The most common mistakes to avoid when hosting your webinar

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John Wooden, the famous American basketball coach, once said, “If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes.”.

This may be true in the realm of entrepreneurship, or if you’re a world famous musician or pop star, where taking risks is almost a requirement, and can often lead to huge payoffs (or devastating, yet entertaining/memorable failures).

But in the world of webinars, a mistake, no matter how big or small, can not only cost you the success of your webinar, but can cost you the success of your business. Guests in attendance may lose faith in your abilities if you mess up, or you can expose yourself to the possibility of looking unprofessional and no one wanting to do any future business with you/buy your products/use your services, or attend future webinars.

Make sure to keep the following learnings in mind before you go ahead and shoot off those webinar invites!

A webinar is a proven method of directly engaging with your audience, testing and researching your chosen demographic and generating converts to your brand, as well as recruiting employees to come and share their skills and work for your company.

A webinar host does what it says on the tin: as the host, you are the face of the webinar, leading it from start to finish. You are like the Emcee of the event, in other words, making sure energy levels are high, everything runs on time/smoothly, and that guest speakers feel confident in your ability to lead them. As the leader of the event, you start and end the webinar, introduce speakers, and lead the Q&A, if your webinar has one.

Here are the most common mistakes you can avoid by reading our tips below.

An interactive webinar is key for a successful webinar: it lets you get to know your audience and humanises your brand for them. Making a webinar interactive through questions, live chats, polls and surveys makes you a memorable host, shows your enthusiasm for your clients/consumers, and allows you to gain feedback in real time, instead of having to wait for email survey results etc. It also sparks a dialogue about the issue or idea you are presenting on, which will prove to be much more inspiring and eye opening.

Here is our poll question generator if you need inspiration on good poll questions to ask.

While hosting the webinar, make sure you stick to the allotted time you have given to everyone. Time is precious to everyone, and going over time will only annoy your guests and look like you don’t respect their time; or they may end up leaving before you have finished relaying all of the important details of your presentation- something you want to stay clear of!

Many sales and marketing people may be guilty of this without even realising, but it’s good to ensure you strike a balance between selling your brand/product, and engaging with your audience on a human level- not just trying to force them into a sale, but taking the time to ask them for feedback, listen to them and connect with them.

One critical mistake you can make is to spend so much time on your planning and prep, that you completely forget the importance of promoting your event beforehand, through social media, marketing channels and word of mouth.

Don’t become so insular and swayed by the planning process that you forget one of the most crucial aspects: making sure people turn up to your webinar at all!

Whether it’s your first webinar or your 50th, everyone is capable of making mistakes when hosting: we are all human, after all. But follow our tips above and you can safeguard against possible errors or any making any embarrassing faux pas’ that cost you converts to your cause.

If you’re still hungry for more information on how to make your webinar the best yet, check out our other blogs and tools below! You’ll find posts on how to increase your webinar audience attendance here. And our handy Webinar Checklist Tool here. To certify you have everything prepared before you host and that it all goes without a hitch. Head on over to the other blog posts now, and clinch your future success!