There are millions of things that can distract someone from paying attention to your webinar: Emails flying into their inbox, a telephone ringing off the hook, paperwork piling up. Here are five tips to help you keep your audience engaged during your webinar.
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Video Transcript:

Five Tips: How to Keep Your Audience Engaged During an Online Event

In the first video of this three part series we suggested interacting with your audience every 5-7 minutes. In this video we’ll show you five ways to keep your audience fully captivated and insure they receive your message.

Tip 1: Tell a Story.

Don’t start your presentation by reading a slide that lists your agenda, housekeeping items, or a long bio of the speaker. You may begin to lose the interest of the audience. It’s best to include a link to that information in your webinar invite or in the lobby of your event. While setting presentation expectations up front is a good thing, nothing grabs an audience’s attention like starting off with a compelling story that makes a point and leads to the information about to be shared. This makes your speaker and your content relatable to the audience, and leaves them anticipating more.

Bonus tip:

Don’t give out your meeting notes or slides at the beginning of a webinar. Nothing says go ahead and get back to that piling paperwork, emails and phone calls, what I have to say isn’t that important, like sharing all your secrets in a handout before you have even begun!

Tip 2: Talk with them, not at them.

Make sure to keep your energy up during your presentation. This will help to keep your audience’s attention level and by all means, avoid the deadly monotone voice. However, no matter how smooth your voice is, no one wants to listen to it for an hour. Break your presentation up by using conversation tools like Q&A, whiteboard and chat pods to get your audience interacting with you or each other. Make good use of those poll questions by incorporating them throughout your event. Don’t be afraid to throw in a funny, non relevant question either— this may help any of those in your audience you have lost to Words with Friends.

Bonus tip:

Address your audience as individuals instead of as a group by using the singular ‘you’ in your statements and questions. For example, instead of saying “I wonder if anyone out there can answer this question” say “I wonder if you know the answer to this question?” See the difference? This will give each listener the feeling that you are speaking directly to him or her.

Tip 3: Make it visually stimulating.

Media isn’t delivered in black and white anymore, not even newspapers, and neither should your presentation. Play to your audience’s senses with the use of graphics, videos, even music. In fact, studies have shown that 65% of people are visual learners, which means they associate things they learn with the images they see. Don’t let your slides get wordy and stay away from packing them full of bullet points. Instead, design slides that contain few words and focus on having a powerful image that drives your point home.

Tip 4: Use real facts and figures to support your message.

You can claim anything you want but without the proof, why would anyone necessarily believe you. While including charts and graphs in your presentation are a great way to support your message, don’t bombard your presentation with facts and figures or your audience will feel bogged down. Instead, stick with one or two key data you want your audience to remember and reiterate that throughout your presentation.

And finally, tip 5: Guide your audience to action!

Before signing off, be sure to use the sharing tools at your disposal for call-to-actions. Tools such as note pods can provide your contact information. File share pods can provide PDF price sheets and whitepapers or your meeting slides in PowerPoint. And weblink pods can provide quick access to any url, for example a link to an online survey asking for feedback on your webinar.

And here’s another bonus tip.

If your webinar platform allows it, record your presentation and send the link out immediately following the webinar. Recordings are a great way to reengage an audience including anyone who was unable to make the live version.

InteSolv has worked to help organizations all over the world create and deliver successful and impactful online events. And we can do the same for you. Remember, better webinar experiences = higher conversion rates.

Want to revamp or possibly just fine tune your online webinar experiences? Reach out today for a no pressure chit chat.