Each year, over 60% of marketers incorporate webinars into their content marketing strategies, often with a focus on driving sales. These webinars can sometimes feel repetitive, and in many cases, they're run on regular schedules, with the same type of content being presented week after week. But this recurring pattern actually creates a unique opportunity for businesses to rethink how they approach webinars—and that’s where recurring webinars come into play.
A recurring webinar is essentially a series of webinars that are scheduled to happen on a regular basis, usually around a specific theme or topic. This allows you to build momentum with your audience over time, establish deeper connections, and create a more engaging experience for participants. Rather than constantly coming up with brand-new content for each session, you can focus on evolving your presentations and continuing the conversation with your viewers.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about how to host a webinar: what exactly it is, why it’s beneficial, how to set one up, and how to keep your audience engaged week after week.
What is a Recurring Webinar?
A recurring webinar is an online event that happens regularly at set intervals, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. These webinars are scheduled in advance and take place on a predictable basis, making it easy for your audience to know when to expect the next one. By offering webinars on a regular schedule, you create an opportunity to engage your audience over time and build a deeper connection with them.
These webinars typically follow a consistent format each time, so participants know what to expect. Whether it’s a presentation, a demonstration, or a training session, the recurring nature allows your audience to get familiar with the structure, making it easier for them to tune in and engage.
What Can Recurring Webinars Cover?
Recurring webinars can be focused on a wide range of topics. Here are some common types of recurring webinars:
- Product Demos: Regular demonstrations of your product or service, showing how it works, how to get the most out of it, and answering common questions.
- Onboarding Sessions: These webinars help new customers or users get started with your product or service. They can be scheduled weekly or monthly to make sure new people get the guidance they need.
- Training Sessions: If you offer training or educational content, recurring webinars can cover different aspects of the subject, giving participants the chance to learn over time.
- Q&A Sessions: A regular space where you answer your audience’s questions, helping to build trust and provide immediate value.
Depending on the nature of your business and your audience’s needs, you can adapt your recurring webinars to suit a wide variety of purposes, always ensuring the content is relevant and valuable to those who attend.
Landing Pages and Registration Options
One of the key aspects of running recurring webinars is how you set up your registration process. The webinar platform you use can impact how you manage registrations and promote each session.
- Single Landing Page: Many platforms allow you to create a single landing page for your recurring webinar series. This means attendees can choose from multiple upcoming dates for the same webinar series, making it easier for them to register for the entire series at once. This option simplifies the process, as you only need to promote and manage one page, and your audience doesn’t have to navigate to a new page each time.
- Multiple Landing Pages: If you prefer to create a unique experience for each session, some platforms let you create individual landing pages for each date. This can give you more flexibility in customizing the details for each session, such as different topics, guest speakers, or key takeaways, but it also requires a bit more time to manage and promote each one.
Live vs. On-Demand Webinars
When planning recurring webinars, you also need to decide whether you’ll offer live sessions, on-demand access, or a combination of both.
- Live Webinars: Hosting live webinars allows you to interact with your audience in real time. Participants can ask questions, engage with polls, and discuss the content with other attendees. Live sessions help create a sense of urgency and excitement, encouraging people to sign up and attend. They’re perfect for webinars that require audience participation, feedback, or real-time interaction.
- On-Demand Webinars: On-demand webinars give your audience the flexibility to watch the content whenever it’s convenient for them. This is great for people in different time zones or those who can’t attend the live session. Offering on-demand access maximizes your reach because people can view the session at their own pace. Plus, you can make recordings available for as long as needed, giving attendees the option to revisit the content at any time.
Many platforms allow you to host a hybrid model where the webinar is live initially but also made available on-demand afterward. This approach helps you cater to both audiences: those who prefer live interaction and those who want the flexibility to watch at their convenience.
Maximizing Your Reach
The flexibility of recurring webinars, combined with live and on-demand options, helps you reach a larger audience. Live webinars are great for building excitement and engagement, but on-demand options ensure that no one misses out on valuable content just because they can’t attend at the scheduled time.
By allowing people to register for a recurring series and providing them with easy access to both live and on-demand sessions, you increase the chances of getting more attendees and repeat viewers. This approach also helps you build a consistent audience, as people can rely on your regular webinars to stay informed and engaged with your content.
Ultimately, the recurring nature of the webinar—along with the ability to cater to different preferences—helps you create a valuable, ongoing experience for your audience, making it more likely that they’ll come back for more.
