There is a ton of information online about marketing and sales webinars but the truth is, you’re a professional looking to connect with your clients and prospects and showcase your expertise. So for you, this requires a unique approach to webinar content and delivery.

Below are eight of my best practices to help you deliver world-class webinars in 2019 and beyond.

Webinars Are an Opportunity to Teach

Teaching is incredibly powerful in gaining customer loyalty and interest from new clients. It’s one of the best ways to get people to know, like, and trust you. As you put together your content, consider approaching the structure like a mini course. This means you want your participants to experience some kind of “win” or success and be able to implement one or two new skills after the webinar. This makes you look good!

Define Your Ideal Audience

It’s important to take some time to describe your ideal audience. And the more specific you can get the better. Think about who you are looking to work with. Some questions you can ask yourself:

1. Who are you hoping to attract? Clients? Colleagues in the same industry?
2. What industries are they in?
3. What is their role? Who are you hoping to speak to in a follow-up call?
4. What is their experience level with the subject matter?
5. What challenges do you think they face related to your topic?
6. Where are they located? Are there any cultural differences you need to be aware of?

Once you know who these people are your content will be more on target and you’ll be able to create a better connection. Be sure to describe your ideal audience in your webinar promotion, this way you’ll attract the best people who align with your topic and services.

Share Client Success Stories

Everyone loves a good Before and After story. Client success stories are relatable and help your audience envision positive outcomes. To keep it interesting, show the story: use images, graphic stats and client quotes. Bonus if you can get one of your success stories to do a live interview with you (even for 10 minutes) in the webinar.

Create a Vibrant Slide Deck

This will be direct, but I mean this with total respect and friendly support: Most presenters still need to improve their slide decks. I get that this can be a daunting task, but it actually doesn’t require a fancy graphic designer (although that’s a nice-to-have!). You most likely have a branded template created by your organization’s marketing team. Here are some tips to developing more vibrant slide decks:

1. Limit bullet points or even challenge yourself to nix bullet points altogether (I did and I love how my decks turn out!).
2. When using graphics (like icons), keep them all in the same style so it looks polished and professional. And hopefully, no one is still using clip art!
3. Where possible use images that fill the screen and evoke thoughts and ideas. Turn data into graphs and other visuals. With PowerPoint’s SmartArt function it’s really easy to transform one-dimensional information into something visually-pleasing and easier on the eyes to digest.
4. Limit the amount of content on each slide. Too much information on a slide creates overwhelm and people tend to tune out.
5. For inspiration, head on over to Slideshare and see if you can find one or two new ideas to implement in how you style your presentations.

Keep Your Slide Deck Moving

When you deliver a presentation in person, it’s very dynamic. Everyone is looking at you; your slides are the back-up dancers. This changes drastically in a webinar. As mentioned above, looking at one slide for too long is one reason people check out or multitask. So keep your slides moving. You’ll most likely spread out your information over more slides and your deck will be much bigger. This is totally fine. What matters is holding your audience’s interest so that they get the most out of your presentation.

You MUST Have Regular Interaction

Add engagement every 15-20 minutes. Studies have shown that the hippocampus part of the brain can only hold so much information before it must be processed and pushed into short-term memory. Studies show this to be a maximum of about 20 minutes of information. This means the hippocampus requires a few minutes of processing time otherwise that data can be lost to the participant (and you will have wasted your time). Consider blocking your content into 15 minutes of information and then pause to allow for some type of interaction with your audience. I give several ideas on audience engagement in another post here. This is where you can really connect with your audience and create value.

Engage in Verbal Q&A

It’s always helpful to have some seed questions ready to get the Q&A going. However, one of the skills I recommend practicing is opening up the Q&A to allow for verbal questions. This means you would unmute any attendee wanting to ask their question over audio instead of through texted Q&A. Is this unexpected? Yes. Is it worth it? Oh yes.

I get that many presenters feel uncomfortable about this…

• What if the question is irrelevent? That’s okay. Answer as best you can and quickly move on.
• What if the audio doesn’t work and I can’t hear the participant? Say, “We can’t hear you so we’re going to move on to the next question.”

Webinar Surveys Are Valuable

I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere along the way surveys seem to have slowly disappeared. They are an important part of gathering valuable information on who attended your event. Will everyone respond? Nope. But I feel it’s respectful to give your participants the option to voice their feedback. I usually give everyone the heads up before we end that the survey is fast with only a few questions, and I’d love to hear any comments.

Two or three specific open-ended questions can give you valuable information to use in a warmer follow-up call. So what are good questions to ask? Decide what information will be helpful to you in a conversation later on.

