Jack’s Hacks: 5 Tips for Driving Engagement During Your Webinars

When it comes to digital marketing, we’re often looking to drive engagement with audiences. Fortunately, webinars are the most effective way to drive engagement with your audience over digital channels.

But simply running a webinar isn’t enough to drive engagement. Your audience has to interact with you and to encourage that interaction you need to make use of the engagement tools made available to you. Polls, surveys, chat rooms, downloadable resources are all valuable tools to get your audience to interact with your content.

Knowing how to use them is critical to webinar engagement and success. Here are five tips and tricks you can use to ensure you get the most engagement possible.

Webinar Q/A

The Q/A widget is the bread and butter of your webinar engagement. It allows your audience to talk with you directly and even to influence the flow/content of the webinar. The best way to start driving Q/A is to start asking, and answering, questions early and often. Encourage your audience to submit their questions and share stories from the get-go. Often you will find that when you read what people submit, it encourages more attendees to chime in. Before you know it, everyone will be participating.

To help run the Q/A it is very helpful to have a non-presenter logged into the Q/A roll during the event. I suggest creating folders that this person can organize submissions into to make things easier for the presenter(s). They can also answer questions that the presenter(s) isn’t able to get to.

webinar Polls

Similar to Q/A, polls allow the audience to share their own thoughts with the presenter in real-time. We like to include a poll very early in each webinar to help set the tone and get people used to interacting. The live results are a fun way to show the audience how their peers feel about a given topic.

Use Video in webinars 

You audience wants to see your smiling face. Liven things up by moving away from just audio with slides. Your audience is less likely to zone out if they can see you on camera.

Don’t let video scare you. You don’t need any fancy equipment. Fifty-one percent of video presentations are done using a webcam.

Have Fun With It

I am firm a firm believer that if you are having, fun others will have fun too. Try new things, make jokes, and think outside of the box.

Don’t Stop at the End of the Webinar

The engagement doesn’t need to end just because the webinar has! Offer your viewers more ways to engage. You can promote other events via resources, images and especially the CTA widget. Don’t let your webinar be a dead end.

Don’t forget to check out “7 Secrets to Avoid a Boring Webinar” on October 9th for tips on livening up your webinars!