Webinars represent the first wave of innovation when it comes to interactive corporate communications and that’s why there exists a real need for marketers and businesspeople everywhere to know how to set up a successful webinar. Moreover, conducting interactive audio-visual events in virtual space erases the expense involved in setting up, travelling to and staying at a physical “in person’ event, and allows us to leverage networking power and reach out to a much wider audience.

Below Linda Mentzer provides us with a few invaluable tips on how to go about creating a powerful webinar that builds relationships and converts prospects:

Get it out there.
People aren’t going to know about your webinar unless you actively promote it. Integrate information about the webinar into every aspect of your organization from marketing and sales to customer service and business development – make sure these departments effectively disseminate the information across the length and breadth of your

Get your timing straight.
Timing your webinar is paramount to having a high attendance webinar. Ideally, you should schedule your webinar so that the maximum number of people will attend. This means conducting a fair bit of research into the work and lifestyle habits of your target audience, especially if you are intent on bagging overseas participants. But on a general note, you can avoid the Monday blues and the Friday mellow, by scheduling your webinar around the middle of the week.

Ensure that the technology you use is effective.
Glitches, long wait times and broken connections will reflect badly on only one person – YOU. As the host of the webinar, the blame for any problems that might arise will rest squarely on your shoulders. So, make certain that the software and hosting services you engage are efficient and bug-free. Also, keep in mind that if you want to launch a successful webinar your bandwidth must be high enough to quickly and smoothly transmit large amounts of data.

Be animated yet professional.
A webinar is an opportunity to share ideas and gain insight through an interactive discussion. The idea is to keep your audience interested and engaged enough to actively contribute to the entire exercise. In order to better facilitate audience participation, you may want to split duties and allow one individual to host the webinar, audio-visually, while another monitors the conversational thread and cultivates discussions.

Be articulate.
Avoid all non-lexical utterances, false starts, slips of the tongue, grunts and other meaningless fillers. While speech irregularities may be overlooked as a matter of course during “in person” meetings and presentations, they won’t earn you any brownie points with a webinar audience. As the host of a webinar, you’re expected to be fluent, with a strong grasp on the topic under discussion.

Ask for opinions.
Take an interest in all your participants and make heavy contributors feel rewarded by actively responding to them while ‘nurturing’ introverts with polls, occasional light humour and encouragement. You may also want to note down specific participant contributions and weave them into the substance of the discussion – this help make everyone feel appreciated and makes for a more cohesive and amenable event community.

Narrate a story.
As humans, we perceive things in a linear fashion and a narrative is nothing but an engaging manipulation of that linearity. Your webinar must be a story from beginning to end, with carefully monitored and controlled rhythms, peaks and troughs. By being in control of the narrative and in tune with the audience, an exceptional webinar host will know exactly when to raise and lower energy levels and exploit discussion patterns to keep the audience engaged.

Follow up.
After the event is over, remember to send out thank-you notes to all the attendees. Also include webinar download links and any additional information. If people liked your webinar, now is also a great time to indulge in a little corporate promotion so get some company literature out there, but don’t overdo it.

Send out a survey.
Feedback surveys provide valuable data on the good and bad of your webinar and can help you raise the bar the next time. If you choose to request feedback from the audience, do so immediately after the event and you’ll likely get a much better response than if you’d waited a day or two.

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