What is a webinar? Basically, it’s an online seminar – complete with a host, presentation and audience, just like an offline seminar. Why should your business hold its own webinar? Doing so could help your business to build its brand, position itself as authoritative in its field and generate abundant leads.
Now, for what date and time should you schedule your webinar? The answer to this question is surprisingly complex, but in-depth research has contributed towards somewhat simplifying the subject.
What audience do you want to attract?
If you are considering holding a webinar in the first place, it could be because COVID-19 restrictions would, for the time being, render an in-person seminar impractical. If you are indeed in this situation, then your webinar will probably be catering for a local audience.
This could make it easier for you to settle on a date and time for the webinar, since you probably already have a good idea of when your target audience would be available to see it. However, many pages of the rulebook would be torn up if your webinar is intended to reach an international audience instead.
That’s because you would have time zones to think about. Choosing a time for your webinar in this case could be a tricky balancing act, as time zones can differ significantly even within countries.
What time would attract the most registrants?
The webinar expert Daniel Waas has participated in research investigating this subject. After studying a random set of 350,891 webinars hosted in 2016, Waas and his team found that, of these webinars, those scheduled for 11am attracted the highest percentage – 16.1% – of sign-ups.
Of course, you might wonder how much the number of registrants for your webinar really matters if relatively few of those people proceed to attend the event. Search Engine Journal concedes that 8.78% of webinars have 50 or fewer attendees.
Waas argues that “you’re looking to drive maximum awareness, so a sign-up is valuable regardless of whether that person does or does not attend.” Still, if you want to know what date and time would be the most promising for garnering the highest possible attendance rate, good news: Waas has researched this topic, too…
Choose the day carefully, too
The researchers found, through analysing a representative set of 250,000 webinar sessions run in 2018, that those webinar start times attracting the highest proportions of total attendees were 10am and 11am. The respective percentages for these were 29% and 24%.
Trailing in a distant third place was 9am, with the percentage for that being 12%. Overall, though, what would be the best day for you to run a webinar? Together, the 2016 and 2018 data suggests that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday would be the strongest candidates.
All the same, Waas acknowledges that it’d be worth you experimenting to see what days and times seem to work best for your webinars. It’s a good incentive for you to invest in an online webinar platform that would let you easily hold webinars regularly.
