Conducting and managing a webinar involves careful planning. Even more so when you’re utilizing webinars as part of your business strategy. You’ll need to take care of the topic or theme, the managed webinar service, the slide presentation, and more. All these careful planning, however, won’t particularly matter if you have no goals or objectives set. You’re conducting webinars, yes, but you’ll have no way of telling if you’re accomplishing something.
What are webinar goals and objectives and why are they important?
Goals and objectives for your webinar might seem all too similar, but they are two different things interconnected with each other. The webinar goal is the general intention of a webinar, while the objective is a specific and measurable result you want to achieve to reach the goal.
If your goal is to be established as a thought leader by providing unique and remarkable insights to the audience, your objective could be to achieve an 80-90% satisfaction rate. If your goal is to gain more exposure or awareness, then your objective could be to get a 70% attendance rate at the live session.
Other goals and objectives could be about growing your email lists, targeting conversion rates, increasing sales, and more.
Without proper webinar goals and objectives, you won’t have enough direction or clear priority for your webinars. Without an established purpose, your webinars won’t bring a significant or focal change to your business.
Specifically, setting webinar goals and objectives for your webinar:
- gives you a sense of direction
- lets you measure your success
- serves as a motivation for the team
- makes webinar management smooth and cohesive
- gives you a target to aim for
How to set your webinar goals and objectives
Identify your business needs
First and foremost, you need to identify the need of your business. Your business needs should be the foundation of your webinar goals and objectives. Do you need more customers? Do you need more subscribers? Is your business in need of proper exposure, or maybe enough traction in the market? Think of these things and use them as a fundamental guide. Once you’ve got that figured out, you can easily set your goal and objective for a webinar.
Keep S.M.A.R.T. in mind
When it comes to setting the goals and objectives, be smart. In other words, they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
You need specific goals and objectives, not too vague nor too general.
They also need to be measurable, especially the objectives. State numbers or percentages and use these as benchmarks for progress and success. It could be 200 registrants, 80% conversion rates, 90% attendee rates, and more.
Goals and objectives should also be attainable. Putting in numbers is no use if they’re completely unrealistic.
They also need to stay relevant. Make sure the goal is valuable and linked to you and your business.
It helps to make your goals and objectives timely. Set timeframes or deadlines that will motivate and direct your team. These endpoints will be the finish line that will help you and your team analyze the results and measure the success of your webinar.
Your goals and objectives will help shape your webinar until the end and help you obtain actionable results for your businesses. Keep these things in mind the next time you start to plan a new webinar.