to feel too scripted or forced, just make a note in your webinar script where you will tell that story instead of writing it word-for-word. Stimulating emotions should be a goal of your webinar. This genuine storytelling can be particularly effective for reaching an audience of startup accelerators, who are always looking for ways to help the companies in their portfolio grow and succeed.
In the webinar below, Mesh Energy tells a story about two characters. The story helps the viewers to picture the differences between the two characters.
When writing your script, tell a story in such a way that the audience will believe the positive outcome they can expect after using your product.
6. Review your webinar script
The final step in creating an effective webinar script is reviewing it. Read your script out loud. When reviewing your script, check if your ideas are easy to understand and structured well. Your webinar content should be accessible to the broadest audience possible.
Pitching it in front of your friends or teammates is also a good idea to collect feedback. Use any opinion you get, whether good or bad, to improve your work further.
When writing your script, don’t forget the after-event tasks. The best practice is to capture the audience’s reaction and feedback straight after the event while it’s fresh in their minds. For this reason, you should include in your script that you need to distribute an event survey.
Distribute a short survey via email to the registered attendees. Another idea is to display a QR code at the end of your webinar, so the viewers can scan it with their mobile phones and complete the survey immediately.
Alternatively, you can use tools like RingCentral or a RingCentral alternative to get in touch with your attendees and collect their feedback. You’ll need that feedback to improve your subsequent webinar experiences.
In Closing
Creating a webinar script will help you focus on your topic and improve audience engagement. Your goal is to run an interesting presentation for your audience, and writing a script will help you stay on track.
Using tips from this article when writing your next webinar script will help you run a successful webinar. Start by defining a goal and purpose, and getting to know your target audience well. Then, create a webinar agenda. Think through the visual branding of your presentation. When writing your script, take the story-telling approach to connect with your audience. Finally, ensure you reviewed the script to catch any issues before pitching it to the public.
An effective webinar script is the foundation of your whole presentation. Write a perfect webinar script for your next successful online seminar.
This article was co-developed and written by Baidhurya Mani is the founder of SellCoursesOnline.com.
About the Author / Akeem Okunola
