4 Tips to Captivate Your Audience with Effective Webinar Materials

Posted by BeaconLive

Offer Engaging Webinar Content To Keep Your Audience Coming Back For More

 

Webinars are a cost-effective alternative to in-person meetings. They allow companies to expand their reach and better target their audience while delivering a compelling, fully branded experience. 

 

For webinars to be successful, they need to be engaging, provide value to the audience, and offer actionable takeaways. Webinar presentation materials play an essential role in keeping your audience’s attention and making your content more memorable. 

 

Let’s take an in-depth look at how to create a stellar live webinar presentation and four essential tips to ensure that your virtual presentation will captivate your virtual audience.

 

How To Craft An Outstanding Webinar Presentation 

Webinars have become an incredibly popular and influential way for companies to dispense information to their target audience. They are meant to educate and inform. A webinar can also establish you and your brand as thought leaders in your niche. 

 

But webinars are about more than just talking to your audience. You need stunning visual content, high-quality presentation skills, and exciting information to keep them engaged and help them retain information. 

 

When crafting your webinar presentation slides, here are some things to keep in mind:

  • Create An Informative Title Slide: Distill your webinar topic into one descriptive sentence. Use a neutral background and large font to ensure viewers can read it.

  • Don’t Exceed 18 Slides: Design your presentation slides for a small screen. Since webinars typically are around 90 minutes, including the Q&A session, only include videos if essential. 

  • Follow The Rule Of 8: Use no more than eight words per line and 8 lines per slide to avoid crowding your presentation. Use no more than four bullet points per slide. 

  • Be Careful With Font Type & Size: Stick with san-serif fonts, like Arial. Titles should be 36 point font, while body text should be 24 or larger to ensure webinar attendees can easily read it on their screens. 

  • Avoid Distracting Transitions: Don’t use different transitions or animations between each slide. If you must, choose one and use it consistently throughout your presentation. 

 

Always proofread your presentation slides for grammar and spelling. Display your slides on the host computer for the best playback speed and include the presentation in your webinar follow-up email to ensure everyone has access to the information. 

 

Let’s look at four tips you can use to captivate your audience at your next webinar. 

 

A person uses headphones to attend a webinar on a computer with a sunset in the background

Photo by Simon Abrams

 

Four Ways To Offer Engaging Webinar Content For Your Target Audience 

Your webinar attendees registered for your virtual event for various reasons. But they all want the same thing: an exciting, engaging webinar session. 

 

To do this, you need to make sure your webinar content is optimized to capture your audience’s attention and hold it for the duration of your live event. Here are four ways to ensure you offer engaging webinar content that makes your audience excited for your next webinar. 

 

1. Provide Visual Stimulation

You can present the main bullet points in PowerPoint or PDF format. In addition to text, incorporating visual content is an excellent way to make complex information easier to process. 

 

You can include many different visuals in your presentation, such as:

 

Webinar Visual Aides

What It Is

Functionality

Infographics

A graphic that summarizes critical information 

Viewers can easily see your main points and absorb the information. 

Charts/Tables

A structured visual that uses sentence fragments to give influential information

Webinar attendees can get important information at a glance

Graphs

Visual representations of numerical data

Helps your viewers quickly grasp ratios, percentages, and other forms of numerical data 

Animations/GIFs

Moving images 

Engages the audience through humor or visual interest. 

 

Going a step further, increase attendee engagement by going to a website and navigating through the content you are discussing rather than merely showing a screenshot of the website. This will help up the engagement of your virtual event and keep your audience captivated. 

 

Only use mark-up capabilities when they make sense. Draw a circle around a critical point or a line to connect related issues. Get your point across visually to keep people’s interest and enhance learning by reinforcing your main points. 

 

Research has found that visual stimulation increases recall better than when courses deliver information through an auditory or textual form. Visuals help people make sense of the content and direct attention, increasing the possibilities that the learners will remember. After all, 65% of the population are visual learners. 

 

But don’t use too much of a good thing. This could impact your internet connection and slow down your live webinar. So use visuals sparingly and ensure they make a big impact to engage your audience. 

 

2. Don’t Duplicate Your Speech And Text On The Visuals

Few things are less engaging than a presenter reading what’s written on a PowerPoint presentation verbatim. Use slides to illustrate your points, not as a visual crutch—and don’t simply read content from the deck.

 

Slim down the text on your slides to a few highly relevant bullet points and then elaborate on these points with animated explanations, examples, relevant anecdotes—whatever can bring the slides to life. 

 

Your audience will likely lose interest if you’re reading straight from slides that they can easily read. Bring new information into the mix to liven up your presentation. 

 

3. Don’t Read Your Presentation From A Sheet Of Paper

One of the cornerstone fundamentals of presentations is to not read right from the slide deck. It comes across very clearly, even in webinar format, when a presenter or moderator reads straight from a piece of paper.

 

Your presentation should sound natural. It’s OK to use an outline, but avoid utilizing a full-text printout of what you’d like to say. 

 

It’s too easy to read word-for-word if the full text is in front of you, and you risk sounding robotic. Instead, allow your presentation to flow organically. This will be more relatable for your audience members and prevent them from tuning you out.

 

Also, make sure to ask questions to keep attendees engaged. Your audience will remember less than 30 percent of the sentences they hear during your presentation, but they will remember more than 85 percent of your questions. By asking questions, you deepen the audience's understanding and conviction. Keep it interesting!

 

To ensure you or your moderator is prepared to host a great webinar, do a run-through on your webinar platform to practice what you’d like to say and how your presentation will flow in real time. This will help prevent the urge to just read the slides to your audience, making both your subject matter and live webinar more engaging.

 

Two coworkers sit at a table high-five after a successful webinar

Photo by KrakenImages

 

4. Use A Quality Microphone

Quality audio is a big deal when it comes to delivering professional webinars. Distracting background noises, fuzzy audio, or an echo can take away from your webinar slides and impact your webinar attendees’ engagement.

 

Your content should be delivered clearly so that the audience can hear all of your key points perfectly. Distracting background noises come across as unprofessional and, frankly, annoying. All of the attention should be on the delivery of the speaker's content, or else the webinar lacks continuity.

 

Built-in laptop, webcam, or PC microphones tend to incorporate a lot of background noise and produce an echo sound. To avoid this, invest in a quality headset with a noise-canceling microphone.

 

As with every technological component, be sure to test them out before your presentation! There’s nothing more distracting than a webinar host fumbling with equipment during a live event.

 

When screen sharing, you don’t want any social media notifications or random pop-ups to disrupt the webinar when screen sharing. Remember to mute notifications on your device and phone to avoid interruptions.

 

Partner With BeaconLive To Offer Effective, Engaging Webinars 

How your content is presented is crucial and ultimately determines how much of the content your attendees actually absorb and remember.

 

By following these four important tips on how to improve your virtual presentation with valuable materials, you’ll increase viewer engagement, enhance learning, and keep attendees stimulated throughout the presentation. Considering these critical practices will help you improve the power of your webinars.

 

You must choose the best webinar platform to host your live events, so they go off without a hitch. Contact BeaconLive for more information on how your business can take its webinars to the next level.


 

Topics: Speaker Best Practices, Webinars & Webcasts, Webinars: Best Practices

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