Before webinars, there were seminars. Seminars were usually done in stuffy offices full of workers and bosses who had to listen boring talk about leveling up productivity or reading office memos. Now that we have webinars it looks more cool. A webinar is basically seminar, but online, or web conference. What’s great is that you can get all the information from the comfort of your living room in fuzzy, warm slippers, (if you want). Webinars can be sent either through video or voice chat and streams of data. It’s very hard to catch anyone’s attention, especially in this day and age. So if you are by chance preparing some type of presentation you need to try all your best in order to be well received and snappy.
So, how can you make sure to create a kick ass webinar? Honestly, large number of webinars just suck. Before you even start to create one, ask yourself why are you planning to do one in the first place? Webinars are not for every audience, even though they are a great way of adding value to the audience. Some people respond better to infographics, prerecorded videos or slideshows or podcasts. But, if you are certain that the audience likes all this content together, webinar could be a great option to drive engagement and further sales.
Next important part is, knowing who will be hosting a webinar. Is it going to be someone else or only you? There are 4 basic formats when creating a webinar that you should consider. There’s an option of one speaker which is just single presented demonstrating, speaking and answering questions from the audience. But, if the presenter is alone, it could lead to him becoming the authority of front room which would make some people in audience reluctant to ask any questions or participate. There’s also webinar in a style of interview. The interviewer is asking many questions that are already predetermined. This can also encourage the audience because the interviewer is asking experts questions. I think the best way of doing webinar would be, using 2 speakers.
As you see from the facts above, if there’s only 1 speaker in the room, audience could feel intimidated, meaning they are less likely to participate. The conversation is much more engaging if there are 2 speakers. Setting the perfect date and time of your webinar is very important. But, do you know what’s the best time? Well, after more than 9,300 tested webinars it came to the conclusion that the best time for webinar hosting is at 2pm EST, Wednesday. Actually Wednesdays and Thursdays have biggest rate of attendance of almost 30%, where Saturdays and Sundays have worst, meaning only 1% of audience attendance. Also, keep in mind that scheduling webinar during the time of lunch is a bad idea, food will win.
Even though you have great webinar, creating a nice slideshow that goes with it is not a bad idea. People love to see some informational displays here and there. You can include key topics and highlight them. It should serve people as a visual help for demonstrating what you’re talking about in the webinar. For most people, it’s impossible task to speak to audience with ease and elegance. Many individuals have written scripts for their presentation, but I don’t recommend writing entire, if you don’t want to sound uninspired and too rehearsed. Your webinar should have that natural flow feeling.
Your webinar should not be longer than one hour, chances are that the audience is not going to last much longer than that. When you created webinar, you sure don’t want to see an empty room. So, you need to promote webinar. You can do it through social media, email list, communities on LinkedIn, in signature when sending email and on blogs. How great webinar is going to be, depends on your preparation. While presenting a webinar to the audience, try to have fun, and maybe then people will have to. Building that relationship to finish is important, and after you’re done with sweet presentation, just take a bow, wave to them and go.
