Webinar best practices: How to design, write, and host presentations

More than half (53%) of B2B marketers report webinars are a successful lead generation tactic. And 58% of B2B professionals say virtual events like webinars and online courses also produce the best business results — compared to assets like research reports and short articles.

And 62% of webinar attendees feel ready to request product pricing after watching a relevant vendor video. 

This makes it clear: not only do professionals use webinars as a great resource for internal communication and remote training, but webinars can also help generate leads for sales.

Learning how to create a webinar is half the battle. Successful marketers focus on designing content and presenting a compelling webinar that holds attention. So how do you do it? Thankfully, we’ve got some presentation ideas and tips for you.

We know webinars are a great way to attract leads, convert customers, and share your brand’s story. While webinar promotions and the right content will attract your audience, keeping their attention is all about nailing your live presentation.

In this post, we’ll dive into the nuts and bolts of how to design, write, and host webinar presentations — from choosing a webinar platform to gathering feedback. By the end, you’ll master the fundamentals of presenting an attention-arresting show. Here’s what we’ll review:

How to set up a webinar in five steps

We’ve distilled the art of creating a webinar presentation into five easy steps.

Need more tips? Learn how to create a webinar, or check out Vimeo’s Webinar Confidential to hear real-life stories of virtual event mishaps and tips on how to run a great event. Watch now

1. Work out the webinar’s structure and presentation style

Dedicate this first step to ensuring smooth functionality and planning the nitty-gritty details of your webinar:

• What topic will you cover? 
• Who is your audience? 
• Will it be a real-time live webinar or pre-recorded? 
• Where will you host the landing page where guests can register for the event?
• Will there be an on demand video of the webinar available afterward?

Also, ask yourself how the webinar will unfold — the sequence it will follow, who will present, and the order of topics/content to share.

Once you’ve planned out the webinar’s basics, work out which presentation styles will complement your show: slides and audio, screen share, webcam, or a combination of the three. Ideally, show yourself and/or the speakers to connect with your audience.

2. Dump your thoughts into an outline

So you’ve ironed out details about your presentation style, webinar speakers, and structure. What’s next? A brain dump so you can start organizing your thoughts.

At the top of your outline, write down the key message you want to deliver. Next, write down all your topic-related presentation ideas — visuals, main points, transitions, etc. At this point, it’s advisable you don’t hold back or try to filter or pause to evaluate if an idea is good or bad. Simply 👏 write 👏 it 👏 down. 👏

As you jot down your thoughts, add any supporting evidence to your points. Think examples, data, stats, and customer stories that tie into your main webinar thesis.

Now, work on refining your brainstorm into an outline. Here’s a three-step process to get your outline in top shape: 

• Filter: Whittle down all your information so you have no more than three to five key takeaways.
• Distill: Select the most impactful data and examples to back your points.
• Polish: Make sure everything in the outline aligns with your webinar’s goal and is relevant to your target audience.

Remember that it’s important to only present the most important, most impactful content.

As Chris Anderson, curator at TED, describes in the Harvard Business Review, try to limit abstract language and focus on concrete examples:

“If you try to cram in everything you know, you won’t have time to include key details, and your talk will disappear into abstract language…You need specific examples to flesh out your ideas. So limit the scope of your talk to that which can be explained, and brought to life with examples, in the available time.”

“Limit the scope of your talk to that which can be explained, and brought to life with examples, in the available time.”

Chris Anderson, curator at TED

Your final outline should read like a script or guide that will map the webinar presentation.

3. Make a plan to engage your audience

There’s nothing more disappointing than a bland webinar that does little to excite the audience.

In fact, in a recent internal Vimeo survey, we found that the main reasons participants exit webinars are technical difficulties (59%), poor moderation (46%), or boredom (44%). This means it’s imperative to have your production in order and content that’s concise and relevant.

Of course, grabbing your audience’s attention with well-designed presentation slides is crucial — and we’ve got tips on that a bit later in this article — but attendee engagement and getting your audience to “act” during the live event is your top priority.

Online whiteboard software Miro’s customer education manager, Jennifer Clark, acknowledges the importance of improving your attendees’ user experience for this. Not only does it help convince participants to stay till the end, but it also encourages them to attend more of your webinars.

