Preparing for and presenting a webinar that will educate and inform your audience takes time. To make sure that your audience truly benefits from your online presentation, you need to have an interesting topic, high-quality content, stunning visuals, and effective interaction with your audience.
However, all your time and effort could be lost if you fail to guide your audience through your presentation. How is that so?
Liken yourself to a guide taking a group of people on a sightseeing excursion. It’s your job to point out specific areas of interest, make sure that your group can identify these, and inform them about the significance of the points of interest. This calls for organization and uniformity to ensure that everyone benefits. You also need to react if anyone drifts off the path.
Hosting a webinar is like taking your audience on an educational journey. By the end of it, everyone should have learned something new and benefited from attending it. However, if you failed to make clear specific areas of interest or didn’t help your audience to see the significance of this, some attendees may fail to benefit fully. In addition, if you don’t guide your audience properly through the webinar, some may drift off and start checking their Facebook updates or email.
How can you guide a webinar audience so that they can get the most benefit from attending your online presentation?
Here are 5 tips to make sure that your webinar is presented in a uniform and organized way.
Table of Contents
1. Have a Solid Structure for Your Webinar
First and foremost, you need to have a solid structure for your webinar. How does this help guide your audience in a webinar?
The cornerstone of your presentation is your slides. You should ensure that you prepare captivating slides that include strong content. Make sure to introduce each slide properly and provide a clear explanation for using it.
Each slide should logically lead onto the next one. In fact, research into how the brain remembers information has found that logic is the key to memory. So, be certain that there is a logical progression between your slides. That way, your audience won’t be caught off guard and lose their concentration.
2. Inform your Audience
The second tip to guide your audience in a webinar is to always inform about what is coming next in the presentation.
Imagine a guide trying to direct a group of people and he or she keeps changing direction without warning. This would be very frustrating for the group and they may end up being confused about the direction you are taking.
In a webinar presentation, tell your audience why something is important and how they can benefit from it. When you change from one main point to another, make sure, and let your audience know the change of direction.
3. Have Less Text and More Visuals
There’s an adage that a picture tells a thousand words. So, when preparing your slides, make sure that each slide contains more visuals and less text. An audience always responds well to visually rich slides. However, good slides don’t just captivate your audience, they help your audience retain more information.
Research has shown that people remember information much better when they see a descriptive picture rather than a written explanation.
You can also effectively use color in your visual slides to get information across more effectively. For example, red is usually associated with a command to stop, green signals go, and amber is a signal to be prepared. Using strong visuals and color can help to steer your audience in the right direction during in a webinar.
4. Highlight Specific Areas of the Slides
An effective way to direct your audience to specific areas of a slide is to highlight the appropriate text or visual that you want to draw attention to.
For example, if you have a bulleted list on a slide, you could have each line of text change color as you go through the points. Alternatively, you could have a lighter area appear around the visual to help emphasize it.
Another way to guide your audience to grasp the main points of your webinar is to use a moving object to point to different areas or points on the slide.
5. Be Enthusiastic
One of the most important ways to help guide your webinar audience and stop their minds wandering off is by giving an enthusiastic delivery. Enthusiasm is contagious and you can use it to keep the attention of your audience.
Your enthusiasm will also help to emphasize main points during your presentation. Therefore, when discussing less important points you can talk a little faster, then when you reach the main point, slow down in your delivery and use appropriate pausing for effect.
This will have the same effect using sign posts to direct and guide your audience to benefit from your webinar.
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