The 8 Most Popular Use Cases for Webinars

More and more event professionals and marketing teams are turning to webinars to engage prospects, customers, and even employees in a more cost-effective way. In fact, a report from ResearchAndMarkets.com found that the global webinar market — which stood at $1.57 billion in 2020 — will reach $4.44 billion by 2025, nearly a 3x increase in five short years.

This accelerated growth is because of a confluence of factors, including the versatile nature of webinars, the benefits they deliver, the fact that you can offer them on-demand, and how easy they are to host (if you have the right tools). Keep reading to learn more about webinars, popular webinar use cases, and the easiest way to host a successful webinar.

What is a webinar?

A webinar is a single-session virtual event of two hours or fewer that is usually free. Webinars can be live, pre-recorded and streamed live, or available on-demand. 

Here are some compelling webinar analytics based on our own research here at Bizzabo: 

• 18% of events are webinars
• 28% of Bizzabo customers run webinars
• 98% of webinars are free
• 89% of webinars feature a single ticket type
• 65% of webinars are less than one hour
• 83% of webinars have fewer than 250 registrations
• 78% of webinars have fewer than 100 registrations

The Top 8 Webinar Use Cases

Here are eight common ways organizations use webinars to engage prospects and customers or build more tight-knit teams.

1. Workshops

At a workshop, a company’s goal is to help attendees learn new skills while displaying thought leadership and hopefully boosting brand awareness. In many cases, workshops are paid events, but in others, they may be free. Sometimes, a workshop may deliver attendees a certification or other credential after attending.

For example, an event tech company could offer a webinar workshop about event speaker management that concludes by offering a short quiz about the topics covered. Attendees who achieve a certain score then receive a certificate of completion to add to their LinkedIn profile or resume. 

2. Happy hours

No rule says that webinars have to be all about work. Quite the contrary: You can have gobs of fun hosting a virtual happy hour. Whether that’s with your team or your customers is up to you. Although hosting a happy hour on the computer might have been scoffed at years ago, the pandemic has changed our perception of virtual events — particularly with the boom in remote workers. 

Suppose you want to strengthen relationships with customers or build more camaraderie among your team. A virtual happy hour could be the perfect way to kick off casual conversations and break out into smaller groups for more intimate discussions. You also don’t have to go it alone. Today, there are plenty of companies specializing in virtual happy hours and webinar-based team-building over food and drinks. 

3. Lunch & Learns

In an age where so many people work from home, a lunch-and-learn session can be a great way to share ideas, help attendees build skills, and otherwise demonstrate your organization’s thought leadership while virtually breaking bread with employees and customers. For example, one of Bizzabo’s marketing team members is giving a lunch and learn this week about having a growth mindset, and the team is jazzed about the opportunity. 

If you’re interested in trying this idea out, offer attendees a gift card to order their own lunch from a place they love using DoorDash for Work or a similar service. The benefit here is that attendees who are kosher or vegan feel comfortable ordering and attending the L&L — versus when the office caters in lunch, and it’s impossible to meet all dietary requirements. 

4. Product Demos

You might think your product is the most intuitive thing in the world. Regardless, some customers will have a longer learning curve than others. Since you want them to make the most out of their investment in your solutions, you should strongly consider product demos as a way to show them all the nooks and crannies. 

Not only can you use demo webinars to engage prospects in a live setting, but you can also record them so folks can view them on-demand. This allows you to educate prospects and customers on all the functionality of your products while reducing any friction that might be preventing them from trying the solutions. 

It also ensures that you have a deep bench of on-demand training content for building a self-service onboarding offering as your company grows and your customer base expands. 

5. Feature Releases

In addition to offering product demos, software companies also use webinars to highlight new features coming soon or just released. By doing so, companies keep existing customers engaged while showcasing the latest features the engineering team has built — enticing new customers toward a demo. 

The last thing you want is to ship a feature-filled release only to discover that most of your users are ignoring the new functionality or that you’re losing prospects who don’t realize what you offer. By incorporating feature release webinars into your release cycles, you can increase the adoption of new features and increase your product’s stickiness. 

