What is a Webinar & How does it Work? Full 2026 Guide

Everyone is watching more video content. That means your prospects, leads, and clients, too. So businesses have to keep up: 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.

Webinars are a form of live video content with a lot of potential for interacting with your audience: increasing brand awareness, engaging viewers to turn them into leads, and converting leads into customers.

This article will cover everything you need to get started with webinars: what they are, why you should host them, how to successfully plan and host one, and more.

Let's dive right in.

What is a Webinar?

Webinars (short for web-based seminar) are real-time video presentations, workshops, or lectures hosted using a webinar platform.

Business-related webinars are often lead generation, authority-building, or trust-building tactics — but can serve any business purpose such as onboarding new customers, training employees internally, and more.

Webinars are a great format for businesses because of the ability to provide high-quality personalized experiences at scale: hundreds or thousands of people can register and attend the webinar live. They are much more scalable than in-person events and a lot easier to organize. No need to pay for a venue, flights, hotels — a webinar platform and a laptop are enough.

Another bonus to webinars is that they create tons of content the business can use to keep engaging and educating their audience even after the live webinar is done. Notably, this can be done by using on-demand or by repurposing the webinar (more on that later).

How Does a Webinar Work?

Webinars can be accessed live, or made available on-demand.

There are 3 main parts to hosting a webinar:

Using a webinar platform, someone will create the webinar. They will set a date, time, give it a name & description. Most tools will automatically create a registration page, so people can sign up for your webinar and access the content.
The host is the person in charge of running (and sometimes moderating) the webinar: they make sure your webinar's content is engaging, interactive, and full of relevant value to the business' audience. They will invite guest speakers, write the webinar script, host Q&A sessions, and ensure the session is on-pace — all this to make your session as informative and interactive as possible.
Viewers can register to an upcoming webinar on the dedicated landing page. They will get an invitation in their calendar and reminder emails before the session goes live.

By showing up when the session live, attendees can interact with the hosts, guests, and other attendees through the chat, or use other interactive features such as Q&A or polls.

Attendees can also access the webinar's replay on-demand to watch back their favorite moments or share it with their colleagues.

What are the Benefits of Hosting Webinars?

Now that you understand these 3 main parts of hosting a webinar, let's look into why you should consider hosting a webinar of your own.

These are the main reasons you should be hosting webinars:

Establish your Expertise

The #1 reason you want to be hosting webinars is to show your audience that you have expertise about a specific topic — webinars are a great element to add to your demand generation strategy. You want to establish yourself as an authority in your market and be the go-to source for information about your industry.

Webinars are a great format to not only show that you have expertise about specific problems your audience are facing, but also show that you have a solution. Once you build this trusting relationship with actors in your industry, you will be top-of-mind and the go-to solution for anyone facing this issue.

Showcase your Solution

Once you've established this preliminary trust with your audience, webinars are also a great way of showing your product to a group of interested people.

Product demo webinars are the opportunity to have one of your product experts show the main features of your product, how they fit together to solve the problems mentioned previously, making sure that prospects understand the value of your product.

But these webinars aren't limited to potential clients, product demo webinars can be used to educate current customers, inform users of new feature releases, or even used as training sessions for more complex features.

The use of interactive features during these webinars make for a better viewing experience: polls allow the host to gather information about the audience and Q&As allow the product expert to take chat messages and answer them in real-time.

Create Valuable Content

All your webinar content should be recorded, and if your webinar platform does not automatically record your webinars: choose one that does.

How often do you get to have an industry expert agree to a 1-hour interview where they will share their knowledge, anecdotes, personal experiences, and answer questions? Let me guess, not very often. But — invite them to a webinar — and they might just say yes.

Webinars are a goldmine for content. They make for great Hub content in the Hub and Spoke model. An hour-long webinar can easily be repurposed into 4-5 short clips, a blog article, a newsletter, 4-5 social posts, an FAQ, and more! With the right tools and techniques (and a little AI), you can easily extract 10+ pieces of content from each webinar.

All of these shorter pieces of content can be used to keep driving more people to your webinar replay: increasing engagement and building out your lead list.

High-Quality Lead Generation

Marketers generally agree to say that webinar lead generation results in some of the highest quality leads.

You will get information about every person who registers to your webinar: their name, email — you can even ask for their company name or phone number. All these registrants can be added to your list of audience members (using integrations or CSV exports).

Not only do you get information about these people, but you also have pre-qualified them: you know they are interested in the topic of the webinar. And if they show up, that's an even stronger signal that they are interested.

The best webinar platforms will provide you with detailed webinar analytics such as whether they attended the session live, if they watched the replay, and how long they watched (watch time). You can also get information about engagement: chat messages sent, poll answers, etc.

All this information makes it easy to outreach these warm leads, who are interested in your niche, product, or industry — with relevant messaging.

Support Marketing Team's Efforts

Marketing is all about engaging with your audience, prospects, and customers — and webinars can support efforts all through the funnel.