“I [engage attendees] by welcoming folks with music, asking interesting icebreakers to warm up the chat, and offering several opportunities to raise hands or respond in the chat throughout the session. Humor is critical too — if we don’t have someone’s attention or we aren’t interesting to listen to/look at, we’re not going to retain our learners long enough to teach them something cool.”

“If we aren’t interesting to listen to [or] look at, we’re not going to retain our learners long enough to teach them something cool.”

Jennifer Clark, customer education manager at Miro

To create a memorable user experience for your webinars, try adding a few things like an intro slate, a handful of ice breaker questions to fire up the chat, and a pause between sections. This gives presenters and speakers time to comment live by answering audience questions from the chat or to pose questions to the audience to help them retain more info.

Clark also focuses on paying attention to the small details to make your webinar stand out:

“I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to think through the end-user experience for the webinar itself. The sound and video quality should be high, the field of view should be clean if you’re sharing a screen, and ‘do not disturb’ mode should be on.

We shouldn’t see any bouncing apps or notifications. I think those little details mirror what I’ve done in person as an educator. In the past, that let your audience know you care about the small things and want their experience to be seamless.”

Technical execution is critical to keeping folks engaged in webinar content. Schedule a rehearsal before the live event to troubleshoot any issues with video and audio prior to the live stream.

4. Prepare a short but engaging introduction

A poor introduction can make attendees feel like it was a wrong decision to sign up, so they wouldn’t hesitate to take the exit route. Translation: you need a strong introduction.

So what makes a good introduction?

👋 Start with a greeting

A simple yet effective way to start is with a ‘Hi! Welcome to [webinar title].’ It’s also a good idea to thank participants for taking the time to join you.

⌚️ Reinforce the webinar is worth the time investment

Be quick to tell attendees how the webinar will benefit them. Consider sharing the takeaways in bullet points: three to four points maximum so you aren’t overloading things to the point that you make them easy to forget.

Or you can share a one-line take-home message. For example, a webinar on Google Analytics to track blog post traffic can have the following what’s-in-it-for-me message for its attendees: ‘You’ll leave feeling ready to use GA for tracking your blog performance.’

🎓 Share why you’re an expert in the topic you’re presenting

Introduce yourself next. Explain what makes you an authority on the subject. But instead of reading out your resume, consider summarizing your career highlights — packaged as a story. Stories are personal; therefore, they help you connect with your audience and gain their trust. A story is always way more memorable than a plain speech on what you’ve accomplished so far.

🏗️ Explain your webinar’s structure

Think of this as your general housekeeping. It helps set audience expectations, which makes it an absolute must component of your introduction.

Simply tell viewers what’s in store for them. Have a live Q&A session at the end? Tell them so they can start writing down their questions. Have polls in place throughout the sessions? Again, tell them.

Vimeo’s Master Class on hosting engaging town halls shares key takeaways in four simple bullet points:

• Why are town halls crucial to your business?
• Tips for planning the best content for your town hall
• How to boost employee (attendee) engagement during town halls
• How to extend the life of your town hall

Pro tip: Create a useful template, checklist, or framework to get your audience to stick around till the end. Tell them you’ll be sharing a gift or freebie at the end. But don’t reveal exactly what it is — build the suspense instead.

5. Prepare your presentation slides

With the legwork done, start creating your presentation slides. Use the outline you’ve created to write copy for the slides. Roughly, you’ll need to work on the following slides:

• Section headers/dividers
• Text-heavy slide
• Combination text + high-quality image(s) slide
• Big stats slide
• Pull quotes

The key, however, is to make sure you don’t stuff the slides with too much text. A good presentation slide formatting rule that can help here is the 5-5-5 rule:

• Add no more than five (5) words per line
• No more than five (5) lines per slide
• No more than five (5) consecutive text-heavy slides

How to build a webinar: Four design tips

Now, for some expert tips from Vimeo’s design team. Don’t worry; you don’t need design chops for this.

