What Best Practices Should I Follow When Recording a Video for an Automated Webinar? [JOIN WEBINAR]

Planning your content

It doesn’t have to be perfect

Just because it’s a recording, doesn’t mean it has to be perfect, edited, and produced. Think about the last time you joined a traditional live webinar. If the host stumbles on a sentence, he or she just says it over again. It’s no different when recording a video for an eWebinar. It’s almost more authentic than a perfectly produced video that can sometimes feel more like a promotional video. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have your video well-produced if you want to. Just don’t let it stop you from getting started. Webinars are often delivered in a more casual setting anyway. It’s the content that matters. Webinars are not TV shows.

Keep things timeless and evergreen

If you plan to have your eWebinar run for any length of time, it’s a good idea to avoid referencing things that might date it or cause it to lose its relevance quickly. Keep things somewhat evergreen. Avoid referencing current events, holidays, the weather, or even times of day. “Welcome” is better than “good morning”, for example. Little things can pull people out of the experience unnecessarily.

Don’t lie to your attendees

A question we get asked alot is whether or not you should tell your audience they are watching a recorded session. The answer to that question is totally up to you. For our own demos, we don’t say that the session is recorded or not recorded, We simply welcome attendees to the demo. We also tell them we’ll be answering questions through chat and say we’ll get back to them as soon as we can. Consumers nowadays just want to know that they’re being heard. They want to know that their questions will be answered in a timely manner. To help manage expectations, we use the chat autoresponder, and recommend you do the same if you take a similar approach.

We think there’s no need to say it’s a recorded demo versus a live one. When you think about a traditional live webinar, everything is live, the video and the chat. With an eWebinar, even though the video is pre-recorded, the chat is still live. In that sense, an eWebinar is also live.

Some people like to tell their audience that the video is recorded and someone on their team is managing the chat live. And they set that expectation from the beginning. This all depends on your business, the content you’re delivering, and how you want to engage with your customers.

The key to whether you should tell attendees that it’s a pre-recorded video or not is to always set the expectation with your attendees honestly. Whatever you choose, don’t pretend you’re live when you’re not and never lie to your attendees. It’s a quick way to lose trust and credibility.

Beginning your webinar

Set expectations and encourage engagement up front

Take a few moments up front to set attendees’ expectations and let them know your presentation will be an interactive experience. Going through a few housekeeping items at the beginning can drive engagement and increase the amount of time attendees stay to watch your webinar. Tell them about the interactions that are going to pop up throughout the presentation, explain how chat works, and ask them to give you encouragement if they like what you’re sharing. This is not much different than the housekeeping items you might go over for traditional live webinars hosted through Zoom.

Say something at the beginning like, “Throughout this presentation, you’ll see things like questions, polls, and tips pop up that allow me to engage with you while I am presenting. Let’s give this a try, how did you hear about this webinar? I’ll give you a few seconds to answer the question that’s coming up right now.” And then pause, because pausing makes people feel like they need to respond and therefore become part of the experience. Of course, this is where you’ll add a question interaction card when you’re designing your eWebinar. If you can get people to engage in the first couple interactions, they’re more likely to keep doing it till the end.

Then, let them know how chat works. You can say something like, “I’ll be answering questions through chat, and only through chat, so please type them in the chat box.”

If you don’t plan to have a moderator on at all times, you can just say so and set that expectation. You can say something like, “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, and if you don’t hear from me immediately, you’ll hear back from me through email.” Setting that expectation means attendees won’t get frustrated if they don’t hear back from you right away.

If you do plan to have a moderator during your webinar sessions, you might want to say something like, ‘Our team is monitoring the chat live so please make sure you say hi and let us know if you have any questions.”

Lastly, invite people to give you a thumbs up if they like what you’re sharing, it gives them another reason to interact with the webinar and keeps them from leaving early. This is no different than what they’re already doing on social platforms like Facebook live and Instagram live.

Once you’ve introduced the experience with interactions, chat, and thumbs up, you’re good to go. You don’t need to mention every interaction as they come up, but it does help to draw attention to them once in a while.

During your webinar

Use the interactions to drive engagement

During your webinar, and throughout your presentation, you should use interactions to drive engagement and create an interactive, participatory experience. This is a great opportunity to learn about your customers, tell them more about you, and ask them for feedback. Make this a two-way experience so attendees don’t have to just sit there and listen like the traditional webinars they’re used to. Traditional webinars are boring and we’re here to change that. This is really the power of the eWebinar platform.

