How To Get The Best Out Of Running a Zoom Webinar

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Webinars have only risen in prominence in the past year ever since the pandemic took over the world. Whether it’s for remote work or remote events, people now see webinars as a tool not only to generate remote leads but also for brand marketing, brand awareness, and customer education purposes. And Zoom webinar has become a great low-cost and high-value solution for remote conferences. 

But Zoom didn’t become the darling of its customers for webinars. It rose to popularity as a  meeting tool. For users who are just starting to use Zoom and want to use it primarily for webinars, this article explains:

• the operational difference between Zoom Webinar and Zoom Meeting
• how to use Zoom Webinar to its full potential and get the most out of your webinars

What is Zoom Webinar?

Zoom Webinar offers an online tool for teams (corporate or otherwise) to host large public virtual events with a host who moderates interaction between a small number of panelists and a large audience. 

The audience and the panelists (+ host) can interact with each other through polls, Q & A, and public chats. 

Only the host and panelists in a Zoom webinar have the ability to share their audio/video/screens and to see/manage other attendees. 

What is the difference between Zoom Meeting and Zoom Webinar?

First and foremost, everyone participating in a Zoom meeting is treated equally and can control their own audio/video/screen share. In a Zoom webinar, only the host and a small group of panelists will be in control. 

The Zoom Video Webinar add-on is ideal for:

• Town halls
• Public broadcasts
• Quarterly updates
• Marketing/sales conferences with a large number of prospects
• Educational lectures
• Other such large events where more than 90 people may attend

Zoom meetings are useful for group calls between small or large groups (of less than 90 participants) where everyone may need to share their screen and have an interactive discussion. Make sure you have a high-quality camera in place.

Is Webinar on Zoom free? How much does Zoom Webinar cost?

Zoom Webinar is not free. To host zoom webinars of up to 100 people, you will pay for BOTH levels:

• Zoom Meetings PRO plan: $149.90/year/license
• Zoom Video Webinar ADD-ON: $400/year/license

Head over to the Zoom Webinar pricing page to check out their other tools, add-ons, and special plans for education and telehealth providers.

Here’s your Zoom Webinar setup process

In this section, let’s assume that you have already bought the tool and its required webinar add-on.

To create a webinar in Zoom, follow these steps:

1. Log into your zoom account and click “Schedule a webinar” (on the website) or “Schedule” (on the desktop app)
2. Fill these required fields based on how you planned your webinar.
   • Topic
   • Description
   • Timing and duration
   • Select your timezone
3. If this webinar will repeat periodically, check the Recurring Webinar option. 
4. Make registration mandatory by selecting the Required option under Registration.
5. Zoom will automatically create a webinar passcode for you. To enable this facility, select the option to require a passcode under Webinar Passcode.
6. Decide which webinar roles will have access to your video in the Video section.
7. Select how attendees will connect to your webinar in the Audio section. You can also limit or allow participants based on their countries in this section. 
8. Based on your requirement, you can select the following Webinar Options by turning on the associated toggle:
   • Q&A
   • Practice Session
   • HD video for shared screen
   • HD video for attendees
   • Allow only authenticated users can join.
   • Record the meeting automatically
9. Add email addresses of Alternative hosts (or co-hosts)
10. Select Enable language interpretation if needed
11. Clicking Schedule to finish the process.

Save these settings as a template if you plan to conduct multiple such webinars.

Adding and inviting people to your Zoom webinar

For this task, turn your attention to the Invitations tab and follow these steps:

1. Select Edit under Invite Panelists and add details of your panelists. Click Save after you’re done.

2. Click the Invite Attendees tab and share the link to join webinar with your attendees. Click Copy the invitation to get the complete invitation text that you can use in a mass-invitation email campaign.

3. Select Edit under Approval to get access to the following registration settings:
   • Type of registration approval (automatic or manual)
   • An email confirmation to the host after each registration
   • A maximum limit for the number of registrations 
   • Information to capture during registration.

Managing Zoom panelists 

Managing Zoom attendees

Enabling options for Branding, Q&A, Polls, and Live Streaming

You can customize the look ok and feel of your webinar under the Branding tab.

The Polls tab allows you to set up specific polls to launch as the webinar progresses. 

By default, all attendees will have their name next to the questions they ask. Under the Q&A tab, you can choose to allow anonymous questions from your attendees. Use this same tab to allow interaction among attendees on each others’ questions. Enabling this type of interaction will reduce the burden on the host and panelists to answer every question, but then the host will have to monitor the accuracy and quality of attendees’ answers so they don’t confuse each other.

Live streaming your webinar is a great way to expose it to a much wider audience. Zoom has a guide to set up webinar live streams on their Help Center site. 

Using Zoom Q&A and Polls features during a live webinar

During the live webinar, access all the questions your participants sent by clicking the Q&A button.

The beauty of Zoom’s simple interface is that you can answer these questions live on camera or in the chat and even add resources for further reading in the chat.

Hover your mouse pointer over a question and click Dismiss after answering their question. 

Find all dismissed questions under the Dismissed tab. Click Reopen on any dismissed question to bring it back to your Q&A screen. 

With the Polls feature in Zoom, you can find out how many people are actively listening, take their opinion on matters specific to the ongoing webinar (when to take a break, etc), or check their general disposition toward an upcoming topic.

After clicking the Polls button during the webinar, you will see the list of polls you saved as you were setting up your webinar.

Edit the poll using the edit options if you need to change the poll. Once ready, just click Launch Poll.

You can also relaunch past polls or share results of finished polls with your attendees. 

Together with Q&A and Polls, your Zoom Webinar will no longer be boring; it becomes an interactive session that all panelists and attendees will like to listen to again. 

Don’t let your webinar fail due to under-planning

When you are handling a high-stakes webinar in front of your future clients or stakeholders, you would want as many things in your control as possible. 

A smart planning strategy backed by a solid practice session is a great way to prepare and rehearse alternative scenarios. 

Despite everything, you can’t control if something goes wrong during the final session. You or one of your panelists could get sick and become unavailable. The internet could suddenly become your enemy on D-day!

In such uncertain times, you could use pre-recorded and pre-edited videos and broadcast them during the session as live videos. The host and panelists can then stay on for the Q&A at the end. 

Thus, asynchronous broadcasting minimizes the time investment from senior stakeholders in the team and also reduces the possibility of anything going wrong on the day of the webinar. 

With HippoVideo, you could pre-record videos and annotate them with helpful on-screen tips and text to bring light to the best features of your product/service/website. 

Repurpose Zoom Webinar recording for sales and marketing

A single webinar recording could hold enough value to convert multiple clients. Repurposing this recording helps maximize its output by keeping your effort limited. 

Integrating Zoom and the HippoVideo platform

By leveraging our Zoom integration, you will automatically save your recorded webinars to your HippoVideo library.

These videos are now available for you to repurpose into marketing and sales content in the following ways:

• Embed them to your website
• Share on social media pages
• Send using email marketing campaigns
• Gather leads by gating these videos with HippoVideo forms
• Leverage real-time insights on video views, watch percentage, engagement, watch rates, play rates, geo-location, and other important video analytics stats. This lets you find warm/hot leads that must be nurtured to become marketing-qualified leads. 
• Multiple editing options to split the full webinar recording into bite-sized engaging clips

A single video could be used to demonstrate your product on a sales page, add value to your marketing emails, or create an instructional blog post to rank for low-competition keywords.

With HippoVideo, you can reuse a single video in multiple ways and take your brand’s content marketing game to the next level. 

Go ahead, have a look at all our features with a free 7-day trial.