What is a Webinar and How Do Webinars Work?

Webinars are a critical tool for any B2B marketer today. They engage attendees and prospects, deliver interactive experiences and engagement insights, and provide teams with a data-rich resource that can be repurposed and hyper-personalized thanks to AI-powered content generation. In fact, according to a HubSpot report, between 2025 and 2026, there was nearly 20% growth in the number of organizations integrating webinars into their marketing plans.

But what is a webinar, and how does it work?

The term “webinar” is a portmanteau of “web” and “seminar.” As such, we can define a webinar as a digital tool facilitating seminars and similar events over the web or the internet. These virtual events typically include live audio and video elements as well as interactive webinar features to drive audience engagement.

Crucially, webinars are not meeting tools. While they can incorporate meeting elements, like breakout rooms, webinars are not designed for real-time video collaboration, one-on-one communication, or internal meetings. They’re also distinct from traditional streaming media, which often lacks attendee engagement or interactivity.

Behind even the most basic webinar, there’s a lot happening. When it comes to world-class solutions like the ON24 platform’s webinar capability, the technology, combined with professional production capabilities, helps make the process of planning, creating, and delivering webinar content.

What Is a Webinar?

As noted, a webinar is an interactive, web-based event where a speaker (or multiple speakers) delivers a presentation to an audience. This is key: webinars relay information from an individual (or a small group of experts) to an audience. This information transfer is one-way.

However, there are some nuances. For example, a simple video essay can do exactly what we just described: relay information in a one-way manner over the internet via audio or video. What makes a webinar different — and what builds upon our definition — is the ability to provide branded, interactive, and dynamic experiences.

Here’s what we mean:

Branded – Webinars represent a company’s brand to customers and prospects by their very nature. As such, an ideal webinar solution would empower companies to fully reflect company colors, logos, and typography for an engaging on-brand experience.

Interactive – While webinars are primarily one-way information transfers (i.e., speakers sharing information with an audience), that doesn’t mean audiences cannot interact with the experience or the speakers. Webinars can provide audiences with Q&A, polls, surveys, resource downloads, CTAs, chatboxes, and many other engagement tools to enhance engagement and build a relationship between an attendee and a brand.

Dynamic – Today’s webinars are dynamic, responsive to attendee firmographics, past interactions, and even live discussions. For example, modern webinar solutions can dynamically display an attendee’s logo, provide resources related to a previous digital engagement, or enable speakers to push surveys, polls, screen share, or more in response to audience interest.

So, then, a webinar is a web-based event where a speaker (or multiple speakers) delivers a branded, interactive, and dynamic experience to an audience.

Parallel to our definition, but just as important, are the operational terms influencing a modern webinar. These include first-party data collection, integration, and asynchronous delivery (the latter simply asks whether your audience webinar is live, on-demand, or simulive).

How Does a Webinar Work?

Webinars are an integral part of modern corporate strategy due to the four factors:

1. 1. They offer branded experiences
   2. They can easily scale in size from small breakouts to massive keynote presentations
   3. They collect first-party data, which can be used to provide audience insights, accelerate pipeline, and provide marketers with tools necessary to hyper-personalize digital experiences.
   4. They can easily integrate within an organization’s tech stack. Webinar platforms are adept at sharing information with MAPS and CRMs for easier automation and more.

From educationally inclined webinars to launching new products, they are considered one of the most effective and cost-effective methods to give out one’s message to target audiences all over the world. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2026 B2B Content Marketing Trends Report, 52% of B2B marketers say speaking events and webinars are among the most effective channels for distributing thought leadership content. 

A webinar typically includes a host, a producer, and attendees. With the right webinar tools, hosts can present the content in real time or through pre-recorded webinars. Some webinars are simple recordings, while others are highly interactive. This flexibility makes webinars perfect for training and user onboarding, among other formats.

