How to Create a Webinar Strategy for Your Senior Living Company [+Templates]

Events are a great way to engage leads for your senior living company. Unfortunately, right now in-person events aren’t a possibility for a lot of people. That shouldn’t stop you from hosting these events—all you have to do is take them online! 

Webinars are such a great tool to provide information to your audience. They also allow  two-way communication to take place. Attendees can ask questions or chat with you directly with any information requests.

In order to successfully create an effective webinar strategy for your senior living company, you need to ensure that you are taking care of the following items.

Choose a Webinar Platform

Although there are a lot of webinar platforms options available, we recommend that you use Zoom for the following reasons:

• You can have up to 300 participants with a business account.
• Seniors are likely familiar with Zoom because quarantine has introduced them to video calling with their friends and family.
• There are options for Q&A, chat, and polling during the webinar.
• You can set the webinar up so that it records automatically. This allows you to use the recording as a sales tool or to share it with registrants later on.
• You can mute participants so no other sound will be made as you present your webinar.
• You can have alternative hosts, if you have multiple guest speakers or experts talking about a topic.
• HubSpot integration allows for segmentation, such as:
• Number of webinar registrations
• Webinar attendance
• Webinar attendance duration

Create a Process 

Once you’ve established the platform that you will host webinars on, another key step for an effective webinar strategy is creating a process for your webinars and planning properly. This includes the following steps:

Choosing topics

A good place to start is taking a look at what you’ve done for in-person events and repurpose them in an engaging webinar format. Other ideas include basing a webinar around popular content pieces that you have, or addressing frequently asked questions from your qualified leads.

Choosing speakers

Once you have a topic, you need to decide who will present the webinar. Is your sales team well versed in what you want to speak about? Should you bring in an outside expert? Would you like to have multiple speakers? These are all questions to think about.

Creating a webinar calendar

Once your senior living community or communities are onboard, you will need to organize all the event information on a calendar or spreadsheet. This will prevent webinars from overlapping and ensure that you have the proper time commitments. Some of the items to include on this calendar are topic, date and time, and when you want promotions to go out.

Promote Your Senior Living Webinar

Once your planning process is nailed down. You need to get the word out there that your senior living company is hosting a webinar. We recommend promoting your webinar in the following ways:

• Create a registration landing page that explains the benefits your webinar has to offer and includes a form to sign up.
• Send promotional emails to your database that link to your registration landing page and encourage those already in your database to sign up.
• Once someone signs up for your webinar, send them a confirmation email that provides login information. Then, a day or so before the webinar, send another reminder email giving them the login information again, so it’s at the top of their inbox and they are less likely to forget to join.
• Create a postcard invitation to send to those contacts you have mailing addresses for.
• Post on social media through either organic posts or paid means.
• Add a call to action (CTA) to promote the webinar on your homepage or other highly trafficked pages. Also add upcoming webinars to an events page, if you have one created.

Practice, Practice, Practice

No matter how many times someone has hosted a webinar in the past, it is always a great idea to schedule dry runs of the webinar before the live event. This allows all of those involved to get together and talk through the flow of the webinar. You should schedule as many dry runs of the webinar as you need to feel comfortable.

If you have a video or slides to run through, make sure those part of the presentation are seamlessly prepared and your transitions are smooth before you go live. We recommend having one person dedicated to controlling the logistics of the webinar, to minimize error and help with smooth transitions.

Follow Up with Webinar Registrants and Attendees

The work does not end once the live webinar is over. Following up with registrants is one of the most important pieces to an effective webinar strategy. 

Here are some ideas on how your senior living company can follow up with registrants:

• Create and send thank-you emails. You can customize these emails based on attendees versus those who only registered. It is best practice to include a recording of the webinar. This way registrants and participants can reference the information you provided at their convenience.
• Add the recorded webinar to your website. If you have an events page, it may make the most sense to add it there. You can also add it to your content library.
• Create a lead nurture for your registrants. You can tailor your message based on where your contacts are in your sales cycle and the topic of the webinar that they registered for. The most important thing is to make sure they receive communication from you even after the webinar is over.

Even when in-person events are the norm again, you should continue to use webinars to generate interest for your senior living communities. These events are flexible and offer the convenience of learning without having to leave home. By following these steps, you can ensure that you will have an effective webinar strategy for your senior living company in no time.