The whole point of hosting a webinar is to engage the audience from the outset and keep their attention for the duration of the online presentation. Unfortunately, many webinar presenters make the mistake of thinking that just because a person attends a webinar they will be interested enough to listen to the whole presentation. This is often not the case and many times webinar hosts who don’t hold their audience’s attention find that many leave mid-way.
As a webinar host, it’s important to look at specifics ways to better engage your webinar audience. In fact, with forethought and planning, it is not difficult to keep your audience engrossed in your presentation for its duration. This will also lead to a better experience for your audience and boost your sales. After all, a webinar attendee who doesn’t stick around to the end isn’t going to buy your product.
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What are the best ways to better engage your audience in a webinar?
Here are the top 5 ways to keep your audience interested throughout your presentation. This will also give you more confidence to showcase your product and educate your audience in a more interesting way.
1 – Have an enticing topic
First and foremost, you need to have an enticing topic to better engage with your audience. It is very difficult to attract interested people to your webinar if you just have a generic topic for the webinar. Your topic will also determine how easy it is to engage with your audience throughout the presentation.
Therefore, whether you are presenting case studies, a “how to” webinar, an educational event, or online training make sure and give your topic the “wow” factor. You can use phrases in your title like “secrets of”, “the latest trends in” or “the top X amount of”.
These kinds of phrases create an air of interest, which you can use to make your presentation much more dynamic.
Even just the simple matter of choosing the right topic may mean the difference between having your audience fully engaged during the webinar or not.
2 – Engage your audience by interacting
There are many ways to interact with your webinar audience to keep them engaged for the course of your presentation. The more a webinar attendee can participate in the webinar, then the more engaged they will be.
One of the best ways to interact with your audience is to conduct online polls and surveys. This helps to get everyone involved. Make sure and strategically place the interaction possibilities throughout the presentation. Also, build some anticipation for your interactive segments by informing your audience that a poll or survey is coming up.
3 – Use social sharing
You can engage with your audience even before the webinar has started by encouraging sharing on social media. Come up with a unique hashtag as part of your webinar marketing materials and use this hashtag during your presentation. You could have it as a watermark on your slides or at the bottom of the screen.
The hashtag can also be used after the webinar event to continue to engage with your audience. The hashtag will also encourage engagement with other people who didn’t attend the webinar.
4 – Develop content that engages the audience
Developing high-quality content is a must for any webinar and it is one of the key ways to better engage with an audience. Audiences can get bored and switch off if all they see are boring uninteresting slides. Spice up your slides in your presentation by using striking colors, stunning visuals, and interesting graphs.
It’s also important to try to increase the number of slides you use in your webinar. The more that visuals on the screen change, the more interested and engaged the audience will be. As a general rule of thumb, you should use 1 slide every 1-2 minutes during your delivery. Keep the text on your slides as short as possible and make sure that they are easily readable.
5 – Use frequent Q&A sessions
Most webinars have a Q&A session; however, many webinar presenters just leave the Q&A until the end. While there is nothing wrong with that, you can use Q&A sessions more effectively if you break them up and use them throughout the presentation. There are a number of advantages to doing this to keep your audience engaged in a webinar.
Holding Q&A sessions at various points during the webinar allows for more engagement from the audience. You will also be able to discuss problems and answer questions when the topic is still fresh in mind.
Asking questions frequently during the webinar also keeps your audience mentally engaged. For example, if someone has an important question to ask, but they have to wait for an hour, they will spend more time thinking about their question rather than your content.
If the audience knows that you will be asking questions during the webinar, they will more likely be attentive throughout the whole presentation.
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