Your webinar has the potential to take your marketing efforts to the next level. They can be a powerful tool to build your authority as a leader in your industry and can help you to engage with your customers.
However, webinars can also be an unmemorable event leaving your audience feeling bored, uninspired, and disengaged with you and your product.
What can you do to make sure that your webinar reaches its goals and leaves your audience feeling that it was worth their while attending?
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A Webinar Should Be Entertaining and Informative
We’ve all been to (and maybe even hosted) webinars which contain about 45 minutes of the speaker presenting his material and then finishing up with a 15-minute Q&A session. In the end, the audience is left scratching their heads thinking if it was really worth attending.
In order to make sure that you present a webinar which is of true value to your audience, it needs to be both entertaining and informative. But it is important to strike the right balance between the two. It can’t be so entertaining that you spend so much time planning jokes, funny animations, and humorous stories that your material is light on information. On the other hand, you don’t want to just pack your webinar with information, facts and figures that it becomes boring, monotonous, and uninteresting. In fact, those kinds of webinars can do more harm than good to your brand.
What can you do to make sure that your webinar is both entertaining and informative to your audience? Here are the top 7 tips:
1. Entertain Before the Webinar Starts
It is always good to have some entertainment before your webinar starts. So, plan to have some interesting items of entertainment running about 15 minutes before your webinar starts. This will mean that you engage the “early birds” to your webinar in an interesting way.
You could also play some entertaining videos to keep your audience amused while they are waiting. These don’t even have to be connected with your webinar theme. For example, everyone loves animal antics, and these can provide some entertainment value before the webinar.
2. Slides
Slides play a key role in the part of any webinar and these are an important way to get your information across. However, make sure that your slides aren’t boring and just contain bulleted text. Try jazzing them up a bit with some interesting colors, fonts, and pictures. Use animations whenever possible, this is really easy if you use PowerPoint.
Make sure that your slides contain more images, graphics, and screenshots than text. So, if your webinar was related to the travel industry, rather than have a bulleted list of popular locations, why not have some entertaining pictures or even videos of the places? Also, make sure that your visuals are big and vibrant and that they evoke emotions, choose high definition media whenever possible.
3. Polls
Polls are always a good way to keep your audience engaged. However, they also provide valuable information to your audience and can be leveraged to provide some entertainment.
For example, you could have multiple choice questions rather than just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer and try to make one of the answers to choose from amusing.
4. Share Funny Stories
Send an email before the webinar, and ask prospective participants to send in some funny stories that they have experienced that are related to the topic. You may even have some of your own to use. If you find it difficult to get material that way, then search online for some related stories.
What’s more, these stories don’t only provide some entertainment value, but also case studies on how to use, or how not to use the product. So, try to mix things up a bit and don’t just have information and facts.
5. Plan for Frequent Audience Engagement
Don’t just allot 15 minutes to the end of the presentation for a Q&A session, but plan for more frequent shorter sessions. These could be at the end of each main section before you move on.
Space out your polls, surveys, and quizzes so that you engage the audience to every 5-10 minutes or so. This can help keep your audience engaged.
6. Keep It Flowing After the Event
After the event, make sure and send out follow-up emails with items of value. These could include PDF files of the slides and visuals that you used in the event. You could also include any feedback that you received after your presentation. Always look for ways to blend something entertaining with valuable content.
7. Practice
Practice is a must for any webinar presentation. This is especially so if you want to incorporate an element of entertainment in it. Sometimes you could have a joke in mind or some funny story, but if it’s not told or delivered properly, then it may just fall flat and sound cheesy. Practice will also ensure that your presentation comes over in an informative way.
Use these 7 top tips to keep your webinars entertaining and informative and you will make sure that you always have an audience for your webinars.
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