Recurring Webinars: What are They and How to Host One?

Introduction

Each year, over 60% of marketers host webinars as a part of their content marketing strategies, often sales-driven and repetitive; even continuous. Many of these webinars are run on regular schedules — this opens up an opportunity to create a recurring webinar.

We're about to share all you need to know about recurring webinars: what they are, how to set one up, and how to effectively engage participants. Let's jump right in.

What is a Recurring Webinar?

Recurring webinars are online events or webinars that are scheduled to occur regularly at predetermined intervals. It is common that you find events or webinars to take place daily, weekly or monthly. In most cases, these webinars or events follow a consistent format.

These webinars can cover a wide variety of topics: product demos, onboarding sessions, training sessions, or others.

Depending on which webinar platform you use, you will have one landing page with multiple date choices, or multiple landing pages per session.

These events can be live webinars or be made available on-demand to maximise the number of views that your webinar will get — as well as catering to different preferences your audience might have.

What are the Benefits of Recurring Webinars?

Recurring webinars offer several benefits, including:

1. Consistency: They provide a reliable schedule for participants, allowing them to plan ahead and attend regularly.
2. Continuity: Participants can engage in ongoing learning or discussion over time, building upon previous sessions.
3. Convenience: Knowing the schedule in advance allows participants to make arrangements to attend, making it easier to fit into their busy schedules.
4. Community Building: Regular attendees can form a community around the webinar series, fostering discussions, networking, and knowledge sharing.
5. Content Repurposing: Organizers can repurpose webinars from previous sessions or adapt it for future ones, maximizing the value of their resources.

From an operational perspective, recurring webinars are a huge time-save for webinar teams.

• A single landing page with one URL for a webinar and all of its sessions removes the need to constantly duplicate webinars and create the associated landing pages.
• Scheduling multiple sessions at once makes it faster to prepare and manage your upcomming recurring webinars — saving your team time so they can focus on creating engaging content.
• Grouped analytics across recurring webinars in a dashboard makes it easy to measure and analyze the success of your recurring webinars at a glance.

Mastering the Art of Setting Up Recurring Webinars

Achieve success in remote engagement with recurring webinars. Absorb the fine details on how to pick the best platform, schedule at optimal times, and generate content that hooks the audience. Get ready to outshine!

• Grasp how to select the ideal platform for your webinars.
• Decode the science behind scheduling.
• Furnish engaging content that resonates with your audience.

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Recurring Webinar

Finding the best webinar platform for your recurring webinars can be like reading a complicated map. Each has its own map, hidden benefits, and potential pitfalls to be aware of. An in-depth exploration is therefore pivotal.

You may weigh the merits and demerits of several platforms available for hosting webinars. Factors to consider can encompass user-friendliness, price, capacity to host recurring events, and creating branding webinars.

We build Contrast to be the only platform you'll ever need for your recurring webinars:

• Create and schedule them in minutes
• Brand your video and viewer experience
• Detailed analytics and integrations
• Repurpose AI to get 10x more content
• Easy to use interface for you & your team

How to Schedule a Recurring Webinar

Hello hello, you're favorite person here, Luuk from Contrast. When we designed recurring webinars we were inspired by calendar apps – not webinar apps. We felt that these apps did a much better job at easily creating recurring webinars.

Instead of a regular webinar that happens only once, you can choose to schedule a recurring one. This webinar will continue taking place on the days and time you want it to. Think of a weekly product demo that you host, or perhaps a monthly onboarding for new customers.

We create smart suggestions automatically for you, as you can see in this screen.

If you need more options, you can fully customize the way you recurring events take place. Easy, right? The cool thing is that you're used to scheduling events this way already with your calendar. So there's nothing new to learn really.

For every recurring webinar you create there is going to be one so-called parent webinar. In here, you set up the rules for when your recurring webinar needs to take place, its cover image and other info. For every occurrence, we will create an individual (child) webinar that people can register to.

For each webinar, you can still edit things like cover image, speakers, reminder emails and other info. Every webinar has their unique studio link so you can invite different speakers to different webinars. Pretty handy.

What do recurring webinar look like for your registrants then? They can choose the webinar that best fits their schedule. Just like this.

That is recurring webinars in a nutshell for you. Got questions? You know where to find us.

Preparing Engaging Content for Your Recurring Webinar

A good orchestration is nothing without a compelling score. Creating engaging webinar content for your audience remains the kingpin of a successful webinar. Making your presentation informative, engaging, and interactive will make your audience come back for more.

Unique insights, actionable tips, question-answer sessions, asking questions to your guest speakers, and live interactions should be the pillars on which your content stands.

Remember, the key to engaging ongoing attendees is to add value and respect their time. Aim to lead the discussion by generating knowledgeable content that fosters learning and intrigue. The hallmark of an effective webinar is not only the audience you attract, but also the community you retain.

Maximizing Attendee Engagement in Recurring Webinars

TL;DR

• Weave in interactive features such as Q&A sessions, polls, and breakout rooms for a vibrant experience.
• Fuel up audience activity for all-round engagement and inclusive discourse.
• Build on active strategies to stimulate participation and foster enriching dialogue.