91% of B2B professionals say webinars are their preferred type of content. Paired with the 1-to-many aspect of webinars, this makes them a no-brainer for any marketing team.

Modern webinar platforms help marketers build thought-leadership through innovative and entertaining experiences, while helping generate a ton of value for content teams to redistribute unique and authentic content through different formats.

Increase Brand Awareness

Most businesses struggle with getting their brand out there, and webinars can be a powerful solution to this predicament.

Running branded webinars allows you to associate the authority and trust of the content directly with your brand. This will increase brand awareness and recognition for relevant people in your industry.

However, this can also be a double-edged sword. Make sure your content is on-brand, up to par with your brand's expectations, or you might disappoint your audience and create a negative brand experience.

Customer Education and Onboarding

Closing a new customer might be considered the "hard part" but the job isn't done until the customer is up & running and successful with your product.

Customer onboarding webinars are an excellent way of helping your customer success reps engage with new (and existing) customers. They can guide them through the more difficult features towards your products "aha-moment".

Creating an interactive (and fun) experience for client onboarding will not only help with information recall, but also positively impact the way they see your product and brand — increasing word-of-mouth and retention in the long run.

You can also embed the webinar on your website (or in your product) to make it available on-demand for all your users.

Improve Internal Communication and Training

We've talked a lot about how webinars can help you communicate and build trust with the outside world. But as organizations scale and teams get bigger, webinars can be used to improve communication between and amongst teams (and this is particularly true with the rise of remote work).

Webinars are a much more efficient way of communicating than 1:1 training or onboarding sessions, while providing a fun and human-centric experience. Would you rather watch a video of someone or read a long piece of text? I know what I'd prefer.

Onboarding and training webinars can also be used on-demand increasing capabilities and reducing ramp time for new employees.

Types of Webinars

There are tons of different webinar types and formats, all with different and unique purposes and advantages. Make sure you pick the right format depending on your webinar's goal.

Here are a few of the most common webinar formats and content types:

Webinar Formats

Live Webinar

Live webinars are presentations, workshops, panel discussions, or other formats that take place in real-time and are broadcast to an audience. These are the most engaging, authentic, and entertaining formats as the audience can interact with the host, guest, and impact the rest of the webinar with questions or poll answers.

On-demand Webinars

On-demand webinars are usually replays of webinars that viewers can access at any time. They help businesses increase the ROI of their webinars by extending the life of a webinar past the live, so it can keep generating leads, building thought leadership, and contributing to revenue.

Paid Webinars

Some businesses run paid webinars instead of giving away their expertise for free — some businesses are even entirely built around this model. The registration page includes a payment gateway (using Stripe for example) so attendees can pay for their seat to access the webinar's content.

Paid webinars can be live or on-demand.

Recurring Webinars

Recurring webinars are online events or webinars that are scheduled to occur at predetermined intervals. It is common that you find events or webinars to take place daily, weekly or monthly. In most cases, these webinars or events follow a consistent format.

These webinars can cover a wide variety of topics: product demos, onboarding sessions, training sessions, or others.

Evergreen Webinars

Evergreen webinars are timeless on-demand webinars. They are always relevant, no matter when they were made. Topics tied to current news, statistics, trends, or reports are unsuitable, as their relevance is fleeting and likely to evolve shortly. Evergreen webinars are best when they include content that maintains its value over time.

Webinar Content Types

Once you have decided on your format you can decide what kind of content you're going to put in your webinar:

Live video

Showing live video during your webinar is a great way to build trust with your audience. In an age of AI and fake content, live video is pretty much impossible to fake. Make sure you have a nice, tidy background and turn your camera on to show the "human side" of your business.

Slideshow

Presenting a slideshow is a great way to structure your webinar and provide some supporting visuals to help educate your audience on the topic. Make sure you don't have too many slides or too much text on them or you might lose your audience.

Screen Sharing

Probably the most common webinar content type, screen sharing is very versatile and gives you control over what you want to show during your webinar. For example, if you run a product demo you can share you screen to walk your audience through the tool step-by-step while providing commentary. This can also be useful for onboarding sessions, as audience members will be able to follow along and see where you are clicking.

Webinar chat

The webinar chat is the #1 way of creating a bidirectional interaction with the audience and will be the main way they will have of communicating with the moderator, host, or guest speakers.

Pre-recorded Video

Sometimes a set of slides or a screen share isn't going to cut it — maybe what you need to show is too complicated or it needs some editing (blurring out information for example). For these cases, using a pre-recorded video as an asset during your webinar can be a great solution.

Polls

Running a live poll during your webinar is a great way to learn more about your audience. Data suggests the best webinar hosts run a poll every 30 minutes, or on average 2 per hour webinar. You can use polls to ask the audience how they're feeling, what other topics they're interested in, or even asking them if they'd be interested in a demo of your product.