Mapping out your content and script, and noting where you want the interaction points to be will help you remember to mention them in your video. Then you can add the interactions when you craft the eWebinar. For those of you who are familiar with hosting live webinars on Zoom or GoToWebinar, you’re already doing this by creating polls or asking your attendees to type questions they have in the Q&A.

eWebinar has so much more than just polls. Our interactions include questions, tips, offers, requests to contact, and link shares. And we’re continuing to add new ones. Make use of these as you plan your automated webinar and script them in your video. This is how you can encourage your attendees to participate in the webinar experience with you.

A really important tip if you want to make sure attendees stay until the end, is to program an interaction to show up every 3 to 4 minutes. This will help keep things interesting and give your attendees something to do. If you do this, you should see watch time go past 90% of the video. Remember the goal here is not just for you to simply deliver information, it’s to make the experience interactive and fun throughout so your attendees will stay until the end. So be sure to make them feel like part of the experience.

Have a clear call to action

If you figure out what your goals will be for your webinar, you can use your script and interactions to accomplish them.

Do you want to learn more about your customer? Then you might want to have polls or questions like, “What company are you from?”, “What industry are you in?”, or “How did you hear about this webinar?”

Do you want them to learn more about you? Then you might want to add link interaction cards and share articles or additional information you think they might be interested in.

What is the call to action? Do you want them to request for you to contact them? Claim an offer? Do you want their feedback? Make sure you know the call to action you want attendees to take. Otherwise all your efforts will be wasted.

Ending your webinar

As you wrap up your webinar, don’t forget to make your ask. You know what your call to action is, make sure you deliver that and program the appropriate interaction card to come up. And make sure it’s not too close to the end, leave at least a minute or two for that information to sink in before you end the webinar.

Follow through on any promises you made in the beginning. Did you say you’d have a slide deck for download, or perhaps a webinar-only promotion? Now is the time to surface it.

Before you go, thank your audience, and then pause. Pause for about three seconds before you end the recording. This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget because you’re not recording in front of an audience. If you forget to pause, the video will stop suddenly and make the ending feel very abrupt for attendees, like slamming the door on them. Add a fade out in the end if you want an even softer ending.

Crafting an engaging experience

Plan your content

So how do you craft a high-quality and engaging experience? You must plan your content. We don’t mean just think about it in your head. You should write it down, sit on it, and give yourself a few days to make any edits. This is the only way you can make sure that you deliver everything you want, and get what you need from your audience. Use the best practices we’ve shared to write a structure or a script.

To give you a sense of what we’re talking about, it takes us about an hour to think through the structure of the content for a 15-20 minute video, and then 3-4 hours to write the full script. After we have a full script, we like to sit on it for about a week and make a number of edits before recording. Spending that amount of time planning content means we can record our videos in one go and have a much higher quality video in the end. Sometimes we don’t even need to edit our videos afterwards.

Remember to plan to add interactions throughout, every 3 to 4 minutes. If you miss something, it’s OK to add them even after you’ve launched your webinar. That’s the power of eWebinar, you can always improve on it later

Adding interactions (now and over time)

When you are adding interactions, change up the titles and add images to spice things up. This breaks up the interaction cards visually and adds a bit of personality. Include fun call to action buttons for Links and Offers, like “Claim this now!”. Your interactions can even evolve over time. If, for example, after running your eWebinar for a while, you know that a question always comes up at minute ten, you can add a Tip at 9:45 with the answer to that question to lower your own support in the future. Finally, check back with eWebinar often, since we’re always adding new interactions that you might want to include in your webinar.

Take advantage of the Waiting and Exit Rooms

Remember you can add interactions both before and after your presentation. A good way to engage attendees early on and to get them familiar with the interactions is to ask them a Question a minute or so before your presentation begins in the Waiting Room. It could be something small talk-ish, like “Where are you joining me from today?” Or a way to ask something more meaningful, like “What kind of work do you do?”

The Exit Room is a great place to ask for feedback right after your presentation ends, by using the Feedback interaction. Ask something like, “Did you enjoy my presentation?” Or, “Did you get what you’d hoped for out of our session?” It is also a great place to encourage additional questions. For example, you could add a Tip near the end of your presentation inviting people to stay for Q&A, saying that your team will be sticking around afterwards for an extra thirty minutes to answer questions.

NOTE: Keep in mind that interactions in the Waiting and Exit Rooms will not appear to attendees who choose to watch a replay instead of attending a scheduled or “just in time” session.

Recording your eWebinar

Use a script

Being creative and trying out new things

Lastly, be creative. Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s no right or wrong way, and these are just best practices and suggestions that have worked for us. You know your customers best. As you get used to creating videos for eWebinar, you’ll get better at them. Remember, if doing it alone is hard at first, you can invite someone to record an interview style webinar with you. In the end, the point is to have fun, be creative, and find compelling ways to bring your brand and your content to life.