Hosting Engaging Webinars

Given that many governments have encouraged social distancing, you’ve probably noticed that lots of live events/workshops are now converting to virtual webinars.

I’d like to share my insight, especially so that small business owners who have never done webinars can learn a little on how to run a decent one.

No expert here, but here’s what I’ve learned about webinars:

What to expect

It’s typically harder (though not impossible) to solicit paid registrations for a webinar (as compared to a live event).
Registrations -> attendance drop-off is much higher. The industry average is quoted as 44%, but it’s questionable if that is data for free/paid/mixed webinars. From personal experience running webinars:
- Live event registrations -> Attend (Free) = 50%
- Live event registrations -> Attend (Paid) = 90%
- Webinar registrations -> Attend (Free) = 30%
- Webinar registrations -> Attend (Paid) = 80%
Audience engagement is a common problem for all webinars.

Best Practices

Preparation

Keep it under 60 minutes, any longer and they start losing attention.
Clarify timezone, especially if you’re promoting the webinar to people from different regions.
Don’t forget to send instructions to tell attendees how to dial-in.
- Send once during registration.
- And at least one more time an hour before you begin.
Launch your webinar room at least 15 minutes before the intended start-time so that early viewers can dial in.
Come prepared with a list of questions/conversation starters to engage the audience while you’re waiting for people to dial in before you begin your presentation.
If you’re planning on checking-in your attendees, it helps to have a volunteer do that so you can focus on the presentation.
- If you’re planning on recording it, it’s also a good idea to have your volunteer trigger the recording or remind you to, you’ll tend to forget when you’re so focused on engaging the audience/delivering a good presentation.

Boosting attendance

Tease that you will be giving/sharing something exclusive to those who attend.
- You also tease this at the start of the webinar and hold off on providing it till the end of the webinar (it helps encourage people to stay till the end).
By making them live sessions and not providing a recording.
- Lots of people sign-up, only to not attend because they want to view the recording at their own time after (which they often never do).
- If you build the expectations that your webinars are not recorded, people will be more interested to tune-in live when it does happen.

Facilitation

Use highly visual slides. People can read faster than you can speak, if you have text-heavy slides and read off them, people will disengage quickly.
Focus less on facts and concepts. Instead, use storytelling to elaborate on how different people have applied the concepts in different ways and seen results.
If you plan on playing a video with audio within your presentation, test on how you will make it work given that your speaker/microphone set-up could interfere with what your audience will hear.
Turn off your phone, notifications, close your tabs. They may not only distract you, but also distract your audience (encourage them to do the same on their end to be fully present and gain the most from what you’re about to share).

Things to keep in-mind

Software exists that allows you to split your audience into breakout rooms (Zoom is one of those).
- It is however, difficult to run activities where you need to split the room into 2 main groups, provide them with different instructions, then ask them to form pairs with someone from the opposing group for the activity.
Of course, there is no substitute for having good quality content and truly delivering value. Everything above won’t work if all you try to do is pitch someone your product/solution in your webinars.