Hosting webinars give marketers and thought leaders the chance to come face-to-face with their target audience in a snap, making them the tactical choice for top-of-funnel content marketing strategy.
Regardless of whether or not you’re using popular webinar platforms like Webex, GoToWebinar, or Zoom, the process of building a webinar that works is a potent mix of prediction, repurposing, and authentic connection.
Here, we’re sharing five essential tips for maximizing effectiveness and engagement potential for your future and existing webinars.
1. Invite your guests to form a tribe
Sometimes you want to go where everyone knows your name (and webinars are no exception).
For a fun webinar party trick (aside from starting the meeting BEFORE the advertised start time), presenters should try to get the early birds to introduce themselves to your host by tribe.
Invite them to submit their name and where they’re from and why they joined the webinar in the webinars chat or question box.
The goal here is to launch a conversation with folks before everything gets started.
Our theory isn’t rocket science: we’re believers that most webinar viewers have at least four windows open in the background.
This leads the audience members to believe they’re anonymous because no one can see them.
However, as soon as they hear a personal greeting from the host, their experience will be 10x more personable because they know that they will be called on and therefore, 10,000% more memorable.
Also, when your guests take the extra step to submit their names and location, they’ll already know where to send their questions at the end of the session! Win-win, right?
2. Make polls your secret weapon
Polling is a vastly underestimated tool in the world of webinar marketing and production.
When you implement polls into your webinar marketing strategy, it does a couple of things: first, it stimulates additional engagement.
Second, it allows people to speak their mind on topics that genuinely engage them.
Yes, the whole goal of the webinar topic might be to deliver a message – but the real feedback that polls offer in real-time is invaluable.
Why? Any feedback received is another opportunity to build more trust with your audience.
And we all know that trust can equal sales big time.
When you post a poll question during the Q&A session, it’s important that you kill enough time for people to actually answer. So make sure to read the question and all of the potential answers.You can even talk to the other panelists or the moderator about why the question is being posed.This will help you buy the 30-45 seconds that you’ll need to get the majority of your attendees to submit their answers.
Final pro-tip, just when you think you’re ready to close the poll and share the results, wait another 5 seconds. The insight you get from any extra stragglers could be the difference in turning an attendee into a client.
3. Send a questionnaire pre-webinar
When you’re asking for 30 minutes to an hour of a busy guest’s time, it’s of the essence.So, it’s crucial to do everything you can to make your content relevant when promoting your webinars.Around a week to a couple of days before the webinar, try emailing a questionnaire to guests to poll them on what they’re looking to get out of the session once it begins.This strategy works wonders for guest satisfaction because you’re able to get a sense of what your registrants are looking for before you finalize your PowerPoint slide deck. Typically, webinar attendees only have a title and a brief description of what the presentation will be about – so if you decide to go all “choose your own adventure” on your audience, however, you’ve got a golden opportunity to increase engagement and conversion rates.
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