A question that is often asked is, “What is a realistic planning horizon for producing an engaging one hour informational webinar?”

To answer this, let’s start with the assumption that we’ve defined and quantified our desired outcomes, i.e., is it fresh new sales leads, raising brand awareness, or boosting thought leadership or all of the above?

We also have a clear idea of who our targeted demographic is along with a value proposition that we believe will align with this audience to get their eyeballs to our webinar.

If we then factor in and identify all of the logistics and deliverables, including developing analytics covering the entire webinar life-cycle, experience has shown that best results will occur if we budget between 6 – 8 weeks from developing our work plan to starting with audience recruitment, developing a compelling invitation, driving & tracking registration, shaping the message, coaching presenters, scheduling 2-3 dress rehearsals, through doing our final sound check and going live.

We find that 6-8 weeks creates the right amount of creative energy to stay focused and meet the many deliverables, yet also provides enough time to remain flexible to adapt new ideas or add a new panelist and still produce a great webinar.

Less than 6 weeks is problematic as the pressure mounts to get things done,and this rush adds unnecessary stress to the team and makes for more reactive decisions. This is when mistakes happen that can turn catastrophic, such as not having the right phone numbers or date on the registration landing page. Also good ideas aren’t considered as “we ran out of time”.

On the other hand, too much time, tends to have things drag out and decisions that need to get made, are put off or debated for too long a time period, where a sort of paralysis sets in that ultimately hurts the final product.

In a future post, I’ll start to drill down and identify the critical long lead items and how to manage them across the entire webinar life cycle.

What’s your experience on the optimal time frame for producing and delivering a webinar?

Thanks,

Mike