There are two audiences to consider when we ask the question “How does a Webinar Work?” These are 1) the audiences attending a webinar and 2) the organizations and teams producing a webinar. Let’s start with the first and work through the second.

How Does a Webinar Work for an Attendee?

For attendees, a webinar is a fairly simple event that can generate a lot of benefits. Still, there are roughly four stages throughout an attendee’s relationship with a given webinar event. These are:

1. 1. Receive a promotion — Most of the time, an attendee will receive a message engaging them on an emotional level, like how they can be better within their career, how they gain insights into their industry, or how they can solve a pain point relevant to their organization. Most of the time, these messages will reach them through email, though marketing teams should have a healthy mix of emails, paid ads/social, and organic social to ensure they’re engaging with the desired audience on the right channel.
   2. Register — All an attendee has to do (once they receive a relevant promotional message) is register for the event by clicking on the message’s link/CTA and filling out a form. After registering, audiences should receive a message containing the event’s details. These details should include the date and time of the event, a link to the event itself, and, optimally, an invite they can place on their work calendar as a reminder.
      
   3. Joining — After step two, all an attendee needs to do is click on the link at the appointed time to log into the webinar.
   4. Engaging — Attendee engagement takes place both during and after a webinar (sometimes even before!). When an attendee joins a webinar, they should be given the option to engage with the event and brand through embedded tools (called engagement tools) like polls, surveys, Q&A, chat, downloadable resources, and more.
      
      Engagement here is a two-way effort. Webinar producers need to provide audiences with the opportunity to engage in the first place, and audiences themselves need to have the desire to interact with the event. Webinar teams can coax engagement through tactics like polls, resources, and CTAs, but remember that webinar engagement is ultimately a form of audience self-selection; they will engage with you if they want to build that relationship.

How Does a Webinar Work for an Organization?

For brands, webinars can be both simple and complex. Fortunately, we have a lot of resources to make your webinar journey an easy one. We’ll start with the basics here.

1. Planning — All webinars operate off of a plan. You plan to have X registrations and Y attendees, which will, hopefully, generate Z pipeline. You plan to share a unique insight that will resonate with a large audience, or you plan to produce a unique demo experience for a high-value, late-stage buying committee.
   
   The point is, all webinars have intention. To draw out and understand the intention you need to create, sit down with key stakeholders across your organization. These stakeholders should help you understand what content will resonate with key audiences, what pain points customers and/or prospects are feeling right now, and what cohorts (or segments) you can create within this audience to better personalize your experiences.
   
   Once you have an understanding of the audiences you’re pursuing (and the webinar format you’re using), you can start fleshing out your overall webinar strategy. This should obviously include a promotional plan, but don’t forget the necessary accouterments that enhance experiences and drive webinar ROI. These include on-demand strategies and promotion, post-event content creation, and segmentation and nurturing, among others.
2. Creating — A webinar’s primary medium is going to be the webinar console; the screen attendees see and interact with during your event. Work closely with designers to ensure your webinar offers the best reflection of your brand or campaign theme. Remember to keep aspect ratios and console layouts in mind as well. Brand colors and logos aren’t the only consideration, however. Content teams will also need to write content (like e-books or blogs) offering insights unique to your brand. They will also need to create/review social media, email, and general promotional content to ensure tone consistency across channels.
3. Promotion — Once your plan and content are in place, begin execution. Work with your marketing operations team to send emails and monitor performance. Check in with them once a week to assess performance and make any necessary adjustments to copy or cadence. The same goes for social media and any paid promotions you’re putting behind your webinar.
4. Practice — Schedule a webinar practice run as promotions are running. Practice runs help teams work out any flaws in your webinar’s flow, correct technical issues, and help any guests familiarize themselves with your webinar solution’s backend interface.
5. Run the webinar — You’ve planned, promoted, and practiced. Now, it’s time to run the event. If you’re live, relax, have fun, and remember to engage with attendees.
6. Engage — Speaking of. All webinars should have interactive elements built into their structure. This can be as simple as a post-webinar survey or as complex as a pushed poll and/or quiz. Regardless, make sure your host highlights these engagement opportunities at the beginning of your event and as your webinar producer pushes them to the live audience.
   