1. Variety is the spice of presentation slides

Text-based monotonous slides are the recipe for losing audience attention. Our in-house design team suggests leveraging animation, GIFs, motion, imagery, or iconography to break the monotony. Short video tutorials, such as screen recordings illustrating a point, also work well. For example, showing a product feature in action.

The general rule is to have less text and more visuals since you’ll be voicing over information as you present.

2. Make your slides easy to read

Use a legible font that’s displayed at minimum 30 points. This is important for making your slides accessible to attendees joining using their smartphones.

3. Brand your slides

Design using your brand colors and logo in your slides for brand consistency. This will also help leave a memorable impression on participants, especially if they continue to join more of your webinars.

Splash, for example, creates presentation decks using its brand colors.

If you choose to keep your logo but want to experiment with other colors, follow this expert advice from a Vimeo designer:

“Choose colorways that are complementary and provide enough contrast to be legible (i.e., don’t use white text on an off-white background).”

4. Highlight key information

This helps you catch attendees’ attention better. Our designer advises you to “make important callouts big and bold! Whether that’s a quote or a key stat that you want to highlight.”

“Make important callouts big and bold!”

Designer at Vimeo

Now that you have a good idea about how to design and format your webinar presentation (remember: lower thirds are your friends!), let’s get into how to write a great webinar script.

Five tips for writing a great webinar script

A webinar script is a written version of what a speaker delivers in their presentation.

You need it as a guardrail to structure your thoughts into a cohesive layout while helping you communicate key points efficiently. If you’re having a bout of writer’s block, you can also leverage an AI script generator to get ideas flowing.

Besides outlining your introduction, webinar agenda, and call to action, use the script to include timing details (how much time you’d dedicate to each section and speaker) and navigational instructions such as which slides to share, interactive elements to intro, and more.

Begin creating your script as soon as you’ve finalized your presentation topic — go back to the outlining step in the section on how to create a webinar presentation for a refresher if needed.

Then follow these five steps to write a good webinar script.

1. Know your audience

Your webinar content can only be as relevant to your audience as your knowledge of them is. Speak their language, use examples that resonate with them, and touch on their pain points — show them you did your homework.

Here are a few tips on how you can write a simple script that is relevant to your audience:

• Remove business speak or jargon.
• Get rid of heavy vocabulary and an overload of abbreviations.
• Use as many short and medium-length sentences as possible.

Most of all, always front-load sentences so that important information is at the start.

The more you know your audience, the better you’ll understand their struggles, how to solve them, and how to present that solution within your webinar. By extension, you’ll be able to engage attendees better. Briar Goldberg, the director of speaker coaching at TED, talks about this:

“When your audience doesn’t feel like your words apply to them, when they don’t understand what you’re trying to say, or, worse yet, they don’t care about your ideas, then your carefully crafted slides, agenda or jokes simply don’t matter.”

“When your audience doesn’t feel like your words apply to them, then your carefully crafted slides simply don’t matter.”

Briar Goldberg, director of speaker coaching at TED

A useful starting point then is one that Goldberg shares: ABC or Audience Before Content. Translation: before you put pen to paper, research your audience. The following three tips will help:

• Ask the marketing team to share audience demographics and buyers’ persona.
• Understand why attendees are making time for the webinar — what do they really want to learn?
• Figure out your audience’s expectations and how you can meet their expectations (social listening and asking this question in your sign-up form are two helpful ways to find your answer).

2. Know your goal

When learning how to create a webinar presentation, don’t saturate your content with too many ideas. Doing so dilutes your main message.

Semrush’s head of influencer marketing, Anton Shulke, stresses the need to have a clearly defined goal:

“Before doing a webinar, ask yourself why you are doing it, and if you have multiple reasons — just drop it. Webinars as any type of content serve one [to] two purposes; defining them before starting the work is absolutely essential.”

But what if you’ve gotten to this point and realized your goal isn’t necessarily relevant? Time to revise. What can you do to refine your intention and make your purpose better match your content and audience?

Revising your webinar’s goal is also crucial for writing a script that aligns with your goal and helping you tie in goal-relevant examples, screens, product tutorials (if needed), and calls to action.

