Webinars and online trainings have grown in popularity in the past decade, but their growth has accelerated rapidly in the past year.
With the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, many business owners have turned to hosting webinars as a new way to connect with their clients and potential customers. Some have used webinars to drive sales. Some have used webinars to further develop and deepen their relationships with existing clients. Some have used webinars to attract new potential customers and increase brand awareness.
No matter the end goal, it should come as no surprise that the most successful webinars have been those that were the most engaging for attendees.
Thinking about creating a webinar for your business, but wondering how to make it stand out from the crowd, especially with so many new online trainings and informational sessions being offered these days? Here, we’ll share a few useful tips for keeping clients and potential customers engaged during webinars.
5 Ways to Increase Webinar Engagement
There are a number of things you can do to create a successful webinar. These 5 strategies can help you really focus on engagement, which can increase the impact of your webinar – both for attendees and for your organization.
Choose a Great Topic
This might seem like a no-brainer, but choosing an appropriate and timely topic is hugely important when it comes to creating an engaging webinar. It’s the very first step to crafting a training or information session that will draw people in.
Really do your homework to determine what your customers want (and need) to know about, and think hard about what you’re truly an expert on. What insight can you offer that no one else can? Hone in on where your expertise and your customers’ needs overlap.
Keep It Short
These days, people’s attention is being pulled in multiple directions at all times. If you want your webinar to be maximally engaging, you’ll want to be sure that it can hold people’s focused attention as much as possible.
To do this, keep your webinar short. According to this Chicago property management company clients and potential customers likely don’t have an extended period of time to dedicate to your webinar. Rather than trying to fill an entire hour, keep your session short and sweet – around 30-40 minutes. Pack it with informative content, and keep the pace relatively quick so people don’t have the opportunity for their attention to lapse. This may take more careful preparation on your part, but you’ll gain an advantage when it comes to engagement.
Make It Exclusive
Once you’ve crafted an information-packed webinar on a topic that’s in that sweet spot where your expertise and your clients’ needs overlap, you may be tempted to offer it to everyone. Don’t give in to that temptation! In order to increase engagement, you’ll want to make your webinar offering exclusive.
Creating a sense of exclusivity will help to make those in attendance feel like they’re gaining an advantage, which may incentivize them to stay more engaged.
Additionally, remember that you can still offer the webinar to a wide audience by doing so in various exclusive sessions, rather than in one huge session. With this strategy, you can still connect with a significant number of people but also create a higher level of engagement.
Offer an Incentive
To further entice your audience members to stay engaged, try offering an incentive within your webinar to encourage them to participate and to stick around until the end.
Something like a discount, a free consultation, or an exclusive offer can help to motivate participants to be more interactive throughout the webinar, and to stay logged on for the duration of your presentation.
Make It Interactive
In order to increase engagement, you have to create opportunities for people to be engaged. This means that within your webinar, you should include some questions and prompts to make people think and apply some of the concepts you are presenting about to their specific situations.
It’s also a good idea to make the webinar interactive if you’re hoping to increase engagement. Do polls, open up the chat section, answer questions from participants, and even enable people to join the webinar via video so you can see each other. According to this property management company in Las Vegas, this interactivity will help to draw people into your webinar – and can help you to gauge the engagement of your audience as well.
Create an Engaging Webinar Your Customers Will Love
These five tips can help you craft a webinar that will draw your customers in, ultimately benefiting your business while benefiting your customers as well.
Interested in other tips and tricks for virtual engagement? Check out the following resources:
Online Meetings 101 – Review our basic tips for hosting effective online meetings so your webinars and virtual gatherings go off without a hitch!
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