At Goldcast, we work with top B2B companies who knock it out of the park with their webinar content. Brands like Drift, Bionic, SupportLogic, Alyce, Amplitude, and Zuora have all been using webinars to meet—and exceed—their marketing goals.

So, what are these companies doing right?

We spoke with marketers across these companies to understand their approach and learn their secrets when it comes to hosting winning webinars. Read on to discover ten of the best tips they have for you to improve your own webinar programming!

The registration page is typically a person's first exposure to your webinar.

There are loads of best practices out there for creating landing pages that convert, but today we're focusing on one: Experiment with how you host and design your registration page and make changes to simplify the process for registrants.

We've found that although Goldcast has a built-in form builder, the majority of customers (70%) use registration forms through their own marketing automation platforms, like HubSpot, Pardot, or Marketo. It's worth exploring whether making a change here impacts registrations.

Use A/B testing to go deeper and make other changes. For example, if you see fewer registrations, perhaps you decide to test removing the mandatory contact number form field (or making it optional) and see if the simplified form drives more sign-ups.

Find ways to simplify form filling for your attendees. Provide default or pre-fed values for geographic fields. Similarly, automatically change the text case to uppercase for the name field and lowercase for email.

The aim here should be to minimize any obstacles or minor annoyances that might make the registrant procrastinate or, worse, turn away from your landing page.

Sometimes, people don't show up for an event they registered for because they either forgot or double-booked their calendar.

Goldcast gets around this issue with our automatic calendar holds. Whenever someone signs up for an event, they immediately get a calendar invite with event details and time adjusted for their time zone. All they need to do is accept the invite, and the hold is placed on their calendar.

It sounds simple, but calendar holds pack a big punch. According to Liam Barnes, a Technical Growth Marketer at Bionic, calendar holds helped Bionic boost their event attendance rates by a whopping 25%!

Don't stop there, though. Adding at least one reminder email (or an email sequence, if you're feeling ambitious) amplifies the effect of the automatic calendar hold. Think of it like lead nurturing: You're engaging with people through event updates to move them closer to attending and stay on their minds.

We found that these two activities combined helped boost webinar attendance by 15%!

📈 Looking for more ways to increase your digital event attendance? Check out these three proven tactics.

Have you ever realized you're looking at your phone or computer screen but not really seeing anything? It's almost like you're in a spell as you passively consume information—the exact opposite of how you want your event attendees to feel!

One way to ward off viewer tune-out is to mix things up and cue viewers to turn their attention away from speakers for a moment. Goldcast has built-in video production tools that allow you to set up overlays, ticker messages, banners, and chats to sustain event engagement.

For example, you might use ticker or scrolling messages to share interesting speaker quotes, stats, or takeaways. If you have a standout insight or quote to share that you don't want your attendees to miss out on, you can also post it on the stage. This grabs people's attention and keeps them from zoning out. Zombie viewers, no more!

💡 Looking to amp up engagement? Peep these 12 ideas for inspiration.

Polls are an excellent way to do a quick audience pulse check and glean the audience's thoughts and perspectives in real-time.

One creative way we've seen polls used is as part of the sales workflow. Regina Brown, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at SupportLogic, uses poll responses to help salespeople with target account outreach.

To try this at your webinars, you might create a sales-focused poll question and an email template for each poll response that salespeople can use to approach respondents with context.

The right poll questions can go far, acting as your proprietary in-house research, producing messaging ideas for your sales and marketing campaigns, and helping you to better segment leads. It's worth spending some time thinking about them!

Video Q&A sessions give attendees a chance to interact with the presenter and offer flexibility: People can drop questions in the chat, or they can raise their hands and ask them. This helps offer an in-person element to virtual events and allows you to connect with people.

The first few minutes of your Q&A sessions might bring the crickets emoji to mind. Everyone's scared to go first! This is why it's helpful to start with a few questions ready to go; you could even survey people who are attending before the event to collect these and then flash them on the screen.

This is the approach that Alyce takes. Nina Butler, their Senior Director of Revenue Marketing, said, "Answering Q&As by highlighting them on stage really makes the event engaging, and we push it back to Marketo for our lead scoring."

Web accessibility is the practice of ensuring your content is accessible to everyone. Alt text is one example; screen readers can't process images, but they can read the associated alt text. This helps visually impaired people have a similar experience as those with full vision.

In a related vein, captions use speech-to-text technology to make spoken words accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Here are some caption tips:

1. Display the speaker's name along with the transcription so people know who said what.
2. Include non-speech information such as sound effects, music, noises, and speaker intonation.
3. If you’re using closed captions, you can drag them around, so they don't block other visual elements better. This can’t be done for open captions, as they’re embedded over the video.

Finally, subtitles are a way to overcome language barriers and attract a global audience. Subtitles translate any spoken word directly into other languages and display it on the screen. Goldcast currently supports translations into over 16 languages, including Korean, French, Portuguese, Hindi, and Chinese!

Not all attendees become qualified prospects—so how does your sales team know who to connect with?

One way is to use the Docstab in Goldcast to upload resources and documents before the webinar and receive notifications whenever an attendee downloads a file. You can also upload documents catered towards different stages of the journey to tailor your approach.

You can also add a customizable CTA button. You can use this button to drive demo requests, meeting requests, or trial sign-ups. Alyce saw 42% growth in demo requests using this feature! The CTA button can also be used to send out event swag, run giveaways, or promote other contests.

Similar to providing additional resources during the event, you can also build a content hub to centralize related marketing content and tools. It’s like adding a blog or resource section to the webinar website.

The content hub is customizable, branded, and easy for people to find. Alyce uses its content hub to provide case studies and product one-pagers for prospects; we've also seen clients like Smartling add content as unexpected as space and sunrise photos for people to enjoy!

One major issue sales teams face with webinars is they don’t get timely updates on their target accounts’ activities around events. Instead, they get a spreadsheet after the event and have to manually comb through the list to find their accounts and follow up with them.

This isn’t helpful at all, but our Slack and Salesforce integration changes that!

This integration notifies sales reps whenever their target account registers and logs in for the event. Then, they can jump right into the webinar and chat with the prospect and build rapport.

And if the salesperson can’t attend the event, they receive a post-event update so they can reach out afterward.

Detailed event- and attendee-level insights allow you to see how well your event performed and provide helpful information to your sales and development teams.

Here is a partial list of virtual event KPIs or metrics you can track:

Make sure to map these insights back to your MAP and CRM for better lead scoring. Qualitative insights, such as individual poll responses, questions asked, individual resource downloads, etc., can help account execs and BDRs with lead scoring and future planning.

We know that executing a successful webinar is hard work. We hope that, with the help of these 10 tips, you're able to boost registration, attendance, engagement, and more!