15 tips to improve your life science webinars. Part 1

First published in Pharma Industry 2/2022, June 2022. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument in 2022 was that a webinar succeeds or fails on preparation, and that preparation starts with knowing precisely who you are speaking to, not which specialty they belong to. That is the case the article makes, and the seven tips in this first part are written as advice, not as history: define the audience, get the content and the visuals right, build an offer, plan the phases and write a run sheet, script what you intend to say, keep the slides clear, and vary the format. The opening section is autobiographical and carries nothing to check. What follows names every other section, either because it is tied to the year the article was written or because it carries a claim the article does not source.

The surroundings the piece was written into have moved on. It was published while webinars were still a recent habit for most pharmaceutical companies, and generative AI became widely available in 2023, after it was written, which is worth holding in mind through the sections on producing content and slides. Two passages are tied to 2022 in particular. Tip #02 recommends Envato elements as the place to find presentation templates and sets it against what Microsoft supplies; that was the article's choice of tool in 2022, and what it, or anything competing with it, offers now is a separate question; the same holds for the platforms named in tip #12 of part two. Tip #3 closes by inviting readers to send eHealth contributions to Niclas Ahlberg at his Pharma Industry address. That invitation was the magazine's and it was made in 2022. It is reproduced here because the article is republished in full, and nothing on this page renews it.

Two things about the evidence are worth having in front of you, and the first is a choice of method. Tip #01, the tip the rest of the article keeps returning to, rests on a single congress: the article reports that at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2022 in London the importance of personas came back in more or less every presentation, and reads that as the way the wind is blowing. What comes after is built on it. Tip #7 closes by saying that everything rests on the questions answered in tip #1, and the last line asks the reader to go through the whole article again through that lens. One congress, described from the author's own attendance, is what carries that, and no second source is offered for it. The bonus tip in part two rests on the same congress. Second, the article reproduces figures and a formula without naming a primary source for any of them: the 0.001 percent of relevant studies a specialist could get through, attributed to a lecture by an unnamed representative of a parliamentary committee and hedged in the article itself as not exact; the claim in tip #5 that the first 10 to 30 seconds of a webinar set the tone; the chain in tip #7 from engaging content to attention, to a memory formed, to a decision made possible, given as a formula; and the account in tip #4 of brains built to visualise stories from our time on the savannah. They stand here as the article had them, not because this site has checked them.

Do you run webinars as part of the marketing mix for your medicines? Are you curious about ways to improve your broadcasts and make them more engaging for healthcare professionals? If so, this series is for you. Across two articles we will highlight fifteen aspects, fifteen tips, that will help you improve your webinars, develop your digital marketing of medicines and over time reach more people in healthcare. Here are the first 7 tips, and the remaining 8 (plus a bonus tip) follow in the next issue of Pharma Industry.

A few words to begin with

The most important course I took in all my years of schooling was "Speech", an elective in upper secondary school, one hour every Tuesday afternoon for a single spring term. The aim of the course was to study presentation technique, how famous speeches are built, and to practise speaking in front of a group.

That course took me from being the poor soul standing at the front of the class with a shaking piece of paper in his hand, and I truly hated speaking in front of a group, to finishing the term with a presentation in the school's almost full auditorium.

Without my knowing it at the time, the course also laid the ground for what later became my working life.

Since the day I stood in that auditorium and presented, I have had plenty of reason to think about presentations, and a long line of sales training sessions and speaking occasions has passed by.

This article lists the best tips picked up along the way, most of which apply to both webinars and ordinary lectures.

Tip #01: Define and understand the audience you are talking to

I was recently at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2022 in London, and something that came back in more or less every presentation was the importance of focusing on Personas, also referred to as Buyer personas. That is the way the wind is blowing, and you should do what you can to stay at the front of that area.

So the first, most basic and most important tip for improving your webinars, and your digital marketing in general, is to understand in depth who you are talking to. The answer to that question is not "oncologists", "general practitioners" or "asthma and COPD nurses".

The answer goes deeper than that, and if you have heard me speak or read my earlier articles you will find plenty on what Buyer personas are and why they matter.

At the overall level the usual questions apply. Who is the audience you want to reach with your broadcasts? Which subjects would interest the audience? Which angle, which tone and which content would attract them?

To then work out which person in your target group matters to your particular business, you have to start by building your ideal customer in the form of a Buyer persona. This can be done in several ways, and various frameworks of guiding questions have been developed.

The one we normally use is called Empathy mapping, a framework that looks at challenges, needs and opportunities, influences, thought processes and the "why" behind a decision. All of these aspects are always examined from the starting point of the customer's relationship to your product or service.

This first step is decisive, and it is a step that cannot be skipped.

It is so decisive that I will stick my neck out and say this: if you work in marketing and communication and do not have a proper grip on this concept, your future career is shakier than you think unless you do something about it. That is how decisive it is.

