Picture this; you’re about to host your first ever webinar and are super excited to connect with your audience.
But there’s a small problem.
You’re not sure where to start and how to ensure your audience stays engaged throughout the presentation.
Don’t fret as we’ve prepared for you five actionable tips to help you ace your first presentation. Let’s get started!
Lay down your goals and objectives
The first step is to be clear about what you’re seeking to achieve with your webinar. For starters, a webinar should not revolve around you alone but those attending as well. So it’s important to ask yourself, which webinar topics will my audience find interesting? Will sharing them help me achieve my business goals?
For example, say you own an e-commerce store and want to generate 50 leads and convert 10% of them into customers. You can run a webinar that touches on the pain points your audience may be experiencing. You can then provide solutions on how to relieve that pain through your products or services.
Don’t forget to communicate the reasons why one should attend your webinar as well as what they can expect. This helps to build anticipation which is important if you are to attract the attention of your target audience.
Narrow down on your target audience and send invitations
Targeting the right audience is critical as you don’t want to waste your time (or their time) engaging the wrong group. For instance, if your aim is to generate leads, you need to only invite people who have shown some intent to purchase your product or similar alternatives. An excellent way to get it right is by creating a buyer persona.
This is simply a pictorial representation of your target customer. It helps you understand the problems your attendees are likely to be experiencing, what drives their purchase decisions, and how they prefer to engage in the sales process.
If you can get this right, it becomes easier to attract the right people to your webinar. But that’s not the best part. Those that attend are highly likely to take up your products or services.
Pick a webinar topic
When preparing to present your first webinar, choosing an interesting topic is very important. From the subject and title alone, one can tell if it will be a hit or miss. As we already mentioned earlier, the best topics are those generated with the target audience in mind. You want to make the webinar more about the attendees and less about you.
Below are a few tips to help you come up with a meaningful topic for your audience:
- Consult your sales and customer support departments to find out if there’s a trend infrequently asked questions.
- Dig into current market trends particularly those relating to your products.
- Ask existing customers why they chose to buy from you and stay loyal to your brand. Use that information to tell them more about your business.
Conduct a demo
Just like you’d practice for an interview at home before facing the panel, create a short lesson for your webinar before interacting with the real audience. You can use multimedia tools like Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, and Prezzi to run this session.
During the demo, do everything as if it’s a real presentation. For example, you want to initiate interactions through greetings, questions and answers, and even meetings. Besides, practice how to create a good rapport which is key if you’re to build the much-needed emotional connection.
Host your webinar
At this point, you’ve already determined your goals for setting up a webinar, identified your target audience, generated topics of discussion, and even practiced a demo.
What’s left now is to host your presentation.
Advancements in technology mean there are tons of webinar hosting platforms to choose from today. Most come with pre-arranged templates to make your setup work a lot easier.
Before choosing your preferred platform, confirm that it:
- Has a quick and hassle-free registration process
- Supports download plugins
- Comes with additional tools like Q&A, chatting, polling, and social media integrations
After all, is done and with a ready audience, give a killer presentation as if your life depends on it. Make sure your attendees are engaged and getting value from the discussion.
Don’t forget to conclude the session with a vote of thanks. Most importantly, end with a call to action depending on what you want to achieve. For example, you could invite the audience to subscribe to your email newsletter, check out your website, or provide feedback on what they’d like you to improve in future webinars.
Conclusion
Running a successful first webinar presentation doesn’t have to be scary. Implement everything we’ve shared here to tap into this fast-growing lead generation method.
Have any questions or feedback? Please share with us in the comments below.