3. Leverage storytelling

Good presentations are ultimately about telling a great story. Stories and real-life examples fascinate where business speak bores people — there’s science behind this too.

But what does this mean for you? Start with a story and build your ideas into your presentation as examples. This can help differentiate your webinar content, making it memorable and more human.

In a product-led webinar targeted toward people at the bottom of your funnel, for example, this would mean you don’t focus on your company or product. It means you tell a story about a customer, their problem, and how your solution can help them achieve their goal.

At Vimeo, we’re fans of sharing our customers’ success stories. It’s why in our Master Class on engaging town halls, we shared how Rite Aid created successful all-hands meetings with video.

Pro tip: If you plan to back your story with data, choose only two to three mind-blowing statistics. Dumping a laundry list of numbers increases your audience’s mental load.

4. Use the three to five takeaways rule

This one’s a hat tip to Vimeo’s content and programming lead, Julie Bergstein, who leads our event strategy.

The plan is easy: strip your script down to its simplest form. Why? Because simple is easy to understand and easy to remember.

One good way to keep things simple is by reducing your audience’s take-home messages to three to five points, according to Bergstein.

“I always like to highlight three to five key takeaways that our audience will walk away with so that they know exactly what they’re in for. Then, I always map the different ‘sections’ of content directly back to those three to five takeaways. At the end, I’ll reiterate the takeaways on a slide (in slightly different wording than the earlier slide) to really drive home the main points.”

“Always map the different sections of content directly back to three to five takeaways.”

Julie Bergstein, content and programming lead at Vimeo

Don’t be afraid of repetition — throughout your presentation, loop back to the main points from your outline and continually drive your webinar takeaways.

5. Trim your script to fit the presentation’s duration

Before you consider your webinar script done, give it one last round of edits.  

Take care of two things in this final step:

• Read your script out loud. You want to know how it sounds to the ear. Rewrite or get rid of sentences that are overly complex, don’t add value, and aren’t easy to understand in one go.
• Time your script. Read your script with the timer running in the background. Don’t stop even as the time exceeds your presentation’s duration. This will help you figure out how much speaking time you need to cut so you can shorten the script.

Six tips for presenting webinars

There’s only one thing that you need to practice now: your delivery.

It’s easy to think about “winging it,” but there are areas in which preparation can save you from wasting time (i.e., rambling, not knowing what to say next, etc.).

So here are six simple tips for presenting webinars like a professional:

1. Practice each slide

Without practice, you’re likely to ramble instead of making a concise argument. Plus, you’ll likely shower your audience with a ton of “umms” and other filler.

Delivering such a presentation does little to hold your audience’s attention. The solution? Practice. Lots of practice. If you can, get someone on the team to help you or use a teleprompter to help you get comfortable talking directly on screen.. Or record yourself and listen to where you’re stammering or going off-track.

If the webinar has more than one speaker, it’s a good idea to chart the webinar’s flow, including time slots for each presenter. From there on, do a run-through to see how each presenter is doing and to fine-tune the flow (and transition between speakers).

2. Rehearse your pacing and tone

You don’t need to change the way you speak. But your pacing will need work. As will making sure each word you say is delivered clearly. Miro’s webinar host talks about this, too.

“Pacing is critical; the audience shouldn’t feel like we’re blazing through features [or pointers/ideas] or spending forever on one feature [idea]. It should take advantage of attention while moving freely enough to capture wandering minds.”

“[A webinar should] take advantage of attention while moving freely enough to capture wandering minds.”

Webinar host at Miro

Practice will help you strike the right balance for pacing. Here are a couple of tips for nailing your speech and tone.

• Speak clearly with micro pauses. Consciously take steps to clearly say each word to make sure your audience is able to digest your message.
• Work toward an energetic tone. A slow, lazy tone indicates the webinar is going to be a slow kill. An interested, dynamic tone, on the other hand, is welcoming — and will help you retain your audience.

3. Check your internet connection

Poor internet speed can cause your presentation to stutter or freeze. Since your aim is to provide an amazing attendee experience, make it a rule to check your internet speed a week before the event.

You’ll need a minimum of 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) upload speed for hosting a webinar, but an exact estimate depends on audience size and the video hosting platform.

