Did you know that webinars do not only build brand awareness but can also bring you sales to your product/service? However, attracting the audience’s attention and making them stick till the end is entirely up to the content you share during the webinar. 

Since the emergence of webinars has caused the ripple effect, every individual, brand, and the tech giant has started hosting webinars across various domains. Thus, standing out and connecting with the right target audience has become more difficult than ever.

So, we’ve brainstormed and listed 5 ways to create content that attracts and keeps your audience’s attention intact.

1. Organize Value-first webinars

When you conduct webinars, providing value to the audience brings sales and not your product/service. People sign up for a webinar and invest one to two hours to learn something new. If your product or service is new in the market, discuss the pain points of your customers first, and then tell them how your product or service solves them. But, if there are many people who already use your product but stand clueless about a specific set of features, conduct a webinar to help them find answers.

To know if you’re addressing their pain points,

• Listen to your customer conversations. 
• Follow your target audience or look-alikes on social media and understand what they struggle with. 

This will help you to understand their most unanswered problems. So, when your webinar gives them the solution to that, they come flocking to learn about it and your product becomes their top-of-the-mind solution.

2. Bring Guests Who Bring Value

People are no longer hooked to the PPT slideshow for a 45 mins session followed by a Q&A session. So, even when you have the most beautiful-looking slides ever, people will not pay attention, stay till the end or be interested in your product. 

That’s exactly why you have to bring in industry leaders, experts, or anyone who knows what they’re talking about. Bringing a guest from outside of your brand can help you in different ways:

• Your audience will be more interested to learn from people who have tested the waters and made it to the shore
• You can tap into the guests’ audience 
• You can build brand authority as the guest—an expert in the industry will become an advocate of your brand during the pre-promotions & post-marketing activities. 

You might have figured it out by now—the conversational style webinars are the best way to keep your audience hooked till the end. 

As Lakshman from Vmaker, who has hosted more than ten guests from different industries, says,” The remote culture has left us with “screen fatigue”. Staring at the screen during webinars does not motivate the audience anymore. It annoys them. So, conversational-style webinars are my pick when I put value first”

3. Interactive Webinars For The Win

The remote etiquette of making everyone included in the webinar is essential but often most looked over. Even though the host & guest share the stage, the audience runs the show here. The audience retention rate drops dead low if they don’t feel “included” in the webinars or any online events. 

Here’s how you can keep the audience engaged till the end:

• Begin the webinar a few minutes early and ask your audience to introduce themselves in the comments/chat section. (If your audience is from across the globe, ask them to drop the countries they’re from & their time-zones)
• Run quick polls and share the results with them.
• Before you pitch your product, ask the audience how they’re solving the problem (without using your product)
• Take questions from your audience in between and not hold the entire set for the last.
• Acknowledge them by their first name. This is non-negotiable. 
• Make use of QR Codes linked to additional resources for each slide to keep an interactive element alive throughout your presentation.

When webinars start to feel like the group discussions that people used to have in their colleges, the audience decides to stay till the end.

4. Add personality, not just a pitch

Webinars, no matter if it’s a community-only or a global one, will have a product plug. Your audience will know that the host or the guest will talk about the product during the webinar, but they don’t listen to it when you promote it directly. 

Instead, add your brand personality to the pitch. 

• Is your messaging across the content channel humor and humanized tone? Add it. 
• Did any of your recent social media posts/reel make some noise? Loop that in.
• Have you received the most heart touching customer feedback ever? Play that recording.

Selling the solution by tying the social proof of your product with it is definitely a hit! Adding the sales pitch in between the webinar is the buried-in-the-backyard technique, but an answer to their problem which puts your brand as a credible solution is evergreen.

5. Send The Webinar Recording Via Emails

According to Venture Harbour, sharing the recorded videos post the webinar has increased the registration rate to 42.46%, which is twice the original rate. Not only does making the webinar videos available on-demand increase the sign-up rate, but also increases brand awareness and adds up to the lead conversion rate.

Most webinars happen mid-week and the recordings help people to catch up on the session if they had missed out due to work that keeps them on their toes. Thanks to remote work!

You can use a simple and cost-effective screen recording software like Vmaker to record videos of the webinars without any hiccups or glitches in between the sessions. You can then email the recording to the registrants within 12 to 18 hours of the webinar. With Vmaker and its advanced analytics suite, you can find out the number of people who’ve actually watched the recordings after clicking on the link. 

This will help you to track the success rate of the webinar from the sign-up to sending the on-demand videos. 

Here’s the TL;DR for the skimmers:

If you’re hosting the webinar for your brand, make sure to put the goal of increasing the sales in the back seat and give the head start to value-first content. The best bet to make your content valuable is by addressing the “pain point(s)” of your target audience. 

Then, start reaching out to the potential guests that your audience would love to learn from. With the internet connecting us, it’s not as difficult as it used to be. It’s an added advantage! Also, the audience will have a chance to interact more with your brand. 

From the sign-ups to the “Thank you” slide on the webinars, you have the opportunity to convert them from the audience seat to the customers’, if you can hit every touchpoint right. So, here’s how you can leverage the power of webinars in your style in 2022 and convert the warm leads into sizzling hot leads aka customers.