By Kate Marston
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The good, the bad and the ugly of webinar presenting…
A webinar doesn’t happen overnight. It’s hard work! It takes careful planning, extensive marketing and collects a number of people (some rather reluctantly) into the process along the way. And, that’s not even considering post event activities. Someone’s got to turn those leads into business haven’t they, or what’s it all been for?
So, picture the scene. It’s event day… you generated a healthy number of registrants which have converted into a reasonable attendance rate, but you need to engage these attendees to get any sort of ROI from your hard work.
In an in-person event setting, those who are surreptitiously looking at their phones, answering emails, or staring out of the window, might receive a stern look. However, with a webinar you can’t make eye contact with your audience. It makes for a strange presenting experience, even for the most seasoned summit speakers amongst us – Even harder for those first timers cutting their ‘speaking teeth’ on a webinar.
Your attendees, (the majority of them anyway) are sat at their desks in front of their computers with an infinitesimal number of distractions at their finger tips. Colleagues, the internet, emails, Facebook, Twitter, what’s for dinner? All vying for their attention at the very moment you’re giving an Oscar winning webinar. Rudimentary platform analytics will let you know how long someone has had the event ‘full screen’, but there’s no way of measuring if they left halfway through to make coffee, got distracted and didn’t return. So how do you achieve the elusive “lean forward experience” for your passive webinar audience?
I don’t have the definitive answer as there are too many variables, but having produced over 300 of them, I’ve a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.
Here is the good, the bad and the downright ugly of webinar presenting:
Short and sweet
Your speakers may be the world’s expert on your topic, but if it’s not fact packed and fast moving your audience will check out fairly quickly. It is VERY obvious when someone is simply reading off their slides.
We recommend 30-40 minutes of presentation, followed by a live Q&A session – in total no longer than an hour.
Tone
Nobody wants to hear a speaker drone on. You can have the best content in the world but if the delivery is a flat monotone, monologue, no one is going to invest their precious time in it.
However… don’t rush. Your audience may not be native speakers, so take them into consideration and don’t forget you always speak faster when you’re nervous.
Make every word count
The webinar takes place on screen and spoken – be economical with what you say. Don’t feel you need to pad your presentation out. Good benefits driven content will stand up on its own.
An image can speak a thousand words
Text full, diagram heavy slides, simply don’t work. What do you want your attendee to do, read the slides or listen to you? My money is on the latter. You can always add in the text heavy slides to send out post-event. That way you aren’t diluting your message or distracting from the live experience.
However, one very important point to make: PLEASE make sure you have the rights to use an image. Googling images and saving them to your desktop is at best immoral (they belong to someone else) at worst illegal (they belong to someone else!). There are many free image libraries on the internet. Sites like Fotolia are relatively cheap to purchase from and what’s more, you will OWN that image to use again and again!
Interactivity
1. It always works best if there are two or more speakers. You can interact with each other, bounce ideas off each other, disagree, argue… just make it ‘human’ and an interesting listening experience.
2. Your attendees need something to do. People have short attention spans these days. Prod them to make sure they are engaged, build in a quiz, poll question, a round on sport spot the difference… whatever is relevant for your audience.
Release the poll answers during the event and talk about them. Consider how these reflect to your previous conceptions. Do they cement what you’re saying or refute it?
Make sure you close properly
Finish with a last ‘contact us’ slide. Make sure that this is on screen whilst you are answering questions. Remind people with something like, ‘if we don’t get round to answering you, please email us direct – our email addresses’ are on screen’. You’ve worked hard to get them there, so don’t waste the opportunity!
And I think that’s where I will leave it for this week…. I’d love to hear your experiences as an attendee or speaker. What worked for you and what didn’t?
Next week we will delve into the murky world of slide design, I think… or perhaps conversion strategies…ooooh the suspense!
Thank you for reading.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The post I’m talking to you…LISTEN! appeared first on WTG BLOG.