   Remember: by driving more webinar engagement, you drive more first-party data insights and better potential webinar ROI.
7. Implement Your On-Demand Strategy — Your on-demand strategy should start as soon as the webinar is over. Often, this will involve a “thank you for attending” or “sorry you missed us” email sent to attendees and registrants. This send should include a link to the on-demand recording that can be accessed at any time.
   
   Depending on engagement, you can further segment your audience and offer more personalized messaging. For example, you can send live demo invites to attendees who expressed interest in your solution, offer additional downloads based on an attendee’s familiarity with your brand (e.g., a how-to workbook for a new customer vs an in-depth product guide for beta testers), or provide links to similar webinars they may be interested in.
8. Follow-up — Simultaneously, you should work with your sales team to follow up with audiences and high-value attendees. If, for example, a high-value prospect attends a webinar, work with your reps to build out a hyper-personalized experience that integrates their brand into webinar or content hub experiences, addresses their organization by name, and provides them with content relevant to their industry or organization.
9. Repurpose — No webinar is ever one-and-done. The content you create for this event can — and should! — be reused and repurposed to target other audiences. For example, with generative AI, one webinar can produce an e-book, a summary follow-up email, blogs, social media clips, transcripts, and much more.
   
   Repurposing requires purpose, however. Content generated from a webinar should be targeted to a specific segment, like prospects or even a different region. Content regeneration should always be guided by your overall webinar program strategy.

Webinar Basics — How to Create a Webinar

The best webinar experiences usually incorporate these six basic steps:

1. 1. Define the audience and attendee journey (i.e., what the main call to action/conversion point will be for a defined cohort).
   2. Brainstorm relevant topics and plan post-event content nurtures
   3. Create content from slides to promotional emails to webinar scripts
   4. Practice material with teams, guests, and producers
   5. Analyze with event analytics to improve future webinars
   6. Implement an on-demand strategy

How to Prepare Webinar Content

Preparing webinar content requires a keen understanding of your ideal customer profile and your desired audience. Everything, from your webinar script to the downloadable resources you make available for your follow-up nurture, depends on knowing who your content is for, what they are interested in, and what the next step is for them in the buying journey.

That said, webinar content isn’t confined to just a webinar. Marketing teams will need to develop content and strategies for:

• • Paid ads/social
  • Organic social
  • Promotional emails
  • Sales enablement (social and email)
  • Follow-up email nurtures
  • Organic/on-demand promotion

In addition to slides, scripts, promotional/follow-up blogs, downloadable content for the event, and much more.

The best way to prepare is to build a webinar marketing team consisting of Subject Matter Experts in each area where you’ll need copy and creative for your event.

When you have your team assembled, hold a kickoff meeting to discuss the overall goals of your event, the topics you’ll discuss, the format it’ll take place in, and how the event will contribute to your overall business objectives.

Once your kickoff meeting is over, work with copywriters to draft promotional content in line with your webinar’s messaging. You should also work with designers to stage webinar consoles and create slides in line with your brand guidelines.

A quick note about AI-powered webinar content here: while you can use AI to generate copy and creative, you should always have a professional review the outputs to ensure adherence to brand style .

Is a Webinar Always Live?

No! Webinars can be live, simulive, or on-demand. Each version has its own benefits to consider.

1. 1. Live – A live webinar offers organizations and attendees real-time or near real-time broadcast streams. A webinar host, for example, can immediately respond to a question made in a Q&A chat or pivot a conversation on the fly.
      