Utilizing Interactive Features

As recurring webinars take root in the digital workspace, interactive elements such as Q&A sessions and polls are reshaping the course of web-based engagement. Polls render momentum to the discourse and infuse a sentiment of collective responsibility.

Other ways to make your webinar more interactive is to leverage features like the chat, on-screen elements, choosing an interesting webinar topic or guest speaker, or highlight trending messages or questions.

Enhancing Engagement with Interactive Tools

Clever use of interactive tools doesn't just hold attention, it significantly enhances attendee engagement in recurring webinars. Interactive features enable healthy dialogues, foster real-time feedback and help identify the diverse viewpoints, culminating in a rewarding engagement, and creating a ripple effect through the entire webinar series.

Remember, the success of your webinar doesn't just rely on information dissemination, but letting your audience feel seen, heard, and valued - these factors go a long way in propagating the effectiveness of your recurring webinars. Don't just launch a random poll, instead, select a relevant poll questions, bring the answers on-stage, and talk about the results with your speakers.

Encouraging Active Participation

Getting attendees to actively participate isn't just about answering questions or contributing to polls, it builds the essence of effective webinars. It's the process of making the attendees part of the dialogue rather than mere receivers of information. And for a series of webinars, it’s even more pivotal to build connections and relationships.

Strategies to Stimulate Participation

A well-balanced mix of incentivizing, appreciating and retargeting can navigate the attendee participation trajectory. Incentivizing can be in the form of access to exclusive content during webinar promotion, while appreciation can come in the form of acknowledgements or feedback. Retargeting, on the other hand, is the art of bringing back attendees and delivering an ever-evolving and improving experience.

Make sure your recurring webinar has relevant and high-quality call-to-actions that drive attendees to yoru website, offer, or product. Optimizing this part of your webinar funnel is the best way to have a fast and significant impact on your webinar ROI.

Lastly, remember the domino effect of participation; as more people participate, it fosters a favourable atmosphere where even the most reticent attendee is encouraged to share and engage.

Each interactive tool you integrate or strategy you employ to stimulate participation is a brick in the engaging edifice that is your recurring webinar series and will improve attendance rates. As you ensure your sessions are interactive and encourage participation, you create an environment where attendees don’t just learn, they experience, discuss and contribute.

Overcoming Common Challenges in Hosting Recurring Webinars

• Learn to tackle common technical difficulties with effective troubleshooting tips.
• Understand how to keep your audience engaged and invested in your recurring webinars.

Technical Difficulties

Webinars present their fair share of technical challenges, potentially detracting from efficiency and engagement. A glitch in the audio, a frozen video, or even connection issues can all present hurdles to smooth delivery. If these challenges become a common fixture in your recurring webinars, they could detract from the overall attendee experience and reduce participation over time.

Implementation of contingency plans and thorough testing are two crucial steps towards ensuring a glitch-free webinar. Invest in a good webinar setup, familiarize yourself with the platform, conduct multiple dry runs, and have backup hardware and systems in place. Troubleshooting common issues also requires conversant with quick fixes.

Maintaining Attendee Interest

One of the biggest challenges for hosting recurring webinars is keeping the interest and engagement of attendees alive year after year. Webinars that start strong but gradually wane can lead to decrease in attendee numbers, leading to suboptimal return on investment.

A much overlooked way to improve attendee interest is to make your recurring webinars fun virtual events. In the age of Twitch, Instagram, and other social media platforms, expectations have increased and a boring Zoom webinar just won't cut it anymore.

Different strategies can revamp and rekindle engagement in recurring webinars. Make sure you are up-to-date with webinar best practices. Stay abridged with your audience's evolving needs and preferences. Maintain dynamism in your content, making it immersive, interactive, and relevant. Add personal touch through Q&A sessions, use visual aids, and regularly refresh your content can all prove to be highly effective.

Lacking audience engagement? Consider reworking your webinar script template to make it fit with what your audience is looking for in terms of rythm and information. Sticking with the same script for too long can make your webinars stale, and for your audience — boring.

Ensure you are tracking key webinar analytics across your different recurring sessions. Do different promotion tactics influence how many people attend your recurring webinar? Are some topics better at retaining audience attention than others? Keep an eye on this data and use this feedback to improve your next sessions.

Understanding and overcoming these challenges can propel your recurring webinars to new heights. Regularly review your webinars, adapt to the needs of your audience and stay ready for any technical glitch that may come your way to ensure smooth, engaging, and effective webinars every time.

Stepping Up the Game with Recurring Webinars

Recurring webinars can revolutionize your engagement. They keep the conversation alive, foster a community among participants, and leverages on familiarity to bring about comfort during sessions.

Your valuable time spent reading this piece will pay off when you see increased engagement and repeat attendees in your recurring webinars. Start by determining the most engaging and relevant content for your audience and then develop a well-structured schedule. Follow through with consistent promotion to maintain momentum.

Now that you know the key elements for effective engagement in recurring webinars, the ball is in your court. Perhaps it is time for you to plan your next session?

Stay committed to these steps and before long, you might just see your webinars flourish into a lively, engaged community. After all, consistency is the key to extraordinary results.