There are many good sources on how to build a Buyer persona. Hubspot and Content Marketing inc. are two of the driving organisations, and I have written about this basic aspect of digital marketing in several of my articles and lectured on it since 2015. So it pleases me to hear more and more often how global, regional and sometimes local organisations in the pharmaceutical industry are starting to base their communication on this model. The most important thing then, and it is not always the case, is that the Buyer persona you create is grounded in the sales organisation's (micro)segmentation.

My hope is that you too are heading into, or are already in, an internal conversation about Buyer personas. Because once you ground the work in that kind of customer description, every relevant internal stakeholder gets one shared target, the best possible customer, and with it the chance to have more focused discussions about marketing activities and other initiatives.

Tip #02: Make sure your content is well supported, well worked through and visually appealing

Have you ever taken part in a webinar where you discover that the information shared is out of date, plainly wrong, or does not deliver what was "promised in the advert"? Or where the visual and educational experience sits dangerously close to "Death by powerpoint"?

It is not a great feeling, and with the phrase "In every (digital) interaction you either earn trust, or you burn trust!" as a guiding star, it is easy to conclude that a situation like that burns your brand properly.

As marketers in the pharmaceutical industry it is our responsibility to make sure the above does not happen, and we do that by making sure that what is presented during the webinar is well supported and well worked through.

As we all know, this normally happens through the company's internal approval process. But what kind of effort is usually made where you work to help the speakers with new scientific data to improve the content?

Or, as a communicator and marketer with a sharper eye for how information is conveyed, to help rework their slides so they teach better?

When you map out and finish the webinar's content, think about both content and appearance.

That may sound obvious but, hand on heart, presentations fall short on these two components far too often, and most often on appearance. Including presentations from those of us in the marketing department.

So here is a tip inside the tip.

Today you do not need expert skills in Powerpoint or Keynote to build professional presentations. Envato elements is a website where you can find more or less everything you could ever need for creative work, including thousands of presentation templates designed by professionals. "Professional" does not have to mean lavish or spectacular. But what you find on Envato elements is far better than the templates Microsoft provides.

So if you want your customers to take your webinars seriously, and you want to stand out from the crowd (who does not?), make sure that what you present is well supported, well worked through and visually appealing. It signals clearly that you are more committed than some estimated average, and that you take their time seriously.

Engagement earns trust!

Tip #3: Build the offer you want to promote during the webinar

Marketing medicines is highly complex, with many details to consider before, during and after a webinar. One of those details is how to offer something more than a good speaker and, beyond that, "only" information about the medicine and the chance to order materials.

Today those are hygiene factors and nothing that separates you from your competitors.

You have to be able to offer your audience something that helps them solve a problem or makes their clinical working day easier.

Areas worth talking through to find such an offer include knowledge beyond the purely medical, easier access to data, the patient consultation and the conversation with the patient, or information from the patient ahead of the consultation.

I imagine the eHealth field has many good, creative and valuable solutions here, and I would welcome seeing such examples presented in this magazine. If you have something you would like to write about, get in touch with Niclas Ahlberg at niclas@pharma-industry.se.

Back to your offer.

You have surely seen how the audience photographs what is presented, because they want to return to the information later. What would a summary of the speaker's, or better still the speakers', most important take-aways look like? We have sometimes produced a graphically appealing "one-pager" that sums up what was said during the webinar. For something equivalent these days my thoughts go more towards a summary in the form of a video message.

In summary. If you can offer your audience something valuable during the broadcast, they are more likely to stay for the whole webinar, where that value is usually presented, more likely to receive you on a follow-up visit, and finally more likely to view your next webinar positively.

Tip #4: Plan every phase of your webinar and build a run sheet

Do you remember lessons where a teacher of the old guard filled the whole hour with a long monologue full of facts? Have you also been lucky enough to remember a teacher who built the facts out with examples and stories?

By planning your webinar in advance you can map the flow of the presentation and make sure all the important facts are covered, while at the same time assessing where examples may need to be added.

Bear in mind that webinars tend to have "troughs" when it comes to pace and to how much attention a participant needs in order to follow along. Do what you can to keep those dips short, and try to bring in the following peaks as soon as possible.

An example. A presentation moves from being more storytelling to being more focused on facts. Our brains are built to visualise stories about people and events, which served us well when we lived on the savannah, but makes us less good at working through long stretches of numbers, graphs and abstract reasoning and conclusions.

Think about the different phases in your webinar, where the peaks are and where the troughs are, and whether they can be separated by, for example, moving graphics and a short audio loop, so-called "bumpers", a short video that visualises what has been presented, or simply one or a few questions to the speaker. Something that breaks the rhythm and takes the attention back.

