Top 10 mistakes to avoid when hosting Medical Device webinars in 2023

Are you interested in running healthcare webinars but not quite sure where to start? Maybe you’re already up and running with your webinars, but not getting the results you had expected.

Did you know that for B2B webinars, on average, 73% of the total attendees become qualified leads?

Well, we’re going to help you run webinars that not only get huge numbers of registrations but also convert to give you lots of leads to follow up on. We’re going to let you in on the top mistakes that people make when running webinars in the healthcare industry.

• Starting promotion too late
• Hosting the webinar at the wrong time
• Not choosing the right topic to focus on
• Gathering a weak panel
• Not running technical checks
• Not having a back-up plan
• Lack of interactive elements
• Being over-promotional
• Running over
• Juggling too many things at once

Starting promotion too late

To maximise attendance at your webinar, you need to make sure you start promoting it nice and early. People will probably need to hear about it a few times before taking the plunge and registering so you’ll need at least 3 weeks for the best chance at success.

Promotion should include different platforms, including social media and email. If you want to learn more about promoting your webinar, head over to our article on maximising Medical Device webinar attendance.

Hosting the webinar at the wrong time

When planning your webinar, your instinct may be to host it during the working day because it is when you’ll be working, but this doesn’t take your audience into consideration.

Not choosing the right topic to focus on

Unfortunately, what’s interesting to you may not be as interesting to your audience. If you decide to host a webinar on a topic that you think people should care about, you’ll probably struggle to gather registrations.

Instead, when choosing a healthcare webinar topic, you need to focus on something that your audience already cares about – this means knowing your audience well. In healthcare, this can often be a topic like ‘challenges cases’ or ‘new surgical techniques’.

Gathering a weak panel

To gather a strong panel, you preferably need to find Key Opinion Leaders who are well-known in the industry, as they will help to extend your reach and build interest for your healthcare webinar.

More importantly, your panel should be diverse. This means presenting from different points of view for an engaging conversation that is truly valuable for your attendees.

If your panel is made up of people in similar roles, discussing similar topics, you’ll likely find that engagement in your webinar is significantly reduced. Opposing views can often be a real audience pleaser.

You should also choose a moderator for your session. They should be an industry expert and should be confident in asking questions and steering the conversation.

They can provide input themselves but are mainly there to keep the webinar on topic and manage elements like Q&As and polls.

Not running technical checks

When it comes to webinars, there’s nothing worse than technical issues. The webinar could be perfect in all other ways, but bad audio or visual quality, disjointed screen-sharing and a dodgy internet connection can all leave a very sour taste in the mouth of viewers.

Always ask your panellists to join the webinar call at least 30 minutes before going live, so that you can check that their mics and cameras are working well and that they’re comfortable sharing their screens (if needed). You can also use this time to run them through how everything will work.

The result is a polished, professional webinar that seems completely seamless to the viewers. They’re more likely to engage in the webinar and reach out to your company afterwards.

Not having a back-up plan

Unfortunately, a stable Wi-Fi connection is not always a guarantee, and if the internet cuts out for the host, the whole webinar goes down. All those weeks of planning are washed away, and you’re left with many disappointed registrants.

That’s why having a backup plan in place is critical. You should always have a co-host in a different location from you, who is ready to take over if things go wrong. The chances of both of your internet connections failing are pretty slim.

Lack of interactive elements

Healthcare webinars are not just about engaging in conversation. Although that is the most important element, it’s not always enough to keep your viewers interested. It’s too easy for them to zone out and log off, deciding to watch the recording later (and then forgetting to do it).

When you have interactive elements, it acts as an incentive for your viewers to stay on the live version. Q&A sessions and polls give people the chance to get involved and encourage the conversation down a route that more specifically interests them.

A top tip for Q&A sessions is to have a few questions pre-prepared, so people feel comfortable getting involved. You can find more top tips in our webinar top tips article.

Being over-promotional

Being over-promotional doesn’t mean going overboard on promoting the webinar, it means being over-promotional of the companies involved. Nowadays, people can see right through biased content.

If the content of the webinar is all directed at selling products or services, viewers will very quickly get bored, or annoyed. People don’t tend to join webinars to hear a sales pitch, instead, they are looking for some genuinely valuable information.

Promotion can actually hurt your company, rather than help it in this case. Although healthcare webinars are essentially a marketing tool, you should be selling yourself by showing the level of knowledge you possess, rather than the benefits that working with you offers.

Running over

Even if your webinar is going extremely well, the conversation is flowing and some really interesting points are being made, you still shouldn’t let your webinar run too far over.

We have found that after an hour, webinar attendance drops dramatically, simply because people have only planned an hour into their diary. It also shows a lack of respect for both panellists and attendees, who have taken time out of their day to be there. So, set a time frame and try your best to stick to it!

Not following up

Even if your healthcare webinar was a roaring success, not having a follow-up plan afterwards can mean a huge opportunity is missed. You need to remind those who attended about the great session and get in front of those who missed it.

You can release a full recording of the webinar, which can be sent out to your mailing list. You can also repurpose your webinar, by editing it down into short clips to share on social media. Short clips can gain a large amount of interest as they are so quick and easy to digest but often have a big impact.

Make sure you have a plan in place to capitalise on the webinar – it can become a full marketing campaign rather than a one-off session. For instance, at the end of your webinar is the perfect time to announce your next webinar and begin promotion that way.

Juggling too many things at once

Webinars are a lot of work, as you can probably tell. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a huge explosion of webinars, you could get away with a lower-quality webinar. Nowadays, that is not the case.

To take time out of their busy days, people expect quality, and quality takes time, effort and experience. Successful webinars require different skills in different areas and trying to juggle all the activities involved can be overwhelming.

Depending on your resources, it may be worth working with a freelancer or agency to help things run smoothly.

A freelancer can help you with the design elements of your webinar, as well as coming up with a promotion strategy for you – While this is extremely helpful, they won’t be able to help run the webinar and you will probably have to host it on your own platform.

An agency should be able to manage everything for you, from the speakers and pre-promotion, all the way through to running the webinar and post-promotion. Additionally, Medical Device webinar costs can be quite reasonable.

It completely depends on the resources and budget at your disposal.

Healthcare webinars at Podymos

We hope you found this article valuable and feel comfortable now to go off and host your own webinars, but if you would like us to support you, fill in the contact form below and we will get back to you.

At Podymos, we specialise in Medical Device marketing. We’re experts in many areas of Medical Device advertising and promotion, but we particularly have a lot of experience when it comes to running healthcare webinars.