4 Ways to Get Your Attendees Engaged in Your Next Webinar
Let’s face it, even webinars with fascinating topics and great speakers risk having an audience that’s not engaged. It takes great visuals and engaging dialogue (among other things) to keep a webinar audience captivated and we’ve got a few tips to help you succeed in this area.
1. Start with great visuals
When you’re creating your presentation slides, make sure all of your information is visually stimulating and easy to process. When necessary, use charts, graphs, and infographics to share information in an interesting way.
If you are doing a training of some kind, show the audience your screen as you walk them through each step instead of just adding screenshots to a slide. Depending on the capabilities you have on your webinar platform, do some live “markups” on the screen.
It sounds simple, but all of these things spark interest and will keep the audience from looking at other things on their computer, or even around their office.
2. Avoid reading from the presentation slides
No one likes it when a presenter simply reads exactly what’s written on the slide and then moves onto the next one. But we’ve all been to presentations where that happens! This can quickly be presented with practice – if you notice you’re using your presentation as a crutch, change up your slide.
Only put items on the slides that illustrate your points, and then use your voice to fully explain each point. If you’re having trouble remembering everything you want to say, add it to your webinar script.
3. Don’t be afraid to go off script
Now, speaking of webinar scripts, make sure you’re not reading directly off of your script like a robot. Even though the audience can’t see you, it’s very easy to tell when a presenter is reading right off the paper and not adding anything to the live presentation. Use your script as more of an outline; something to spark all of the things you practiced.
Having a natural, conversational tone will keep the audience more involved and will keep them interested. Keep audience members on their toes by asking questions periodically, as well.
4. Make sure all of your equipment is working
Before beginning your webinar, test out all of your equipment. Make sure your microphone is working and all of your sound equipment. If audience members can’t hear you, they really won’t be paying attention. It’s also a good idea to make sure there’s no chance of any distracting sounds during your webinar. Turn off any notifications or background noises. All of the sound should be coming from the presenters, or else audience members are going to get distracted. If you’re planning on recording your webinar, you’ll want to do a test to make sure the recording will also have quality sound.
By doing all of these things — creating great visuals on your presentation, providing interacting dialogue, asking questions periodically, and ensuring you’ve got great sound quality — your audience is sure to be captivated from the moment your webinar begins until the end.