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Start for freeWhat are the Benefits of Recurring Webinars?
Recurring webinars offer several advantages that can make your content strategy more efficient and impactful. Whether you're a marketer, educator, or business owner, hosting webinars on a regular schedule provides a number of key benefits.
Consistency
Recurring webinars give your audience a predictable, regular schedule. When people know exactly when to expect your next session, it makes it easier for them to plan ahead and attend. Whether it’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, consistency helps build trust with your audience because they can rely on your content to be available at a set time. Over time, this can help grow a loyal following.
Continuity
With recurring webinars, you can create a continuous learning experience for your audience. Each session builds on the previous one, which helps participants deepen their knowledge over time. This is especially valuable for topics that require in-depth exploration or ongoing updates, such as product training, industry trends, or professional development. The continuity of the sessions helps keep your audience engaged and invested in the topic.
Convenience
A regular webinar series allows participants to plan their schedules around the webinars. When the dates and times are consistent, your audience can more easily make arrangements to attend. They don’t need to worry about missing important information, and they can adjust their calendars in advance, making it more likely they’ll attend future sessions. This convenience increases the chances of consistent participation.
Community Building
Hosting recurring webinars creates opportunities for your audience to engage with each other. Regular attendees can form a sense of community around your webinar series, sharing ideas, insights, and feedback. This not only helps foster stronger connections among participants but also encourages knowledge sharing and networking. Whether it’s through live Q&As, chat interactions, or post-webinar discussions, your audience feels like they’re part of a growing community.
Content Repurposing
One of the most efficient ways to maximize the value of your content is through repurposing. With recurring webinars, you can reuse some of the content from previous sessions in future ones. If a particular topic or session resonated with your audience, you can revisit it, tweak it, and present it again from a different angle. You can also repurpose recordings of previous webinars into blog posts, social media content, or email campaigns. This saves time and allows you to get the most out of each piece of content.
Time-Saving for Your Team
From an operational perspective, recurring webinars save a lot of time for your webinar team. Instead of creating a brand new event and landing page for each individual session, you can use the same landing page for all sessions. This eliminates the need to create multiple pages or duplicate the same work over and over again. You can also schedule several sessions at once, which makes it much easier to plan and manage your upcoming events. This streamlines the process, allowing your team to focus more on creating engaging content and less on the logistics of each individual session.
Simplified Registration
With recurring webinars, you can create a single landing page with one URL for all sessions in the series. This means your audience only needs to register once for the entire series, rather than re-registering for each new session. This simplifies the registration process, making it easier for both you and your participants. It also reduces the risk of drop-offs or confusion about how to sign up for multiple events.
Easy Analytics and Tracking
Managing recurring webinars is also much simpler from a data perspective. Many webinar platforms allow you to group analytics across all sessions in a series, providing a clear dashboard to measure success. You can track registration numbers, attendance rates, engagement levels, and more across all sessions, giving you a comprehensive view of how your series is performing. This makes it easier to identify trends, analyze audience behavior, and fine-tune your future webinars based on what works best.
Recurring webinars not only benefit your audience by offering consistency, convenience, and ongoing learning, but they also streamline the operational side of your webinar strategy. From easier content repurposing to simplified registration and better analytics, recurring webinars make it easier for your team to focus on creating high-quality, engaging content while saving time on the logistics. If you're looking to build a stronger connection with your audience and create an efficient content strategy, recurring webinars are a great option to consider.
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 webinar that will continue taking place on the days and times you choose. Think of a weekly product demo that you host, or perhaps a monthly onboarding session for new customers. Whether you need a one-time session or a series of regular events, this feature lets you manage it all in a breeze.
The webinar scheduler makes setting up these recurring sessions as simple as adding a meeting to your calendar. We even create smart suggestions automatically for you, making scheduling even more efficient.
You can see an example of this in the screen below.
If you need more flexibility, you can fully customize the scheduling options for your recurring events. The cool thing is that you're already used to scheduling events in a similar way with your calendar app, so there’s virtually nothing new to learn. This approach makes the process incredibly user-friendly, allowing you to schedule a recurring webinar exactly how you want it.
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. Once you’ve configured the parent webinar, the webinar scheduler will automatically generate individual sessions, called "child webinars," for each occurrence. These child webinars will follow the same structure, but you can personalize each one.
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.
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Start for freeOvercoming 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.
Host Engaging Recurring Webinars
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