ClickThrough's Head of Operations and HR, Debbie Bissell, talks us through what she's learnt from hosting over 30 webinars throughout the last six months. From providing educational tools for our clients to microphone issues, read more.

What I’ve Learned from Hosting 30 Webinars in Six Months

The rise of the webinerd…

Webinars have become part of our daily working lives in 2020, but here at ClickThrough I’m proud to say that they have played an integral role in educating our clients and promoting our business. Throughout my time at ClickThrough I’ve learned a huge amount from hosting webinars, and I’m proud to write this blog as an out and proud webinerd.

When it comes to webinars, ClickThrough were ahead of the curve. Long before lockdown we were running a variety of webinars, and I’m proud to have represented ClickThrough by hosting over 50 of them. It’s a new role that I really enjoy. Of course webinars bring along challenges with them, but it’s been a great learning experience and taught me lots about the world of digital marketing.

Webinars as education

I was initially asked to implement webinars within the sales and marketing team as an education piece and an additional service offering for prospects and clients. Webinars were something I had no experience of. I was given login details for a piece of software and sent away to learn. Since then, I’ve taken the opportunity to attend many webinars and events to learn about benchmarks and to improve our webinars as much as I can. I want our attendees to leave feeling inspired. This is no small feat and I’m certainly not a digital expert, but I do know the digital experts.

Webinars are the perfect opportunity to present your business, to educate people and to provide an insight into the people that we are. They allow us to grow trust and credibility and allow us to inspire our attendees to go away and see the growth and improvements our knowledge brings to their business.

Webinars are a phenomenal part of a marketer’s arsenal, and they serve to promote your brand. I’ve trained and educated my colleagues to find the best practice ways of working. And let’s be honest, there have been some challenges along the way. We’ve faced everything from the internet crashing to microphone failures and slide decks freezing – you name it, we’ve dealt with it.

I sit here today knowing that these experiences have made us more worldly wise when it comes to webinars, preparing us for similar issues that may arise in the future. We accept that we’re human and things go wrong. We know that our audience want to hear the content and they’ll stick with us – so thank you. During a very technical SEO webinar we lost sound, but our audience stayed with us for over six minutes because they knew the content was good.

Specialist knowledge

Our webinars have covered all aspects of digital marketing, from SEO technical insights to Amazon, DPM and PPC. We listen to our audience and provide more of what they want based on their feedback. We are proud of our collaborative webinars in recent months, with companies including FeedSpark, Google and Amazon.

Honing your webinar style

The main thing I’ve learnt from hosting webinars is that they must evolve. You learn. You have to watch yourself back and face your faults and foibles head on so that you can be better. That level of self-reflection is not always easy. I remember watching one of my first webinars and realising that my voice and intonation was all over the place – I clearly didn’t have a career in BBC News forecasting on the horizon!

I’d like to think that people who’ve attended the webinars that I’ve hosted over the years have gone away with a positive outlook and a task list of things to complete. We’ve secured new businesses and have built strong relationships with our attendees. I regularly see familiar names popping up and it’s lovely to know that people can trust us to deliver. It’s a pleasure to know that they want to come and hear what we have to say, and we never underestimate the importance of that.

Future webinars

As we move forwards, webinars will continue to be part of our plan. We love delivering them! The registration to attend rate is higher than the industry average, and the feedback we get is that our webinars really do deliver. The follow up conversations that we have only seek to develop and enhance those relationships and identify new webinar subjects for the future.

Webinars have become a part of day-to-day life, and we should embrace the opportunity to engage with people on a personal level. If you haven’t attended a ClickThrough webinar before, you really are missing out. My colleagues talk about the things that will really help to impact your business, and we have some impressive collaborations coming up with the likes of Amazon and Google.

One of the main things I’ve learnt is not to be afraid of webinars. They are the chance to present yourself, your business and your knowledge to people who want to listen. They don’t have to be perfect, but they do need to demonstrate that you’ve taken them seriously and that the content is valuable and relevant to the people who join. We inject humour, love a meme and emoji, and we’re not afraid to include them because that’s who we are as a business.

Join us!

If you haven't attended a ClickThrough webinar before you really are missing out. Join us and listen to digital professionals talk about those things that really help to impact your business. This year we have a variety of webinars lined up, with guests from Google and Amazon. Make sure to register, and if you enjoy them, recommend them to a friend or colleague!

Want to find out more about what a ClickThrough Marketing webinar involves? Why not check out our latest digital marketing events and webinars?