      Audiences can watch live webinars to gain access to the latest information, engage with a brand, participate in an event or community event, or get access to additional resources not available elsewhere. For marketing teams, live webinars provide an event for audiences to congregate around. They also provide the opportunity to reuse the live recording in a variety of formats, like social media clips or in an on-demand library.
   2. Simulive – Simulive is a webinar format combining pre-recorded webinar video with live audiences, who can then interact with the event as if it were live. Marketing teams can have a producer or moderator attend the event to respond to comments and questions to provide a more “live” feel.
      
      Simulive offers marketers the flexibility of being able to record, refine, and release on their terms, rather than having to sacrifice quality to accommodate a deadline. Alternatively, Sim-2-Live, a subset of simulive, provides teams with the ability to run pre-recorded video/audio before switching over to a live stream.
   3. On-demand – On-demand webinars are always-on webinar recordings that can be accessed at any time. They feature all of the engagement tools and interactivity of live and simulive webinars (although Q&A responses will not be live) that audiences expect.
      
      All live and simulive webinars can be turned into on-demand experiences. While on-demand webinars cannot ever be live, they can provide powerful and unique experiences of their own. For example, a marketing team can produce a series of on-demand “lessons” that can be organized into courses and can provide attendees with a continuing professional education certificate.

While there are many other webinar formats to consider, these three formats are the core pillars to build a webinar program on. Marketing teams will need to experiment with event mixes — between live, simulive, and on-demand webinars — to develop a webinar marketing program that drives true pipeline and webinar ROI.

Pre-Recorded Webinars and Hybrid Events

While live webinars provide immediate interaction, pre-recorded webinars let audiences consume information at their convenience. This flexibility is useful when webinars need to be viewed in different time zones, when consistency and quality need to be guaranteed, or when live attendance isn’t a strategic priority.

A hybrid event is a shared event that takes place in both digital and physical spaces. For example, a large in-person gathering, like a user conference, can be considered a hybrid event if it also provides a live broadcast of conference sessions and keynotes while also providing virtual attendees with shared digital spaces and engagement opportunities. These can include:

• • Breakout rooms
  • Digital expo halls
  • Digital demos
  • Q&A chat
  • Chat
  • Downloadable resources
  • Gamification

Hybrid events fill a niche space, combining both live webinars and live in-person events, and are a sophisticated tactic. To learn more about hybrid events, click here.

Webinar Best Practices and Benchmarks

When is the best time to start promoting webinars?

Historically, our benchmarks report found that most attendees register either the week before the webinar’s live date or two weeks in advance. Regardless, marketers should plan to start promotional cycles about a month before the event’s live date to ensure an optimal cadence.

What is the average registration-to-attendee conversion rate?

According to our 2026 Digital Engagement Benchmarks report, 60% of webinar registrants convert into attendees.

What’s the best day to send promotional emails?

Historically, the best days to send promotional emails are Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with most registrations taking place one to two weeks before the event. Your goals for email marketing should align with your marketing plans, ensuring that you engage both future attendees and those who missed out by offering access to session recordings.

How many attendees can I expect at my webinar?

The average number of webinar attendees is 239, according to our 2026 Webinar Benchmarks Report.

However, don’t let the average number of webinar attendees set your expectations or goals — in many ways, that figure can be a vanity metric. The number of registrants and audience members should align with your business and webinar program objectives. Put another way: 10 high-value attendees can be more valuable than an audience of 500.

How long should a webinar be?

Audiences engage with webinars for an average of 55 minutes. The length of a webinar, however, should be driven by your event’s overall goals and the content you’re trying to relay. For example, a brief educational lesson could take 20 minutes, whereas an industry panel discussion could easily take over an hour.

Making the Webinar Presenter Successful

Delivering a successful webinar presentation is a balance of skill and technology. Skill is an acquired trait, but ON24 webinar software provides the flexible and powerful tools necessary to make your webinar presentation successful.

Central to ON24 webinar production and management is PMXD. PMXD makes it easy to upload, modify, manage, and deliver presentations. In creating PMXD, we quickly discovered that great webinar presentations take more than a well-crafted presentation deck.

