We have all attended lots of webinars during the pandemic, and now it has become part of our lives. From lectures to training sessions and interaction, it has now emerged as a part of life. But one thing which we have all realised is that our attention is dwindling in a very short span of time. There are many aspects to that. The first one would be the same boring webinars and interface with nothing new.
In general, a webinar lasts longer, at around one hour, which I believe is a lot of time to get bored. So, what to do to make your audience engaged till the end of the webinar? Well, there are plenty of ways hosts can do to keep their participants engaged by leveraging the interactive webinar platforms‘ tools utilised.
Pick a compelling webinar topic
Content is the king and relevance is the need, choosing the topic which is in the trend and people wanted to know more about is the key to a successful webinar. The subject must be appealing. Without it, there is no point in hosting a webinar because you’ll not receive any participants at all.
To choose the best topic, you first need to identify your audience and then the trending subject that people want to learn about. Start making a list of what they are looking for and what they want to learn about. Include current industry topics that directly create relevance for your target audience. But choosing the trending topic means you also have to deliver proficiency in it, as it will help you establish your expertise in the industry.
Additionally, it is also preferable to choose a good online webinar platform that has a nice user interface and contributes to improving the user experience.
Make a presentable presentation
Nowadays, the virtual webinar platforms give the freedom to share slides or ppts, which creates an effective and offers strong technicality of information to the participants. This can be helpful to increase engagement and successful webinars for a large group. A professionally designed slide deck can captivate your audience right from the beginning. A basic and boring presentation can send your audience to one side.
In webinars, though you have the option of displaying yourself during the course of the event, most hosts stick with PowerPoint presentations. Because that’s the primary medium for interaction with your hosts and the primary thing they’ll be looking at throughout the course of the event, it is essential to ensure that the presentation will keep their attention until the end. These are tips to create a captivating PowerPoint presentation.
- Use the text to your advantage
- Make use of attractive images
- Include graphics, videos, and animations wherever possible.
- Utilize colour, but do so carefully, avoid shades that are too extravagant or unattractive.
- Make sure the text is relevant, clear, and straight to the point.
- Make sure that each slide is slightly different from the previous slide to signal the fact that you’ve switched to a different topic.
Add Poll Questions
It’s an amazing idea to incorporate poll questions into your boring-looking webinar but with a mix of questions that ignites the willingness of the participants to answer. Adding funny or sometimes irrelevant questions can be a good idea, but not much helps in making engaging and worthwhile questions.
If your participants are answering the poll questions added in the middle of the webinar, it can help you to note down the response of the webinar, whether it’s going well or you need to add something else. The additional benefit of poll questions is that if the attendees answer a question incorrectly, it indicates a need to recap the information.
Polls aid in information retention after the webinar has ended. Rather than just watching and listening, participants are required to interact with the content.
Offer an Incentive
Let’s just all accept the fact that we all love “free!” no matter what it is. But if someone receives any offer by just attending the webinar, then it must be easy to earn. As a company or brand, you can introduce some offers to the participants. If you sell a service or product, you can offer a special discount on that to the attendees who stick with you till the end of the webinar.
For an improvised user engagement, adding some of the rules can be helpful, such as saying incentives will only be given to the participants who answer all the polls correctly or those who share the snaps of the webinar on their social media. The result can easily be found by using any automated webinar platform.
Insert different forms of content.
Adding different forms of content creates attractiveness. A webinar without visuals may lack in appeal to users. But it is somewhat important to remember that a single minute of boredom can lead to disapproval of your webinar and the effort you made to host it. To some extent, it is a crucial factor to make them engage and entertain, whether it be through your words or by adding components of visuals, such as images, slides, short clips, and others.
But before doing this, one important aspect to keep in mind is that you don’t overload the content over the screen or in slides, as it can introduce two scenarios. Viewers may take in all your content and then shut off before you actually begin to speak, or they may be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information and may not pay attention.
As we are discussing above, design a presentation with the content in various formats. Use lots of colour and images. Include a video or two. Your goal is to have your audience be captivated visually so that they will want to be engaged with the information you provide.
Include group discussion or interactive sessions
Humans are social animals and having the time to do networking and group discussion is the best thing they wait for. Giving the opportunity and time for interactive sessions and group discussions can help you increase your engagement. There are many interactive webinar platforms that provide the functionality to easily arrange group discussions.
Take your webinar one level up
Webinars are exciting, a great source of marketing and even for interaction. But leveraging all the forms of functionality and tools of virtual webinar platforms is always preferred. Use all the forms of tools that can make them engaged and, in the end, deliver a useful form of content. Keep track of how you deliver the webinar and what strategy is necessary. Experiment with your delivery of content and analyse which works best.
