Your Webinar Was a One-Way Conversation

Why attend a live webinar if you aren’t able to participate? If you’re not going to involve your audience in your presentation, you might as well just make a recording of your presentation or a video, and send directly it to them. Webinar technology today has incredible capabilities to allow you to have two-way conversations during your webinar event. This digital dialogue will increase engagement, keep people on your webinar longer, spark great questions and conversation, and encourage people to attend your future events. Don’t miss the opportunity for two-way relationship-building.

Modern webinar platforms such as ON24 and GoToWebinar allow presenters to stay in close contact with their audience. Since most webinars are not meant to be formal presentations, but instead to be somewhat conversational, these technologies allow presenters to make their attendees feel as involved as possible. New platforms offer live Q&A, polls, quizzes, and in-presentation social media engagement options. These features help you speak WITH your audience, instead of AT them.

Another great way to keep your audience engaged during the webinar is to create a unique hashtag. Think of Twitter hashtags as the gift that keeps on giving. If you promote your webinar with a hashtag, participants will share the hashtag and use it to add to the conversation during the event. In turn, your attendees are promoting your event and your brand. Communicate to your registrants prior to the webinar that they’ll be able to use the unique hashtag to ask questions or make comments during the event, and then remind them again throughout the presentation. There’s nothing that attendees love more than to feel as though they’re part of a webinar, and participating in the presentation.

Webinars can be really hard work (all that planning! All those moving parts!), but they also can yield great results. A successful webinar will generate quality leads, move existing leads further down the funnel, and increase your name recognition and brand equity.

The most important thing to remember when it comes to webinars and avoiding webinar mistakes is that it’s all about the audience. Provide quality content and actionable takeaways. Keep your audience involved in the presentation and make it worth their time. Don’t worry about promoting your product or service during the presentation. If the presentation is great, they’ll associate you with quality. If you put in the work to deliver a high-quality presentation that answers your audience’s questions or addresses their pain points, you’re well on your way to satisfying a future customer.