There are a million things distracting webinar attendees, so what can you do to keep your audience engaged? We at WebinarListings are lucky to be connected to some of the best webinar producers in the field, and we asked these webinar experts what they believe is integral to audience engagement.
First up is Mike Agron of WebAttract, who says that it is important to know as much as you can about your audience, in order to make sure that what you are presenting is relevant and truly informational. Anything that can give a presenter information about their attendees, and what those attendees know, is good for engagement. Polls, Q&A, and Chat are all great tools for this purpose. Further, they also help audience members to know each other.
According to Matt Bovell of Vell Group, giving a great presentation is of utmost importance to keeping an audience engaged. "Create slides that people can't take their eyes off of: imaginative images and great slide layout." Matt also believes that having a professional moderator is an excellent way to keep a presentation on track and help inertia from setting in. Another strategy of Matt's that I particularly like, is his idea of having a list of attendees and calling out their names during an event (in fact, I recommended this to a certain college professor that I know (i.e. my husband)).
Shelley Ryan of Killer Webinars likes to make her events fun and get attendees relaxed. Shelley's favorite strategy for achieving this is something she says she learned almost by accident. One time she decided to play fun music at the beginning of one of her webinars. Seeing that people reacted well, Shelley took to doing it regularly, with different music mixes. Soon enough, attendees began to log in early to her events simply to hear what kind of music she had chosen! And then, audience members regularly began discussing the music, interacting, before the webinar had even begun. Shelley also makes an awesome, tightly-edited slide show, by the way, making her webinars highly animated. However, with all the tools, tricks, strategies, etc. out there, all of the people I spoke to agree that that the most important aspect of a webinar is the presenter.
Presentation guru Roger Courville of 1080 Group illuminates, "Engagement isn't something you do to your audience, it's something you are. Engagement isn't a thing you place in an event like an object. It's a skill that you work on and grow...and when your audience is one click away from "changing the channel," you'd better figure out how to get and keep attention throughout. If you're not, you're going to be like a television playing in the background, not the main focus of the person you're trying to reach." See Roger's "What Does it Take to "Engage" a Webinar Audience"?
So there you have it. Know your audience, give a great presentation, make it fun and different, and be a great presenter.
Think you can do it?
(Photo Credit: Asleep at computer)