• What has changed for you after hearing this information?
• What is your timeframe for ________________?
• What, if anything, limits you from next steps?
• Did the level of information match your level of expertise?
• Is there anything we missed?

And there you have it. Eight best practices to deliver exceptional webinars in 2019! If you’re just getting started with webinars, take it one step at a time and build your skillset with each event. Experiment and see what works and what needs adjustment.

Here’s to your success!

~ Corena

Corena Bahr is a webinar expert, speaker and trainer helping experts at corporations and global firms deliver world-class webinars for client outreach and customer onboarding. She teaches experts how to create a human connection with a virtual audience, structure content for engagement, and how to use the “bells & whistles” of  webinar platforms to drive business goals. Corena is also a LinkedIn Learning course author and public speaker.

Too often, people get hung up on whether they need a fancy-pants training software with all kinds of bells and whistles to deliver effective virtual training. It’s certainly nice to have, but the truth is, effective training is not about the software. It’s about how you design your content using proper instructional design techniques and then creatively using the training or webinar platform features available to you.

And just to stand behind my words, I’ve highlighted ways to take advantage of some of the features in GoToMeeting to show how you can deliver an interactive learning experience…no fancy training software required.

In this article, I’ll highlight:

• A common mistake made when designing virtual training
• My favorite hack to developing interactive activities
• 3 ways to create engagement using GoToMeeting

A Common Mistake

Let’s take a look at the typical instructional design process. Where is Delivery Method in relation to the other parts of the process?

It’s near the end! But you know where everyone puts it? At the beginning. As in, “I have to deliver a new training on XYZ compliance and I’m going to do it virtually.” So you’ve already mentally limited yourself in your creative thinking to identify learning activities and develop interaction. I strongly encourage you to stop thinking about the virtual delivery method and design your training FOR YOUR PARTICIPANTS. Otherwise you’re actually designing it for the software.

My Favorite Hack to Develop Interactive Activities

Alright, with the above in mind, when you get to Learning Exercises, this is what I have my clients do: I have them pretend they are delivering their training in person. What learning activities and what types of interaction would you create if you were to deliver face-to-face? This gets us in a place open to more ideas, and many of us can visualize interaction better when we think of face-to-face. THEN – after Sequencing – take a look at the features available in your meeting software and determine how you can simulate the in-person activities. I cannot tell you how many Aha! moments I get when teaching this approach.

3 Ways to Engage With GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting caps attendees at 25, which quite frankly, is a good thing. The more learners you have in your session, the more challenging it is to provide true engagement and there is a risk of diminished learning outcomes. But I want to point out that I can appreciate not every trainer has the luxury of keeping the virtual class size small and you must use a platform that allows for higher attendance.

Calendar Invite

With GoToMeeting you can schedule your training using a calendar invite. This gives you the opportunity to add materials like pre-course work, and add links to articles or videos to the invitation email. Providing pre-course work introduces your participants to the subject matter and gives them time to formulate questions. This tactic also maximizes your in-session time.
The other nice thing about using a calendar invite is when you have a multi-session course (I highly recommend you break up your content into multiple sessions), you can use the recurring meeting feature which will automatically add all sessions to participants’ calendars, including reminders.

Webcam Discussion

We’re all familiar with the chat function, so consider switching it up by creating a webcam discussion or role play between 2-3 participants. Other attendees can give feedback or add to the discussion through the chat. GoToMeeting includes HDFaces which is the highest resolution video conferencing quality currently available among web conferencing providers. Prepare your participants in advance that you will be engaging them through activities using webcam. No one wants to be caught on a bad hair day!

Guided Practice with Screensharing or Keyboard and Mouse

When using GoToMeeting as my training platform, two of my favorite features to use for guided practice are passing the presenter role or giving keyboard and mouse control to another participant. I generally set this up by giving a demonstration, then asking for a volunteer (um, because otherwise I’ll just make you a volunteer) to do a similar task by either giving them presenter role where they can do the task on their desktop or give them keyboard and mouse control of my desktop. In GoToMeeting, if I give keyboard and mouse control, I always have override control and can remove the permission at any time. This activity is great when you are teaching new software or workflows.

I hope these examples of engagement inspire you to come up with ideas of your own whether or not you’re using meeting software for your training. There really is no shortage of ways to keep your participants interacting and actively learning. Remember that the trick is to first come up with activities as if you were delivering your training in person, then determine how you can creatively translate the training or meeting software features available to you.

Corena Bahr is a webinar expert, speaker and trainer helping experts at corporations and global firms deliver world-class webinars for client outreach and customer onboarding. She teaches experts how to create a human connection with a virtual audience, structure content for engagement, and how to use the “bells & whistles” of  webinar platforms to drive business goals. Corena is also a LinkedIn Learning course author and public speaker.