If you attracted a decent number of registrants for your last webinar and a high percentage attended on the day, you can absolutely count that a success. But here’s another question to ask: how engaged was your audience during your presentation? And how do you quantify that? Webinar engagement is a measurement of how engaged your audience is with your content and presenters.
If your signup numbers and attendance percentages are good, but you’re not seeing the results from your webinars that you want, engagement may be the missing ingredient. Here are a few tips for improving engagement during your presentation.
Host a Q&A Session
It might seem like a no-brainer, but answering attendee questions in a live event can be a great way to improve engagement. It’s an easy way to interact, and it lets you make the experience more personal and focused on each audience’s needs. Also, keeping track of the questions people commonly ask can help you develop new webinar ideas.
You can host a formal Q&A session at the end of your event, or simply take questions throughout the webinar on a more informal basis—depending on what works for your format. It may help you to assign a moderator to manage the process.
Run a Survey
You can run short polls throughout your webinar to ask multiple-choice and more open-ended questions.
There are lots of ways you can use polls throughout the webinar, including offering rewards for those who get the most questions right; answering questions people ask you in the webinar; and assessing how well people are retaining information.
Encourage Social Media Interaction
Provide your attendees with special hashtags for the event, and encourage them to live-tweet and comment on the presentation as it continues using those hashtags. This will allow attendees to talk to each other as they watch the presentation, and get a conversation going about the topics you’re covering that’s more public-facing.
Ideally, a robust and fun conversation can give those following it from outside the event a sense of curiosity, and help you generate more interest and sign-ups for your next event.
Offer Prizes and Giveaways
Offer a prize for one or a few lucky winners that you announce during or at the end of the presentation. This could be randomly chosen or based on merit. If the topic fits, you could also ask attendees to submit work prior to the event—and highlight the winning entry at the end.
Make Sure Your Attendees Know What To Do Next
What do you want your attendees to do after they sign out of your event? Make sure you end your presentation with a very clear next step to take—whether that’s signing up for your newsletter, buying your book, downloading your white paper, or getting in touch for a free one-on-one consultation.
Boosting interaction during the webinar can measurably improve your webinar engagement during the presentation—and improve the results you get long after the event is over. These steps are just a start, but they should help you get the most from each webinar.