4. Host from a noise-free webinar environment

This ensures your voice can be heard as clearly as possible. It also removes distractions for you, making it easy to keep up with your train of thought.

To this end, make sure you:

• Close all background tabs. You don’t want a song playing in the background only to find out it’s coming from one of your zillion tabs. 😬
• Host from a room with soft surfaces. Carpet and curtains absorb sound and reduce echo. If you’re working from home, make sure the room is inaccessible to children and pets.
• Wear headphones. It reduces background noise and echo.
• Get a professional microphone. Research proves audio quality ranks higher than visual quality. This means your laptop’s built-in microphone simply won’t cut it. Consider investing in a lavalier or clip-on mic that can save your audience from straining to keep up with you.

Have some extra budget to spare? Get a boom arm for your mic so it’s positioned close to your mouth to minimize background noise.

5. Recruit a team to help you pull it all off smoothly

For large events, you may need a few more teammates to help pull everything off smoothly. A moderator, for example, helps manage comments pouring through your live chat or Q&A or moderates the most upvoted questions to the speaker(s).

A spotter, on the other hand, is an extra pair of eyes that regulates all the technical stuff during a webinar.

6. Curate questions for the Q&A session in case engagement is low

Ask for questions ahead of time. This will help you fire off a Q&A session immediately without having to fill the awkward silence until attendees share their questions. Gather questions using the webinar sign-up form or ask your social media or newsletter community to share their questions.

How to conduct post-webinar feedback surveys

A successful webinar doesn’t end once you reach the last slide. Post-webinar feedback helps you understand how your hard work translates into value for the attendees. As you wrap your presentation, be sure to tell participants you’ll be sharing a survey form in a follow-up email.

Some presenter feedback survey questions you can ask are:

• What’s your biggest takeaway from the presentation?
• How can we make the webinar better for you?
• What would you like to learn next?

You can also ask participants to rate your presentation with a few questions, such as:

• How likely are you to recommend the session to a colleague?
• Would you like to learn more on this topic?
• What percentage of the content shared with you was new?
• How would you rate the host’s presentation skills, presentation pace, and knowledge of the topic?

Webinar presentation best practices FAQs

Discover the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about presenting webinars.

How do you structure a good webinar?

A webinar’s success is typically dependent on the preparation that goes into it. In order to structure a good webinar, follow the steps in our guide to:

• Set up a webinar
• Design a webinar
• Write a webinar
• Present a webinar

What makes an effective webinar?

Arguably, the most important part of a webinar is what the speakers say. Visuals are important, but a webinar script can make or break a presentation. If you want your webinar to be effective, you need to first create an effective script. Effective webinar scripts include a variety of relevant data and statistics, examples, anecdotes, and casual communication. And don’t underestimate the power of purposeful pauses.

What are the 13 components of webinar presentations?

Thirteen is an arbitrary number created by a European webinar provider, but since you asked…

The 13 components of webinar presentations include the following:

1. Communicate audience expectations.
2. Create a clear structure.
3. Keep slide information brief.
4. Build a dynamic presentation.
5. Involve participants actively (engage your audience).
6. Encourage attendees to take action (include a CTA!).
7. Practice! Practice! Practice!
8. Present slowly and thoughtfully (watch out for a pace that’s too fast!).
9. Alternate your eye contact between the screen and the audience.
10.  Explain your actions (e.g., “Now I’m starting a pre-recorded video…”) to increase clarity.
11.  Explain who has asked any questions you address.
12.  Don’t forget a post-event summary!
13.  Keep your closing statement concise.

Wrap up: Webinar presentation 101

Hopefully, you have a stronger idea of how to create a webinar presentation that will wow your audience. With these expert insights and presentation ideas, you’ll be able to host an awesome webinar that keeps your audience glued to their screen till the end.

Take a deep breath. Success is in identifying your presentation’s goal, packaging information in three to five takeaways, and practicing your script beforehand. Don’t forget to create breathable, clutter-free slide decks and engage your audience with polls and Q&As. And just remember: your ultimate goal is to connect with the person on the other side of the screen.

Go live with your next webinar