Best Practice for Webinar Time Zones

[Anonymous]

What is the best practice on choosing a webinar time zone? My company has always done our webinars in central time.... since we are in Austin, TX.. I've heard that Eastern time zone is best practice....is that true?

In our most recent webinar, my co-worker decided to set the webinar in Webex to Eastern time and market it in eastern time.  since the presenter was located in New York...

(We currently only sell to the U.S. and Canada)

However, since our time zone in Marketo is sent to Central time, we failed to realize that the calendar token on the confirmation email is automatically sent to central time....

I would love to hear thoughts on setting time zones and communicating that to your audience.

[Frank_Breen2]

It is best practice to include all of your North America time zones on both the Landing Page, Email Invites and WebEx, we write all the main time zones like this:

Time

9am (PT)

11am (CT)

12pm (ET)

In WebEx we also select multiple time zone on the Time zone section when creating or updating a Webinar:

As for the Calendar reminder file in Marketo, it's actually specific to the persons computer Time Zone and not what you have in the ics file, we set it in whatever time zone Marketo is set in, but that doesn't mean it's fixed, i.e. if the Calendar reminder is set for 11am CT but a person in New York downloads it, then it will show up at 12pm on there calendar.

[Josh_Hill13]

Also, in terms of choosing a base time, it is up to you. If you only work in NA, then choose a time that covers East to West coast reasonably. An internet search will find some baseline data on the "best' time for webinars. Most firms do 10-12 ET or 1p ET.

If you want to hit Europe and NA at the same moment, 11a ET usually works. Sometimes I used to do two live sessions - 1 UK time and 1 EST.

But with video recording, it really doesn't matter anymore.