Most of our customers go into every webinar with at least two key roles:

1. The presenter, or host, who delivers the webinar content.
2. The producer, who handles all the behind-the-scenes work, like queuing video clips, managing guest speakers, and routing questions from webinar attendees.

We knew delivering live webinars can be stressful, so we helped the production team keep in touch with real-time chat and intuitive controls for controlling the webinar flow, pushing polls, and swapping out presentation content on the fly.

Webinar Tips for Presenters

Before the webinar

Webinars have a lot of moving parts, so preparation is essential. Once you have a topic and an audience in mind, outline a presentation and draft slides. As you build your deck, look for opportunities to drive audience engagement through polls, surveys, or Q&A.

Schedule a practice session with your finished deck, including anyone involved in the webinar, like presenters, producers, and guests. Practicing identifies weak points, helps familiarize guests with webinar technology, and lets you adjust for better flow.

During the webinar

Start your webinars by guiding attendees through both the webinar console and the engagement tools included in the event. This way, attendees know how to interact with your event should they want to when prompted.

Run through your presentation as you normally would, highlighting engagement opportunities (e.g., polls, surveys) as they arrive. If you’re running a Q&A session, your producer should select and prepare questions for the presenter to respond to.

After the webinar

Once your event concludes, follow up with on-demand webinar recordings for both live attendees and those who missed the event. Turn your live event into an on-demand webinar and email a link to your registrants and attendees within 48 hours of the event ending. Use powerful analytics tools to analyze attendee engagement and improve future events. Post-webinar activity can also include sharing blog posts, sending post-event surveys, or promoting the next online meeting to your wide audience.

Webinar Tips for Attendees

Before the webinar

As a webinar attendee, all you need to do is fill out a form to register for an event. Once registered, you should get an email with the details of the event, including a calendar invite.

Block out time on your work calendar and, on the day of the webinar, click the link to log in. Then, it’s just a matter of adjusting console windows as you see fit.

During the webinar

During the webinar, you’ll have the opportunity to interact with the host through engagement tools like Q&A, polls, surveys, certificates, and downloadable resources. To access or hide these tools, simply click on the corresponding icon on the bottom row of the webinar console.

Other than that, sit back, relax, and enjoy!

After the webinar

After the webinar ends, you should receive an email linking you to the on-demand version within a day or so. Click the link to enter the webinar to revisit the discussion.

Providing an Engaging Webinar Experience

Engagement is what makes ON24 webinar software stand apart.

When you’re asking people to stare at their computer screens for up to an hour, you have to give them something interesting to stare at. It helps if you can also give them something interesting to do.

Most webinar software these days includes basics like a place to submit questions or chat. But we don’t think that’s engaging enough. So, we’ve added popular interactive webinar tools like surveys, polls, downloadable assets, and integrated social media. We’ve also created more niche widgets like idea storming, knowledge testing and certification tools, and group chat.

But that isn’t where it ends. We also built a robust suite of integrations to make sure the data collected through all that interactivity is passed to your marketing automation and CRM platforms, creating a seamless flow of marketing data, and empowering you to hyper-personalize digital experiences at scale. 

What Happens After a Webinar Ends?

According to our webinar benchmarks report, more than 40% of webinar attendees register just for the on-demand event. So, if you only consider a live webinar audience, you aren’t taking the full picture into account

That presents an interesting challenge for us on the management end of webinar software. How will we treat all those people who, for whatever reason, just couldn’t make it to the live event?

Treating on-demand webinars like static videos would be easier, but then audiences wouldn’t get the full webinar experience, and you would miss out on engagement data. When we think about webinar engagement, we always consider additional viewers who watch webinars on-demand or simulive (pre-recorded webinars, then broadcast to a live audience at a designated time).

Hosting webinars has changed significantly over the past decade or so, and it’ll continue evolving as new technologies emerge. But for those of us who build the platform, the mission is always the same: to give you everything you need to engage an audience and meet your business goals.