We have all attended webinar events and gotten bored several times, but if you are thinking about how to engage your audience, do not get bored till the end of your webinar. Then this article is for you. Here we are going to incorporate some of the best webinar engagement activities for your next live webinar event. Read this article till the end to ensure you are not missing any important activities to engage your audience.
How to Make Your Webinar More Engaging
If you’re hosting a webinar (which you absolutely should do! ), be sure to include a variety of participant activities that will keep your audience engaged.
Here are some simple suggestions you can use to increase the level of engagement between you and your attendees:
Ask a Question
It is better to think of your webinar presentations as two-way conversations because the audience is not interested in listening to your lectures. Yes, you will do the majority of the talking. However, by asking your audience a question now and then, you can keep them interested in your content and give them the chance to ask questions if they don’t understand something.
It is not necessarily that you have to ask questions that are relevant to your webinar, but simple interaction etiquette questions are enough, like; “Was that understood by everyone?” If you require a more thorough explanation, send me a chat message. Then keep an eye on the chat feed and on comments. Asking questions is the easiest way to engage your audience during your online webinar event.
Conduct a Survey
Another way to make your live webinar event more interactive is to conduct a poll or survey.
Polling audiences during live events is simple with a good virtual webinar platform. All you need to do is formulate the questions you wish to pose to the attendees.
In fact, short surveys that do not take a long time are the best. Try to make a survey with three questions, as it is easy and simple to answer. If more questions need to be answered, then make a series of polls in the middle of the webinar.
The types of questions depend on the intent of your content, audience, and hosts. A few common questions should include; Attendee information, likes/dislikes, career goals, and how they got to know about your webinar event. Additionally, the host can ask about his own performance, hosting skills, feedback, and more.
Test Your Audience
Let me just pitch you an interesting idea. Engage your audience by giving them the same sort of pop quiz or test. This is a great way to put pressure on your audience to speak up by turning the tables on them. They can also be a fun way to occasionally change up the content of your webinars.
Just keep in mind that not everyone enjoys taking tests. Therefore, here are a few suggestions:
- Make Your Tests Optional. Don’t pressure attendees to take part in your pop quiz if they don’t feel comfortable doing so.
- It’s better to announce the pop quiz or test at the beginning of your webinar event. This way they can be more attentive.
- You can offer some rewards or incentives for the right answer. The reward can be anything from discounts to something free. These kinds of rewards have the potential to boost participation because who doesn’t like to save money?
Start a Discussion
The best webinars are two-way conversations rather than one-way lectures. With this in mind, make an effort to make your webinars more interactive by engaging in a thorough discussion with your viewers at your next live webinar event.
Generally, many webinars conclude with Q&A sessions but over chats (this is a normal protocol). But take a chance to invite attendees to get on camera side by side with you to ask a question. Using this method will help the Q&A section of your webinar feel more personable.
There are many webinar companies that offer many attractive features and customizable options regarding webinar software to make this thing happen easily. Investing in good webinar software will help you to make it easy to mute and unmute attendees, turn their cameras on and off, etc.
Do a Critique
Critiques are one of the best online webinar strategies that most hosts don’t implement. But it is proven that people who use critiques in their events are more likely to succeed.
It is not necessary to ask them something big, but simple things, related to the webinar topic or even just general stuff like a piece of music they have written, the best photograph they have captured, something they are proud of or anything else.
Once you get all the submissions, try to critique the work with complete honesty and constructive criticism. Be respectful of all the people’s submissions and try to give them insightful advice that can help them.
Challenge Your Audience
You read it right. Give your audience a challenge, or better yet, take some home with you, especially when you are covering a series of live webinar events. For instance, let’s say you are hosting an event on how to start a blog. Then there is no wonder to give your participants a challenge to attempt writing a blog till the next session.
Next time, ask for this thing to be submitted for critique. Now you can give your participants feedback and the overall engagement of the webinar will increase.
Bottom Line
To host a successful webinar event, you just need to engage your audience with many of these options. There are many webinar services available on the market with advanced webinar software consisting of lots of features and tools with fully customizable options. Not just that, you can also add many of the things you visualized.
It’s not compulsory to do all these things, but it is all about you and your event, where you have the freedom to experiment with things. You can do any kind of activity you like to do. Even telling your participants to post the webinar clips can be helpful for the promotions and from the point of interaction. The more you personalize the event, the better the chances of getting your online webinar successful.