According to ON24's Webinar Benchmarks Report, the average webinar in 2018 was 58 minutes long—two minutes longer than in 2017. But with all the multitasking that takes place today, engagement and interactivity are crucial.

Although he began by saying that the new California Consumer Privacy Act is an "extraordinarily complicated and poorly written statute," Chris Mohr, SIIA's VP for intellectual property and general counsel, wants to make one thing clear.

Restate the key value proposition of your webinar in reminders, writes Ken Molay on The Webinar Blog. Never send reminder emails that just say, "Your webinar is tomorrow." Add a sentence that reinforces why they were interested in the first place: "'Just a reminder that tomorrow is your chance to learn ways to improve the efficiency of your operations.'"

"Topic is the number one reason why people register for a webinar," Leslie Davidson, a leading webinar consultant from Davidson Direct, wrote on the SIPA Forum recently. "Evergreen topics still pull, but they don't begin to compare with the hot topics of the day, such as new regulations.

"What are your 'best practices' for making a good webinar presentation more likely?" Jennifer Brown of Strafford Publications Inc. asked earlier this month on the SIPA Forum. She received so many great answers that I thought it worth putting them in one space. Thank you to everyone who contributed. Test out. When we hire internally, we go through rigorous “working interviews” whereby they are put through a gauntlet to produce what their credentials say. Many times this works both in their favor and against. Some folks we were on the fence about blew us out of the water, while others that we were really in love with fell flat. Have a moderator who can interrupt, ask questions, and generally try to keep things on track. Ask for the speaker’s ratings from prior sessions. Everyone does them and most organizations share them with the speakers. The flaw in this issue is that the speaker would hopefully have enough sense not to share a poor review. However, wh ...

"We started [teleforums] in 2014, and it has grown to become a value-added outreach program. While our members travel in the car or fly in the air, they can listen to a live or recorded conversation that feels more like talk radio than a slideshow presentation."

You can't be too early in marketing your webinars and you almost can't be too late. According to ON24's 2017 Webinar Benchmarks Report, almost one in four registrants sign up for a webinar more than 15 days before the event. And about 25% of webinar registrants sign up on the day of. (31% register 1-7 days before, and 21% sign up 8-14 days out.) See the report here.

Do you have a solid post-live strategy for your webinars? According to ON24's 2017 Webinar Benchmarks Report, a third of all webinar attendees are only watching your webinars on-demand. So just because the webinar has taken place, you still need to be clear to your audience how they can view it. Interestingly, only 6% watch live and on-demand.

When I used to hear the initials OPM, I always thought Office of Personnel Management—this is Washington, D.C. But then I listened to a recent talk by Adam Goldstein, publisher of Business Management Daily (BMD), and he offered this advice for webinar marketing:

The late British playwright Harold Pinter once wrote a play called Betrayal that begins at the end of the story and works its way "back" to the beginning. It's very powerful to see the ending first—the play involves a love triangle—and then watch the actions of the characters that led to there.