We work and live in an always-on, hyper-connected, and super-busy world, where it’s said that our attention span is about as long as what a goldfish can muster – 9 seconds! How do we keep people engaged in our conversations, meetings, webinars, and conference calls?
In this blog, we’ll share tips in keeping your collaborations highly engaging. We’re sure these best practices will have people focused and engaged in the conversation at hand, instead of being distracted by email, text messaging, social media, or the latest videos that go viral on YouTube!
Data benchmarks to remember
- 30-40% is the conversion from registrants to attendees
- 36% registers more with two weeks prior than 1 week prior to the webinar
- Invites and reminders on the day of the event have higher conversion rates
Keeping the actual scenario in mind
It’s best to keep the actual scenario in mind when conducting webinars and more. As much as you’d like to picture your audience as a highly-engaged and energized auditorium, you won’t be able to run from the fact that some of the attendees will think this is a different webinar, or that some of them only attended because someone asked them to. An also likely scenario is that a bunch of your audience is having their lunches, are currently multitasking, and are clearly distracted.
Here’s how you keep can keep your conference calls and webinars highly engaging:
Talk to the audience via live chat
Remember that even though you are conducting a virtual event, you still have a live audience. Engage with the live audience in real-time where they can talk to you via live chat of your web conferencing service. You can ask your audience a couple of questions all throughout the webinar or call and answer these questions while you address the audience. It’s a simple way to get feedback and catch people’s attention.
Use polling
Polling is another way to get feedback and connect with the audience. If your web conferencing service does not have its own Poll feature, you can simply ask people polling questions in the chat box where you can do a manual count. This is one of the most important things you can include in your webinar.
Utilize multimedia
Incorporating various multimedia into your webinar slide presentation can have a positive impact. You can insert a simple video or an mp3 that will help complete your presentation or give more information to the audience.
Conduct a Q&A panel
When it comes to training webinars and sessions, a Q&A panel is a great way to make sure your audience stayed with you and that you expertly taught them and showed them the mechanics of a new product or service. You can also include Q&A in larger webinars and those that are more consumer-oriented.
Live-tweeting is also a great way to engage with your audience in real-time while things are going on. You can establish a hashtag that your audience can use and you can even have a live Twitter feed included in your screen for the audience.
Ask someone from the audience
Another way to get people engaged is by calling out to the audience and choosing a random participant. Ask the questions, get their opinion, interact with them. This will get people to pay attention to you and your presentation, and keep everything highly engaging.
Brainstorm live
For internal webinars, a neat way to boost participation is to have a live brainstorming session. Utilize a whiteboard tool or even just a simple Google docs to collect information and suggestions and come up with a productive live brainstorming.
Track engagement
There are also various ways to track engagement through webinars or conference calls now. Feel free to utilize these tools to get a better view of your engagement.
Check out online training videos on HubSpot.com
HubSpot offers various training videos that you can incorporate on your webinar presentation. This will also come in handy in your training webinars and will catch the attention of your audience.
Limit text
It’s also best to limit texts. Loading up your slides with a huge amount of texts won’t do you or the audience any good. Minimize everything to two to three bullets, share stories, use images, and of course, don’t simply read your slides.
Bonus:
- Audios may be low quality when you use a cell phone. Instead, use a good quality headset and make sure your environment is quiet and conducive to holding a session.
- Respect time. Start on time and really make sure that your time allotment and management is spot on for you to have enough time for the Q&A.
- Keep your slides engaging. Have only one idea per slide, keep the layout consistent, and don’t spend any more than a minute on the delivery.
If you have questions about audio or web conferencing, or would like to set up a free trial to test our conferencing solution, visit our free trial page or call 888-55-ADIGO.
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