Nothing is more boring than attending a workshop or webinar that keeps freezing or that the instructor keeps talking non-stop. Isn’t that boring?
A workshop might seem less engaging; audiences might fall asleep and leave within the first 30 minutes.
It takes practice, experiments, and experience to make your workshop entertaining and engaging. But, if you’re a new instructor, these steps can make your workshop as engaging as possible.
If you want to know how to make live webinars more engaging and entertaining, keep reading.
What are the Challenges in Live Webinars?
There are many challenges involved in taking a workshop from a physical class to the digital realm. Instructors struggle a lot when they start interacting with computers, but there are ways to tackle these challenges.
Let’s review some challenges of running webinars-
- Technical Issues: Technical issues are crucial factors webinar instructors might face. The common issues are interacting with attendees and navigating through the control panel simultaneously.
- Choosing the right channels for promotion: Your webinar’s success is determined by your marketing efforts. Finding the right channel is the biggest challenge for instructors.
- Impersonal Experience: Live Webinars don’t provide the same experience as in-person conversation. If you’re unable to connect with the audience, you’ll experience distracted attendees and a lack of engagement.
How Do You Combat these Challenges and Make It More Engaging?
Let’s dive into ways to reduce distraction and make it more engaging.
Make it Relevant
Your content needs to be valuable for the people you’re serving if you hope to earn their attention. But how can you find out exactly what they want?
Just ask them.
If you’re uncertain about course content, you can do some preliminary research with your target audience, or send your attendees a pre-event survey to get an idea of what topics are relevant to them.
Introduce the topic of your workshop or training by giving a quick overview of what participants will learn. And provide a brief explanation of how those skills will help them achieve their goals.
Pre-Webinar Survey
Pre-webinar surveys are a convenient way to collect feedback from the participants to improve engagement and lower the possibility of lopsided results. In addition, these survey questions can encourage attendees to show up for webinars when the day comes.
- How did you hear about the free webinar?
- Which speaker are you excited to hear from?
- Why do you choose to spend valuable time attending our webinar?
- Which device will you be using?
Creating a pre-webinar survey doesn’t have to be complicated. If you ask the right questions and take the proper steps, you can reduce the stress.
The next step includes getting the most out of your survey. Setting a clear goal allows you to gather the required information. These information insights help you improve, understand your audience, or grow your email list.
Collecting names and emails in a pre-webinar survey allows you to follow up with the registrants. Don’t forget to leave additional spaces for participants to express their thoughts.
Play Quizzes to Engage with your participants
Running a short quiz can bring up the competitive side of people. It can bring more entertainment for your attendees. You can host a quiz at the beginning or towards the end as entertainment.
You can also bring up quizzes in the middle of the live webinar and reward participants with some fabulous prizes. There are many ways you can bring quizzes during your webinar, depending on your objective.
To make it more engaging, explain to audiences how they can join the quiz, read each question loudly for your audience, and comment on the situation throughout.
Invite Surprise Guests
Inviting a field expert as a guest speaker is wise to make webinars more engaging. In addition, the involvement of guest speakers has a profound influence on the quality of the live webinar.
While inviting guest speakers can result in additional costs on the webinar, it is a helpful strategy to drive more engagement. Here are some benefits of inviting guest speakers at your webinar-
- New Perspective: Your guest speaker brings all his experience, knowledge, and ideas to enhance your webinar. You can ask him a series of pertinent questions and chair Q & A sessions; it lends uniqueness to your webinar and engages the audience.
- Improves credibility: Having a guest speaker in your webinar will help to bring credibility to you and your services/products. Nonetheless, if the guest speaker speaks more about your product, it automatically increases your credibility.
- Widen Your Audience Base: A guest speaker makes your webinar more attractive. Firstly, attendees would be excited to learn from industry experts, and secondly, they will promote your webinar to their customers. It can help you to reach more audiences.
Surprise with Rewards or Certificates
It is true that a well-prepared free webinar is engaging and provides plenty of value to your attendees. Free Webinars help audiences to learn something relevant and get value. So, you might make attendees convert to another master’s program.
Rewarding attendees with extra perks or rewards adds tremendous value to your free webinar. After all, who doesn’t love freebies?
Giving freebies is the most effective way to get people interested in your coaching services. If a person knows that the free item is more valuable, they will wait till the end to know about the rewards.
Rewarding free perks also helps to strengthen customer relationships. If the customer receives some reward, they are more likely to repay and remain a customer. For example, attendees might sign up for the next live webinar or purchase a coaching service.
Also read: How to Increase Webinar Registrations?
Ask Attendees for Feedback
Run a simple feedback survey at the end of your live webinar to determine how your attendees felt about it. Keep the survey short, so the attendees can quickly complete it.
During the webinar, ask participants to fill out the feedback form as they participate. Ensure to activate the survey two minutes before the end of the meeting and ask your participants for their feedback. If you don’t want the meeting to be silent, you may play music in the background.
Here are some examples:
- How would you rate the webinar?
- Any suggestions for the speaker?
- What would you suggest to add to the webinar?
- Which was the best part of this webinar?
To Wrap Up
A workshop or live webinar can be an efficient way to share information with people. However, it can be easy to lose people’s attention if you’re not careful.
We’ve outlined six simple ways to make your workshop or webinar more engaging and entertaining in this guide. We hope you find them helpful!
