5 Actionable Tips to Increase Webinar Interaction Among Attendees

The convenience and accessibility of webinars proved essential when many workplaces shifted to remote and hybrid business models. They’re now commonplace for communicating with customers, prospects, and employees, making webinar interaction an important factor in meeting planning. Webinars are a very powerful communication tool, serving as a medium for conducting educational talks, networking, brand promotion, and various other knowledge-sharing programs. In addition, they do wonders to bridge the gap created by online setups by enabling real-time interactions.

Despite the various benefits that webinars provide, there are certain challenges that come with utilizing this tool. Arguably the biggest one is lower attendee engagement. However, there are several ways to maximize webinar interaction and successfully engage with attendees. In this blog, we’ll key the five key ways to do this:

1. Prepare dynamic slides

Because webinars are an online tool, it is imperative that the material presented is not only relevant to the discussion but also visually appealing and utilizes multimedia elements. Visual appeal generally refers to the design of your slides. Design is very important as it can capture the attention of your audience and assist in getting your points across if applied in a way that is relevant and aligns with the presentation’s message. Multimedia elements refer to images, gifs, videos, audio, and many other visual elements. These two aforementioned factors have the capability to break the monotony that comes with large chunks of text, as well as create variety in your slides. This will largely help in capturing and retaining your audience’s attention throughout the entire duration of the webinar.

2. Maintain eye contact

Eye contact is an important demonstration of honesty and sincerity when delivering a message, making it important for those conducting webinars. While speaking to a virtual audience, it is best to keep your eyes on the camera and refrain from letting it wander around. Individuals who wear glasses might find themselves facing an additional challenge in the form of light reflections and glare on their lenses. This carries the risk of not only distracting the audience but also preventing them from being able to look into your eyes. In events such as this, it may prove effective to learn how to put in and take out contact lenses. Doing so will help you safely replace your eyeglasses for the time being without impairing your own vision. This way, it’ll allow your audience to see your eyes more clearly, which will increase the sense of connection and engagement in your webinar.

3. Include interactive elements

Due to the virtual nature of webinars, it is a lot easier for audiences to simply pretend to be listening. A lot of times, attendees will simply have the webinar tab open while having their focus on a completely different window. In other cases, they may even treat the webinar on their device as white noise and later fully drop off to do something else entirely.

Interactive elements will not only pique their interest but also increase their focus and heighten their content retention. These elements will also add a creative touch and a sense of enjoyment to your webinar, and they can range from virtual games to collaboration spaces to live polls and surveys and many others.

4. Answer and ask

While it is common to have a Q&A portion at the end of webinars, one way to truly create an engaging environment during presentations is to entertain questions that may come up on the spot. While some might argue that it could disrupt the flow of the presentation, when done correctly, this can create a more stimulating discussion. In fact, asking questions has been proven to benefit not only the person asking but everyone else hearing the question. In addition, questions should not be limited to only the audience asking, but the presenter as well. Whether asking to receive multiple responses, asking rhetorical questions to leave the audience thinking, or even simply asking for a show of hands, these questions are a great way to increase engagement with the audience and stimulate interaction.

5. Keep it stimulating

No matter how good the content, a distracted audience could end up being the death of any webinar. At the root of it all, one of the best ways to increase webinar interaction is by structuring the webinar with the audience’s attention span in mind. Instead of having a continuous and monotonous presentation, divide the topic into several sections and include an engaging activity in between each. Check up on your audience occasionally to see if they are able to follow the discussion and how they are digesting the information so far. While webinars typically have a preexisting structure, breaking some of the rules might be exactly what is needed to help conduct an engaging one.

Article contributed by Brianne Watson, exclusively for attendease.com.