Professionals across the globe are still adapting to the new work-from-home reality. To that end, we asked our #webinerd community to share how they’ve adapted to webinaring from home and what they’ve seen as customers and partners come to rely on virtual events to get business done.
The responses have been overwhelming. We’ve had dozens of #webinerds respond to the call, share their #WebinarFH setups and offer tips they’ve found useful for adjusting to our new remote reality.
What, exactly have they been saying? Well, here’s a small sample of what we’ve seen with a few #WebinarFH tips:
How Rhonda Mihalic Facilitates Engagement from Afar
Rhonda and her team use webinars to help keep students engaged with the written word. To that end, the Junior Library Guild is organizing live, interactive webinars. One webinar series, called Quaran-teen, asks students to help develop and write a serialized book based on their own experiences. Check it out!
How Chioma Ejim Keeps Her Industry Informed
Chioma produces webinars for the American Staffing Association, and she’s been keeping busy over these past few weeks. What with? She’s been organizing and producing webinars packed with important industry information addressing how staffing organizations ought to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak.
How Jocelyn Robertson Keeps Webinars Going for Financial Engines
A longtime webinerd, Jocelyn is relishing the opportunity to help friends, colleagues and business partners to jump on the webinar bandwagon. As a Webinar Producer with Edelman Financial Engines, she’s found new ways to engage audiences across her many digital events, including the use of video formats and engagement tools for interaction.
Webinerd Tips To Take Away
As more and more professionals settle into their new normal of video chats and physical-turned-digital meetings, we wanted to share a few webinar-from-home tips from our webinerd community:
Keep your events interactive
Webinars drive interactivity and collaboration with virtually anyone at any time. For example, the Junior Library Guild is drafting a book series with its audience in real-time. That’s a creative approach for sure, but if you’re going to hedge towards more conventional webinar approach, make sure to take full advantage of engagement tools like Q&A, chat, polls and more to bring your audience in and involve them in your event.
Bring audiences together virtually
Don’t overlook the benefit of having audiences engage with each other. Audiences can do more than simply listen during a webinar. Have attendees engage with your speaker through polls Q&As, chat and other engagement tools. Think of a webinar as a two-way conversation instead of a static presentation.
Make sure your webinars are relevant
Professionals are always looking for the latest news and updates, especially when face-to-face and in-person events aren’t a possibility. Chioma, for example, has seen a 21% jump in conversion rates since organizations have moved towards working from home. Make sure your webinars are timely and relevant to pique audience interest and drive conversions.
Not sure what to talk about? Ask! Simple polls and Q&A engagement tools can easily provide your audience a forum to suggest topics and help you better understand what your audience actually wants.
Be creative with your formats
Webinars shouldn’t feel cookie-cutter or like everyone is doing the same thing. Try expanding your webinar horizons by using tools and formats that are new to you.
Always have a keynote speaker? Try a moderated panel discussion instead. Focusing on live audiences? Give on-demand webinars a chance and you’ll be surprised to see how many more people tune in at a time that’s convenient to them. Follow Jocelyn’s lead and capitalize on unique branding and customization for the audience console during your webinars. And, like Jocelyn, explore new video presentation styles to keep things interesting for audiences.
If all else fails, rock some kickass unicorn headphones to keep things interesting!
