Right off the bat, I love webinars. I think when they’re done right, they’re incredibly powerful as marketing tools.Here’s why:

• Webinars are intended to share value with people for free, in turn, building positive brand affinity with your space
• For coworking spaces, you have the opportunity to collaborate with webinar guests who are experts in fields that can help your members, personally or professionally
• By having guest experts on your webinar, you’re going to get exposure to a whole new network of people who might need your coworking space--after all, people are incredibly motivated to share things they’ve featured in, especially when it’s as in-depth as a webinar
• It allows you to collect email addresses (just make sure to get permission)
• Webinars provide you with a ton of secondary content that both you and your guest can share, like social media posts, recap blog articles, and marketing emails with key takeaways or video recordings you can share with anyone who didn’t attend

Not sure where to start with a webinar? Here’s how to approach them:

• Look at your members and identify expertise they’d benefit from
• Seek an expert, whether it’s a member or someone in your network, and pitch them on the idea
• Highlight the win-win nature of the webinar--they get exposure to your audience and vice versa and it’s a chance to showcase their expertise and build their profile
• Decide on your topic, and keep it specific
• Collaboratively build out a presentation to go with it
• Map out an overview of talking points and questions in advance--a script, of sorts--so that you can your guest stay on track and aren’t talking over each other
• Use a tool like Luma to host the event and collect registrations
• Luma will connect to your Zoom account so you can host your webinar there
• Develop an overview of what to expect and, most importantly, what people will learn
• Create assets for your social media and mailing list and your guest’s as well
• Promote the webinar multiple times in the lead-up to the event via social media and email and ask your guest to do the same
• Make sure you’ve got a decent camera, mic, and lighting set-up (it doesn’t need to be a studio, just good enough that people can see and hear you clearly)
• Host your webinar and make sure to record it!
• Edit the video as required and publish it to YouTube
• Ideally, host the video on your website in an archive so people can access it later
• Take highlight snippets and post them on social media (make sure to tag your guest and have them do the same)
• Create a “key takeaways” blog post and email to share with your audience (and for your guest to share with theirs, on their own platforms)

While webinars do take some legwork, they’re massively worthwhile.Just take your time and make sure all the boxes are checked. And remember: experience is the best teacher of all.