Then work out a detailed run sheet together, one that structures the broadcast so you are sure to cover every part you want to include and at the same time creates the most engaging flow possible through the peaks and troughs of the broadcast.

Remember to mark the places in the run sheet where your offer is to be promoted, so that it happens naturally and not too often. Or too seldom.

I wrote more about run sheets, peaks and troughs and "surfing the wave" in the article "Webbinarier – dags att se det som något mer" (webinars, time to see them as something more) in Pharma Industry issue 3/21, which summarised my experience from two large webinar projects.

Tip #5: Write a proper script

You obviously do not need a script for your webinar, because you know your subject inside out, right? You have talked about it plenty of times. Or you are "only" going to open and then hand over quickly to a speaker. So no script is needed. Or is it?

It is the first 10 to 30 seconds of a webinar that set the tone. In less than half a minute you have to catch the audience's attention, get them to leave everything else they could be doing and focus on you instead. You have to move them into the right "mindset", with the right questions in their heads, so that above all they, but also you, get the most out of their participation.

All successful speakers prepare thoroughly, including those who seem to improvise their way through a presentation.

On one occasion I watched a person be asked on the spot to stand up and present a subject to us in the audience, which they did in a way that seemed improvised but was concise and very good. It was of course impressive, and my thoughts circled around how some people simply seem to be born with the gift of speech.

A short while later I saw the same person deliver exactly the same presentation again, almost word for word, and again in a way that seemed improvised. Then and there I realised that both occasions had been very well prepared, and that someone who is well prepared can come across as spontaneous and easy-going.

What I am saying is that even a presentation as short as 30 seconds needs to be properly worked through. There is no second chance to run the same opening for that audience a few hours later. You only get that one chance.

That too may seem obvious. But if you are a red-yellow personality type like me, you may tend to try improvising your way through presentations. After a few too many painful belly flops born out of improvised presentations, I now remind myself to make time for proper preparation. Every slide in the presentation gets a script, and that is how a structure and a flow through the material is created.

Tip #6: Make sure your slides are clear and concise

During a lecture by a representative of a parliamentary committee focused on Swedish healthcare I learned, and the figures here are not exact but the point is clear, that if a specialist in general medicine read scientific studies eight hours a day, seven days a week, that specialist would still not get through more than 0.001 percent of the relevant studies being published.

Healthcare professionals are, like the rest of us, constantly bombarded with information.

So when you put your slides together for a webinar, make sure they are clear and concise. Stick to one main message per slide, and use images, charts, clear bullet lists with only a few points, or anything else that is easy to take in, to support that main message.

In my view animations should always be used to assemble the main message of a slide step by step, point by point, so that the slide teaches.

If you also use clear and varying background colours, with your message contrasting against the background, you add another layer of clarity. If background colours are not possible because of strict corporate templates, you can certainly do something with the images you put in.

Your audience will appreciate not being overloaded with information and left with the feeling that it "goes too fast", and they will be more inclined to pay attention and take in what you say if they are at the same time mildly surprised by colourful slides or strong images.

Here too there is more to find in the article "Webbinarier – dags att se det som något mer", under the heading "Neurovetenskapen bakom engagemang" (the neuroscience behind engagement). And if you want to read more about creating good presentations I can recommend the excellent book Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. A word of warning with a twinkle in the eye though: read that book and you will never look at slides the same way again, and if you are exposed to a lot of "corporate" presentations you should probably leave it alone.

Tip #7: Use a range of different "formats" to keep your audience engaged

When you present it is important to use a range of different "formats" to keep your audience engaged. The most common thing is that we use PowerPoint slides when we present, and if the advice in tip #6 is followed you are some way towards engaging presentations.

If on top of that you can use infographics, preferably animated ones, video clips that reinforce or clarify, a change of scene by drawing on a whiteboard, or even live demonstrations of a concept over a shared screen, then our brains are stimulated and we, meaning your audience, become more engaged.

By using a range of different formats you will hold your audience's attention and make sure they understand your message.

And if the goal is for the audience to make some kind of decision based on what you present, the formula runs like this:

Engaging content leads to attention and engagement, which leads to a memory being created, which leads to a decision being possible.

Note that the formula begins with "Engaging content". Which raises the question: for whom?

To engage someone you need to know who that someone is, and in doing so make sure that this someone is exactly the person you want to engage. Everything rests on the decisions you make in answer to those questions, and we are now back at Tip #1.

Every tip in this first article carries the same underlying question, for whom, and if you have the time, read the article again through that lens.

If you have other tips for improving webinars, or presentations in general, or if you have something to contribute on eHealth to the magazine, do comment by sending me an email. You can reach me at fredrik@dualia.se.

Until next time, I wish you all the best.

Fredrik Holmboe

Owner & Lead digital strategist at Dualia

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Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Related service: Content Engine Sprint.