4 Tips for Hosting an Engaging Webinar
It’s true. No one wants to hear you drone on and on. But unless you take steps to keep your viewers engaged during your webinar, that’s exactly what you risk happening.
Top presenters have learned several tricks for keeping their viewers interested (and listening) even if the webinar seems to go on longer than they anticipated.
Hold Your Questions
If it seems like your viewers drop off the call just as you’re about to make an offer, you’re not imagining things. Many viewers attend for the training, with no thought to buy, and will leave the minute it’s clear the training is over.
You can curb that with one simple trick: hold the questions until after your offer. By breaking up the training with an offer in the middle, you’re more likely to hold your audience’s attention for the duration of the event.
Host a Contest
Much like holding questions until after the offer, the same effect can be had by hosting a contest in which the winner is not announced until the end of the webinar. Alternately, you could offer a prize to the first viewer to answer a question correctly—the question, of course, is based on the content of the webinar. This virtually ensures your viewers are paying attention.
Turn the Tables
Don’t let your viewers just sit and passively watch. Instead, get them talking.
Most webinar platforms have some kind of chat or question feature, so make use of it by chatting them up. At the beginning of the event, be sure to ask them to let you know if they can hear you and see your slides. Throughout the call, as you make a point or reveal a great tip, ask for their acknowledgment. Not only will this keep them interested and listening, but it will also help them learn how the chat function works, so when it’s time for Q & A they don’t have any trouble.
Tell a Story
Everyone loves a great story, and if you’ve got one, now is the time to tell it. Whether it’s the time you nearly got arrested in college, or how you had to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a month after your car died, if you can link your story to your webinar message, it’s a good candidate.
Just remember to practice telling it first, because if you’re not a natural-born story teller (many of us are not) then it can quickly backfire.
The last thing you want is for your webinar to be a boring, hour-long event that drives viewers away. It’s pretty depressing to watch the attendee number drop before you’re even halfway through your slides, but if you put these tips in play, you’ll have much happier—and attentive—webinar viewers.
