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Home › Start here › Run webinars and online events
Start here · Marketing

How to run a webinar for your business

To run a webinar you need a video platform that can host an audience, a way to collect registrations, and a list to invite people from and follow up with afterward. Many teams start with the video meeting tool they already pay for and check whether their plan supports webinar-style sessions and the audience size they expect. An email marketing tool then handles invitations, reminders and the follow-up that turns attendees into leads.

By Bill Belcamino · Page updated September 23, 2026 · Our methodologyResearched and fact-checked by the HelpCompare team
How to run a webinar for your business
Bill Belcamino
Bottom line up frontby Bill Belcamino, founder of HelpCompare
Editorial assessment

Bottom line up front: Can a small business run webinars on the video meeting tool it already pays for?

Often yes, but confirm your plan has a webinar mode and an attendee cap that fits your largest session before you announce a date, because a plan built for meetings may have neither.

Entry prices here are meeting prices, from $4/user/mo for Microsoft Teams Essentials to Zoom at $14.16/mo per user billed annually, and free plans cap group meetings at 40 or 60 minutes, which can end a webinar mid-sentence. Plan for the attendance gap. Plenty of registrants won't show, so a reminder the day before and another shortly before the start do more than a fancier landing page, and the replay does much of the real work. Tag each registrant as attended or no-show when the list reaches your email tool, because the two groups need different follow-ups: attendees get the next step while the session is fresh, and no-shows get the recording. For a one-off event, ask about upgrading for a single month.

My read of the verified data on this page, checked against vendor sources on September 23, 2026. Disagree or spot an error? Tell Bill

How to run webinars and online events, step by step

The software this job takes

What to look for

Common mistakes to avoid

What to settle before you buy

Frequently asked questions

How do I run a webinar with the meeting tool I already use?

First check whether your current plan includes a webinar mode or add-on and what audience size it allows. If it does, set up registration, rehearse with the real setup, and assign a separate moderator. If it does not, compare the upgrade cost with the other tools in the table above.

What is webinar software?

Webinar software hosts an online presentation for an audience that mostly watches and asks questions, rather than a two-way meeting. It usually adds registration, speaker controls, Q and A, polls and recordings. We track 5 video conferencing tools: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting and Webex.

How do I get people to attend my webinar?

Invite your existing email list, send a reminder shortly before the start, and make the topic specific enough that the right people recognize it is for them. After the session, send the replay to everyone who registered.

What do I need to do a webinar?

You need a video platform that supports an audience, a registration page, a list to invite from, a reliable microphone and connection, and someone to watch the chat. The table above shows each tool's verified entry price and billing unit.

How we built this page

We start from the job, not the product. The phrasings people search for this job (for example “how to run a webinar”) come from our research into how small and mid-size teams describe it. Which software categories the job takes is our editorial judgment. Every tool, entry price, billing unit and date comes from HelpCompare’s open dataset, recorded from each vendor’s own pricing page; nothing is estimated, and where a vendor publishes no price we say so. We take no affiliate commissions and publish no scores of our own. See our methodology or download the data from Open Data.

More jobs in Marketing

Cite this page: HelpCompare, “How to run a webinar for your business”, helpcompare.com/start/run-webinars/ (updated ).

Source links on this site are checked every month; last check . How sources are checked.

From shortlist to switched

Built for the leader who owns the selection, answers for the spend, drives the rollout, and lives with the results. HelpCompare covers the whole decision, not just the first step.

01 · CompareWhich tool fits your team, side by side.133 comparisons 02 · Price & approveSourced, dated pricing and a one-page brief for sign-off.Decision brief 03 · SwitchWhat moves, what you rebuild, what it costs.264 guides 04 · ShareDownload and cite the data. CC BY 4.0.Open data
Bill Belcamino, founder of HelpCompare
About the author

Bill Belcamino

Founder and author, HelpCompare

Engineer by training, operator by experience, marketer by choice. Bill spent eight and a half years as an engineer at HP, was COO of Auctiva (the number one third-party selling platform on eBay, past 200,000 users) and ran Google’s $70M/year search syndication partnership at Alot.com. Then he spent 13 years building his own web properties with his own money at stake. He has bought, trialled, integrated and cancelled more SaaS tools than he can count, and started HelpCompare because the real cost of switching tools is the part nobody covers.

“I’ve sat on both sides of the table: the agency recommending the tool and the client paying for it.”

Researched and fact-checked by the HelpCompare team. No paid sponsorships, no affiliate commissions.

Read Bill’s story How we verify pricingSpot an error? Tell Bill