Can I Use AI To Make Webinars Better?

Let's see if AI can make the human parts of webinars even more interesting and engaging.

Ah, webinars. For me, webinars are still proving to be an impactful marketing strategy, so I’m not here to debate whether or not we should be doing webinars. I’m here to see if this logistic-heavy marketing strategy can become a bit lighter with the help of AI.

The Challenge: Reducing the Logistical Effort for Webinars While Making Them Better

I have a real love/hate relationship with webinars. My first marketing job was at a company that relied heavily on inbound leads, so we did a weekly webinar series. In order to make that feasible, the webinars were with consultants/experts in the field who were happy to take on the workload of preparing their own presentation and often were happy to just engage in a casual conversation without too much prep time.

Fast forward a few years, and I discovered that for most other companies, webinars are more polished and require more work. Not every field has a large repository of consultants to pull from for a webinar. That means the majority of the work falls on marketing now. So we have to:

• Generate the idea

• Source panelists/experts

• Interview/prep the panelists

• Write the headline/landing page copy

• Draft promotion materials (emails, social media posts, etc.)

• Create deck/assets that will be used during the webinar

• Create a run-of-show outline for the moderator and panelists to be able to follow

• And probably more that I’m not thinking of in this moment 🫠

The payoff for a good webinar is absolutely worth it, but it takes a lot of little details coming together just right for that one-hour conversation to lead to that payoff. Identifying, reaching out to, and prepping panelists is an inherently human task that I don’t plan to outsource to AI anytime soon, but as I’m prepping for my Q3 webinar, I wanted to see what little things could be taken off my plate or improved with AI.

The Solution: Having AI Help with the Little Things

For this upcoming webinar, I used AI in two areas: messaging/copy for the webinar and preparing the webinar content itself.

Using AI for a Snappy Headline and Landing Page for the Webinar

This may be very specific to me, but when doing outreach to find panelists for a webinar I put together a full document that outlines the key details of the webinar. I share this because in a prior post of mine I explored how AI-resource docs can help with prompting, and I realized this document was a ready-made resource for AI prompting. How convenient!

While I love the research and messaging part of my job, I’m not always as good at putting together that attention-grabbing, clever headline. With my resource document though, I can have AI start the brainstorming for me with the following prompt:

Attached is a summary for an upcoming webinar that [company] is planning for [specific audience]. Based on the planned content for the webinar, please give me 5 webinar title options that would appeal to our audience and inspire them to register for the event.

From there, I prompted it to help me get the landing page copy started:

Based on the summary of the webinar and this title - [title] - draft landing page copy that will speak directly to the pain points [audience] feels in this area. The landing page should be two short paragraphs of summary and three bullet points of the actionable takeaways that attendees will get. For reference, the landing page should have the tone and formatting of the following - [link to a landing page for a prior webinar].

Every time I do anything like this, I always refine and tweak the copy. But now instead of just staring at a blank page and trying to force myself to be clever, I can let AI get me at least halfway there in just a few seconds.

Using AI to Prepare the Webinar Content

Typically I treat webinars as a hybrid between the interview style that I saw in my first job and the more polished versions I’ve seen since. The panelists that I get to work with are often customers and rarely are they public speaking pros. That means they prefer to start the webinar with more formal slides as they settle in before moving into more informal discussion time.

I aim for the following outline for my webinars:

• 5 minute intro to panelists/topic

• 10 minutes for panelist #1 to go over their area of expertise

• 10 minutes for panelist #2 to go over their area of expertise

• 15 minutes for planned discussion questions for the panelists

• 10 minutes for audience Q&A time

• 10 minutes leeway because nothing ever goes according to plan (and more audience Q&A is never bad if things actually do go according to plan!)

So far, building out the slide deck is still a manual process, (however, if anyone has recommendations/tips on using AI for branded decks, PLEASE let me know), but one thing I agonize about is what are the best questions to tee up for the panelists.

Webinars are only useful if they are actually addressing topics/problems/pain points that are relatable for your audience. As a product marketer, I have a pretty good understanding of my audience, but that blank page syndrome still hits hard. To make it easier, I let AI do the first round of heavy lifting with this:

Attached is the first draft of a webinar presentation. Based on the content there, what are the top 15 questions that [audience] may want the panelists to discuss related to the topic?

With that list, I can pull out the three that I want to be sure the panelists discuss and put the rest of them in a document as a back-up resource for our moderator if attendees aren’t participating as much as we expected!

The Results: What Worked and What Didn’t

What Worked?

These use cases aren’t saving me hours of time, but they are saving me quite a bit of brain power. Webinars take a lot of work, and I’d rather put my effort towards identifying important topics, relevant panelists, and amplifying the human element of the conversation.

What Didn’t Work?

None of these results were ready for just a copy/paste. For me, I wasn’t looking for just a copy/paste solution, but rather I needed a brainstorming partner that could help things move along more quickly.

But there were a few things I noticed that could help improve output next time:

• AI is generic unless you push it to not be. That’s not news, but when it comes to a punchy headline for a webinar, I had to prompt it back a bit to be more directly relevant to the audience. The more I doubled down on the audience, the better the results were.

• AI assumed that the webinar would be mostly about our product in the first draft of discussion questions even though I didn’t say anything about our product. My webinars are 95% panelists talking about how they solve problems and 5% about how our solution was a key tool for them. I ended up just weeding out the product-related questions on my own, but in the future I will need to be more specific in that prompt.

Conclusion

Webinars will likely remain a logistics-heavy marketing channel, and that's okay. The human elements, such as building relationships with panelists, understanding your audience's real pain points, and facilitating authentic conversations, can't and shouldn't be automated away.

But AI can be your brainstorming partner for the smaller creative hurdles that slow you down. Whether it's breaking through headline writer's block or generating that first round of discussion questions, AI helps you move from blank page to first draft faster.

The key is approaching AI as a brainstorming partner, not a replacement. Set clear expectations about your audience and goals, be prepared to refine the output, and focus AI's help on the tasks that drain your creative energy rather than the ones that define your expertise.

What's your experience been with AI in content marketing? I'd love to hear what's working (or not working) for you!