How to Plan a Successful Webinar

There's a lot that goes into planning a successful webinar, and that can turn it into quite the stressful ordeal. But don't worry, we've got you covered.

We'll cover how to create the backbone of your webinar — A-Z:

Identify your target audience
Choose a webinar topic that will resonate with them
Watch other webinars about similar topics
Define your goals and objectives
Pick your webinar format
Choose a webinar platform
Assign roles to your team
Invite your guest speakers
Create your webinar's assets
Create an action plan

1. Define your objective and goals

Why do you want to run a webinar? What's the purpose of the webinar going to be?

Lead generation for your sales team? Onboarding new customers? Establish your company as a thought-leader in your industry? Interveiw subject matter experts?

Webinars can serve pretty much any purpose, so you have to be very clear about it before getting started.

2. Identify your target audience

Identifying your target audience means figuring out:

Who they are
What they're interested in
Where they spend their time

Once this step is done, it will be infinitely easier to determine everything else that you need to know about your webinar:

3. Choose a webinar topic that will resonate with them

Now that you know who you are going to talk to, it should be a lot easier to decide what the webinar topic is going to be. Once your topic and audience are defined, the next step is webinar hosting itself, which covers everything from technical setup to live facilitation and post-event follow-up . Starting from the webinar goals and objectives, and taking into account information about your target audience, what information can you share with them that they might be interested in?

4. Watch other webinars about similar topics

So you know why you're running the webinar, who the webinar is for, and you have an idea of what the webinar is going to be about. Now it's time to look for some inspiration.

5. Pick your webinar format and content type

6. Choose a webinar platform

Choosing the best webinar platform for your needs is an important part of running a webinar and can impact how successful your webinar is. Modern platforms will make your content feel more professional and will leave a lasting impression on your audience.

7. Assign roles to your team

Webinars are a team sport — they're pretty much impossible to run on your own.

8. Invite your guest speakers

The speakers (just like the host) are one of the most important parts of a webinar as they set the tone but also bring their expertise to the webinar.

9. Create your webinar's assets

We're almost there. Now we need to start preparing the content. This section will depend a lot on the type of webinar you are hosting, but make sure you have at least these:

Webinar title

The webinar title is probably the most important asset for your webinar, as most people will decide solely from the webinar title if they will register or not to your webinar.

10. Create an action plan

Even before the webinar starts it's worth considering the post-webinar workflow.

How to Run a Webinar: Step-by-Step Guide

So you've just finished planning your webinar, not it's time to actually create the webinar, schedule it in your webinar tool, and run it.

1. Decide on a date and time

The first step to running your webinar is to finalize the date & time of your webinar. Discuss with your team and guest and find a time that works for everyone (and block it in their calendars).

2. Create a registration page and form

Now you've decided on a date & time it's time to actually create the webinar in your webinar software.

3. Set up emails

Registration confirmation emails are sent as soon as someone registers to your webinar. Confirmation emails should contain a calendar invitation, making it easy for registrants to add it to their calendar.

4. Share assets with speakers

Your speaker should have access to all the assets for the webinar: name, cover image, presentation, short description, personal link, etc.

5. Promote your webinar

Webinar invitation emails

Data suggests that webinar invitation emails are still the #1 channel for driving webinar registrants.

6. Practice using your webinar tool

Make sure you practice using your webinar tool, especially if it's the first webinar you run with it!

7. Test your equipment

While you practice using the webinar tool, you can also test your webcam and mic. Make sure everyone's camera and microphone are being picked up, that there are no quality issues, and look into improving someone's setup if necessary.

Best Practices to Make a Webinar Engaging

Running a webinar (as you've seen already throughout this article) is a lot of work. But if there are 2 aspects where you need to focus 80% of your energy on it's: creating good content & engaging your audience.

Repurposing your Webinar to Increase ROI

You spent all this time creating and hosting this webinar, you can't just let it die after the live.

What Equipment do you Need for a Webinar?

Webinars are a very cost-effective marketing tactic because you can start running they with very little initial investment.

All you need to host a webinar is:

Stable and high-speed internet connection
Reliable and modern webinar platform
A webcam or external camera (you can use your phone and Camo for a very high-quality camera you already own).
A microphone (and ideally a headset to avoid any echo)

Key Webinar Takeaways

Webinars are an amazing communication channel for businesses of any size — allowing them to reach infinitely large audiences while creating engaging and powerful experiences.

If you follow all the steps of this guide and follow the relevant links, we're sure you'll put on an amazing show for your audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to participate in a webinar?

As a viewers, participating in a webinar is as easy as first registering through the form on the registration page. You can then add the webinar to your calendar with the link to access the live.

Can they see you during a webinar?

Webinars are view-only for attendees, meaning attendees cannot see or hear each other, and the host cannot see or hear attendees either.

What is the best webinar platform?

Contrast helps you run your webinars in an easy to-use platform.