6. Q&A Sessions

Customers, prospects, and employees all have questions. And you’ve got the answers. Oftentimes, webinars are one of the easiest ways to facilitate Q&A sessions. By scheduling virtual Q&A sessions regularly — once a quarter or once a month — you can allow customers and employees to ask whatever’s on their minds and answer those questions to the best of your ability. It’s an easy way to clear up any confusion, keep stakeholders aligned, and deliver more value to customers while increasing engagement.

One of the most popular use cases for internal webinars is Q&As with the C-suite, HR during onboarding, or the product team. These open sessions usually solicit questions beforehand to ensure a safe, anonymous space for challenging questions and plenty to fill the time (i.e., a real need for the Q&A webinar). Then, during the webinar itself, people can ask additional questions live. 

7. Corporate Communications and Updates

Have an exciting product in the pipeline? Is your organization finalizing M&A activity? Did you recently make some key new hires? Are you expanding into a new market or growing your organization’s physical footprint? Want to run a webinar-style sales kickoff (SKO)?

Webinars provide the perfect platform for communicating significant organizational developments and milestones to an audience that could include employees, investors, shareholders, and customers. Not only does this keep all stakeholders engaged, but it also helps build your brand and operate transparently.

With the right event tech software, you can broadcast the webinar to the entire company with an option for virtual applause, reactions, chat channels, and the option to bring people up onto the stage throughout the webinar to ask questions or participate. 

8. Onboarding Sessions

Cultivating engaged customers and brand ambassadors starts with having an exceptional customer onboarding experience. On the flip side, when the onboarding experience is lacking, customers are more likely to ditch a product for something easier to use. 

According to a recent report from Wyzowel, more than 90% of customers agree that companies could do a better job onboarding new users. This is another place where webinars can be beneficial. To improve your customer onboarding experience, consider hosting live onboarding sessions (e.g., once a month) or on-demand product walkthrough webinars so new users can start using your solutions effectively out of the gate.

Webinars also play a critical role in onboarding new employees. According to Sweetwork, 93% of new hires said their onboarding process would determine whether they would stay at the company. Live webinars let new hires engage with their onboarding cohort, ask vital questions, and start internalizing the culture. On-demand webinars let new employees learn at their own pace, take breaks and notes, and replay content to ensure they are prepared for their new roles.

Offer a mix of both for employees and customers, and you’ll win the day every time.  

What You Need To Host a Webinar

With the right tools in place, hosting a webinar is easy. As you begin planning your next webinar, here are some things to add to your webinar toolkit:

• Event management software: Are you comfortable using a platform like Zoom, or do you need something more sophisticated with reactions and engagement features? 
• Video production equipment: Does your laptop’s camera produce high-quality video, or do you need dedicated video production equipment? Do you know how to use video editing software for on-demand webinars, or do you need to work with a partner? 
• Microphones: Does your voice come across clearly through your laptop’s microphone, or do you need a more professional microphone?
• Lighting: Are the folks speaking at your webinar properly illuminated, or does it look like they’re sitting in the dark?
• Background noise: Do you live in a loud, boisterous city? Is someone mowing your lawn in the suburbs? How might that noise impact your webinar and attendees?
• Set design: Are the presenters’ backgrounds cluttered and distracting? Or are they the center of focus? 

Find the Right Webinar Platform: Learn How Bizzabo Can Help

Bizzabo is a powerful event management software solution built to help today’s Event Experience Leaders deliver engaging, high-impact webinars and virtual, in-person, and hybrid events. Our all-in-one Event Experience OS makes it incredibly easy to put on successful webinars thanks to several action-packed features, including:

• A virtual venue
• Audience reactions
• Real-time chat
• Polls, surveys, and Q&As
• Closed captioning for on-demand video
• SSO & gated events
• Attendee and customer support chatbots
• Dedicated tech support
• Event intelligence and analytics

Request a demo of Bizzabo today to learn more about the simplest way to orchestrate a webinar that does more than gets attendees to show up. Deliver an unforgettable webinar that engages and delights participants every time. Not ready for a demo? We hear you! Check out this free, on-demand webinar that walks you through what Bizzabo has to offer.