Engage your audience with webinars

Webinars can be a great, often low-cost way to share your local business message with your audience. However, like most local business marketing methods today, it’s important that you engage and provide compelling content to ensure that your efforts to share information are a success. So it’s important to take a couple of steps before your first webinar and then several throughout to get the most impact from your information.

Before your webinar, you must:

· Create compelling content to sell your webinar. Explain what your audience stands to gain by attending your session. Remember, we all have so many different things competing for our time. Therefore, it is essential that your explanation of the session is interesting. Think about the quality of the sales copy.

Gather information about your audience and what they are looking for from your type of local business. It’s important to create an effective attendee registration form to get the key information you need to know to run an effective webinar. Although your specific demographics may vary, it is often important to understand the main information(s) the attendee wants to gain from the session. Additionally, some general demographic data can also give you valuable information. Finally, learning some of this information also serves the dual purpose of helping you understand who your marketing messages resonate with the most.

During your webinar, you can use these methods to help keep your audience engaged:

· Assign someone specifically to monitor your attendees’ activity and answer questions from your local business. Depending on the software you use for your webinar, your options may vary, but it’s common for an administrator to be able to see the activity level of webinar attendees. There may be some ebb and flow in activity levels at all times, but it’s important to quickly address any issues or exchanges of information that seem to result in a marked drop in engagement.

· Ask questions frequently or take a survey. It can be common for attendees to multitask during a webinar. Maybe it’s because we all have a lot of things vying for our attention, but unfortunately it’s a common reality for the world of webinars. Therefore, it can be important to engage your audience early in the session and then ask a question from time to time. When attendees are asked to participate, they may be more focused on what you’re sharing instead of being distracted. Additionally, by surveying attendees, you can assess whether it’s time to transition your content or perhaps you should stay on topic a bit longer since you’re raising considerable questions.

· Use an expert in the field. This person knows their topic well and earns the respect and therefore the interest of the attendees. Also, if you need to adjust a topic to maintain the interest level of your webinar viewers, this person may be in the best position to easily change the content on the fly.