Webinar interactivity is key to webinar success and audience engagement. Involve your audience and kill the monologue. There’s much you can do, here are some tips to get you started. Check out our Best Practices video about Webinar Interactivity below.

Video Transcript – Webinar Interactivity:

[Thom Gornall] Hi, I’m Thom from webinarexperts.co.uk and welcome to another video in our series Webinar Best Practice.

This week we’re looking at interactivity and how to eliminate audience drop off.

We’re joined by Lev Cribb, the MD here at webinarexperts.co.uk

Hi Lev

[Lev Cribb]– Hi Thom

[Thom Gornall]– Thanks for joining us

Lev, what role does interactivity have in a webinar? And how would you personally use it to eliminate drop off?

[Lev Cribb]– Yes, interactivity, and I should add to that audience engagement, is paramount when it comes to running webinars. Nobody wants to sit through 60 minutes of staring at a screen not engaging with the interface. So it’s important that we build that interactivity in straight from the start. I’m probably not telling you anything new when I say that polls are a very easy and effective way of engaging the audience. Where things start to differ is depending on how you use polls, you should always strategically place them throughout the webinar. Allow them to add to the content and the content flow. If the questions are completely separate to the actual content, it starts, again, to become a distraction so it’s important that we look at that. And the questions should be interesting to the audience as they are to you. So, if you just ask questions that you are interested in as the organizer, the audience really won’t see the value in that, they won’t really want to participate in them in the first place.

[Thom Gornall] – Okay, so you talked about the value of a poll and what it means to an audience and how it should appeal to the audience. Can you just clarify what you mean by that a little bit more?

[Lev Cribb] – Yeah, sure. Don’t ask a question about purchase decision. When are you ready to buy? I’m not saying you shouldn’t ask the question. It’s a good question, but maybe build that into a survey. So use questions that the audience is interested in as well. But surveys, having mentioned them they are another core tool that you can engage to create interactivity with your audience.

Into that you can then build questions around, for example, NPS scoring, Net Promoter Score, things like what other content the audience might be interested in, what you could improve about the format of the webinar, the content itself, the delivery, things like that. That you wouldn’t normally place into a poll question.

[Thom Gornall] – Okay, so just staying on polls and surveys, can you just give us a few more examples of the questions you like to ask that give you good results when you’re hosting a webinar?

[Lev Cribb]– Yeah. So we love the question, where are you on your journey towards “x” and “x” is the webinar topic. It allows you to do a couple different things. One, it gauges the maturity level of the audience, both as an audience on the whole, as well as individuals. And it actually allows the speakers to adjust their content a little bit, their delivery, if they realize that the audience is much more mature than they’d anticipated, they can adjust and lift up that overall delivery of their content. But also it allows you to add that, and we’ll talk about that maybe a little bit more later. It adds into your overall sales flow information data that you pass through to the team.

[Thom Gornall] – You mentioned Q&A which as we know, is a particular audience favourite. It generates a lot of data, a lot of information and people really like to get involved. Can you just give the audience here a little example of what questions you’d like to ask in a Q&A? What type of questions and what you do to prep beforehand.

[Lev Cribb]– So it’s important to have seeding questions, the audience can be slow to begin submitting their questions even though they have them. And even though you may have reminded them throughout the webinar to submit them when they think of them for the live Q&A at the end, seeded questions help because it inspires people to submit their own. Sometimes the questions themselves inspire additional questions. And it takes away from that awkward silence when you’re still waiting for the bulk of questions to come through. A lack of questions ultimately indicates either a low attendance for the webinar or perhaps a disengaged audience, so having some questions prepared, perfectly normal, and typically you’ll find that more questions get submitted. The other option that you have, obviously as well is to ask audience members to submit their questions up front before even the live webinar itself. And that allows the speakers to prepare content according to what the audience is interested in and helps the overall interactivity. If you have too many questions, you can then, well, you should certainly make sure that you  follow up with each of them. That shows the audience that you care about them submitting questions, which means next time they come back, they know they will get an answer either live or as a follow up afterwards. And you can post those questions and those answers, for example, to a blog page, your community site, and if you transcribe, that also helps with SEO.

[Thom Gornall] – So all this interactivity drives data, it produces a lot of data. And as you know here at webinarexperts.co.uk we’re all about data driven marketing. So what do you do with that data? And how do you utilize it to get the best results out of these webinars?

[Lev Cribb]– So it’s important to integrate all that data into your CRM system. So don’t leave that data sitting in a webinar. By flowing it into CRM, your sales teams will be able to take a look at each individual lead. See what they asked see what survey questions they answered and how they answer them. And it makes for a much richer follow up, it helps also with lead scoring, for example, and just overall profiling your audience and your audience members individually. And that’s really really important insight for your marketing and sales activity afterwards. Ultimately, ad hoc webinars have limited success. So really what you want to do is, take that data that you’re gathering and inform your decisions on how you’re going to run webinar series, for example. What content is able to produce more than just one ad hoc webinar? What that does, again, is it will build, based on the audience’s feedback, a content calendar that you have, and ultimately the audience will come back to that because that’s what they asked for in the first place. So it’s important that you take that data, not just for sales purposes, but also to look at how can we improve the content that we’re delivering from a marketing perspective. Ultimately, that creates loyalty and builds your audience overall.

[Thom Gornall] – Brilliant. So I hope you guys out there have taken away some interesting tips and tricks in your webinars. Lev, thank you so much for joining us today.

[Lev Cribb]– Thank you

[Thom Gornall]– We really appreciate that. And I hope you can subscribe over on YouTube and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter and watch out for the next video in our webinar best practice series. Thanks so much for joining us today.

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