In this modern age, the new solution to a board-room meeting or speech is a ‘webinar’, where people will tune in and out depending on whether you can interest them for long enough. While webinars are an excellent way to inform people about your business, or to help them with engaging, highly-requested topics, they have a few problems. Body language isn’t as expressive or effective through a screen, and attention can be lost within seconds. Also, your audience will have the entire internet to choose from: why should they go to your webinar, and sit there for the entire time? You have to earn and keep your audience, so these informational tips will help you to create a better webinar. Learn how to put together an audience-engaging webinar.
Webinar Topic Choice
“Before you even start planning your webinar, you need to choose an interesting topic, which people will want to learn about,” Samuel Bowser, a speechwriter at Academized and Oxessays, says. “If you already have an established audience, then this should be easy, and consumer polls or questionnaires (basic market research) can help you to understand what your audience wants. However, with a fairly unknown audience, you just have to choose a topic which you are knowledgeable about, and which will keep an audience interested as well as captivate their attention just from the title of the webinar.” This may be the most crucial step in creating a webinar, so spending quite a lot of time on it, especially if you are just starting off creating webinars or moving onto a new area of interest for your webinars, is completely normal and healthy for the planning process. And before you move on to the next step, remember that you’ll also need to find the best webinar platform for your business. While this may seem like an afterthought, it’s important to get a platform that has all of the functionality that you need.
Tell People Or Promote For An Audience-Engaging Webinar
Social media is an incredibly powerful tool, which you can now use to your advantage. Before you even start your webinars, create a professional social media profile on websites like Instagram and Facebook, perhaps even hiring people to manage them for you. These social media websites should be used as free advertising, and a way to connect with your audience. Instagram has many story functions, like polls, which can help you to see your audience’s opinions on a vast variety of topics, especially those which you might be creating a webinar on. However, make sure that you keep it professional, and don’t cause any online ‘drama’ – not all publicity is good publicity, so don’t go crazy and keep it simple and sleek.
Have Many Resources
You must know, by now, that a webinar cannot just be one person talking to the camera constantly for however-many minutes – people will get visually and audibly bored, and switch off, or switch your webinar off. Therefore, before you create your webinar, you will need to spend some time either creating resources (both visual, like imagery, and auditory, like sound effects) that look high-quality and attract the attention of your audience. Hiring someone, perhaps a freelancer, to create these assets may be a good choice for you, depending on your budget, but, however, you acquire the resources, using them in your webinar is an excellent idea to invigorate the audience.
Webinar Interaction
Your webinar shouldn’t be able to bore your viewers to sleep, period. “Audience participation is vital to keeping a webinar alive and running,” Ashley Adams, a motivational speaker at Australian help and Paper Fellows, says, “if they don’t want to listen, then they won’t. Keep them interested by using audience participation – Q&A sections don’t have to linger at the end of your webinar, litter them throughout to keep your viewers on their toes. If you’re not acknowledging the audience every ten to fifteen minutes or so, then you’re doing something wrong!”
Practice Your Delivery
This may seem obvious, but once you have a script or keynotes, you should definitely practice your delivery. You will be able to figure out what feels natural, and makes you sound less like a robot, which will help to improve your audience’s connection with you. As well as this, you can estimate the time for the webinar, and establish the tone – does it sound better in a light, friendly voice, or low and serious? It all depends on the subject matter, and you will be able to try out several ways to deliver your webinar. Practice makes perfect, as the common saying goes, so it can only be beneficial to you and your amazing webinar. All of these things will help you have an audience-engaging webinar.
Ellie Coverdale is a technical and marketing writer at Essay Roo as well as at UK Writings. She has been involved in huge tech research projects, which she has taken many valuable learning experiences, and she also teaches writing at Boom essays service.
