How To Handle a Thousand Webinar Attendees Successfully
The world took unprecedented social distancing and safety measures in response to this pandemic and in the wake of its consequences, it completely changed life beyond recognition. Now that people are not allowed to have face to face interaction, webinar, or virtual event is now of great value to the continuation of things beyond the reach of reality.
Teleconferencing is actually a bit futuristic before especially when it was established in 1993 and has been useful to its patrons after successful online conferencing.
Currently, webinars and virtual events are now being used by companies, schools, and other establishments as their main medium to host seminars, workshops, and other activities that can be done online.
Teleconferencing services such as webinar and virtual events can maximize the number of its attendees up to 100. These online collaborative services such as webinars for example is the best main tool for businesses to boost their marketing strategies and it is an avenue to widen brand acknowledgment and promotion of services.
While comfort and convenience are being offered by Webinar software, hosts and speakers can actually run into some minor problems such as optimizing results for the overall participation totals. Speakers’ concern is the actual participation of an attendee on a specific lecture after signing up.
It’s not that speakers hoard sign-ups or force people to join the event, what really matters is guests sign up one after another to watch and learn from your webinar, “No show” occurrence of the participants happens for a wide range of reasons. While this can totally be disappointing, there are strategies that can be useful to better increase the participants.
Things to prepare before the event
Know your numbers and goals
It is a major challenge for hosts to entice attendees to subscribe to a specific virtual event. You must carefully determine and consider the trends of your attendees that are joining your sessions.
Major steps associating with this strategy include listing the details of your participants and setting a goal for yourself. This includes gauging your capacity to handle a large number of participants.
This can help you foresee the expected number of attendees that you will need for your future webinar to ensure that the target number of participants will be achieved. Setting these goals will set the seal for your success.
How to choose the topic
Launching webinars isn’t that always easy, it requires speakers to construct a solid strategic plan. Plans that may avoid minor and major troubles that may emerge along the segment and to make sure that a successful outcome can be achieved.
It may seem hard to choose a topic for a specific Webinar because it will address the interests of diverse and various people with different perspectives. Choosing the topic for a webinar is one of the major problems that speakers should pay close attention to.
This goes far beyond by simply choosing a topic that you’re likely familiar with but a speaker or a host must choose the topic that could be the point of interest of most of your attendees. Considering the following strategies will result in a better outcome.
Start polls for the Audience
In launching a webinar, the audience plays a major role in the extent that the topic must depend on their preference and satisfaction. Choosing a topic is not just trusting your gut feeling but it requires listening to insights of the targeted participants.
One major step to comply with the audience’s preferences is by getting their insights through polls, surveys with open-ended questions regarding topic matters. Social media can play a big role to get ideas for your topics, it can be used to reach out to possible participants.
Polls, surveys, and inquiries can be posted on many social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Promote your webinar thru social media
Social media is very powerful in terms of featuring various events across the globe. From using it for polls and surveys to creating posts to promote your own webinar. You can create posts or videos with vivid graphics to capture the interests of the possible participants.
In as much convenience that you can get using these social media platforms, you should also be aware of the flipsides of promoting your website using these resources. Online trolls may get in the mix of the data that you’re getting or it won’t go well with people’s taste. So be conscious and smart when you use social media for your event.
Create a Game Plan
Promotion isn’t just a simple invitation to your possible participants; in fact, you can add spice to it by creating catchy incentives. These incentives are meant to encourage people to sign up disguised as a form of a token for their participation.
You can offer freebies such as ebooks, product promotions, and other incentives that will surely capture the attention of the people. Just make sure that the incentives are related to the event and add value to what you’re promoting.
Social Media contests can also help in promoting your webinar by using hashtags as well as encouraging your participants to promote your webinar website to their pages. It is like having a win/ win situation between you and your attendees.
Choosing the best time
It is necessary to give all the details to your participants prior to the launching of your virtual event. In giving details, it must answer the “who/why/what, when” inquiries of your attendees. This includes the time schedule, platforms that will be used, and the topic that will be discussed for a specific time.
In choosing time schedule you must consider the most possible preferred time of your attendees. Surely you won’t launch your webinar during busy days, such as Mondays and Fridays, as well as weekends where people are having their siestas.
So you might consider launching your webinar on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays to increase the probability of having more attendees. You should also consider the specific time of the day, 11 am to 3 can be a good time to start your work-related webinar and if doing non-work related webinar you can set it at 6 pm onwards.
Set Reminders
After setting up the best time for your webinar, reminders should also be scheduled and laid out. Sign-ups for webinars include capturing their email addresses, you can utilize that data to send out reminders a few days before the event.
Use your social media to also do the reminders for the event, you can post photos or even teaser videos for your attendees. If you’re doing it live on Facebook and youtube as well, you can create a premier opportunity for your viewers, you can do a count down too.
You must also guide your attendees to the right platform where you will launch your webinar, JetWebinar’s smooth webinar platform is the best thing to use. You should also announce your topic to your attendees prior so that they can have a hint of your webinar ahead of time.
Check our tips to remind guests of the upcoming webinar!
Lastly after receiving registrations from your participants express your deepest gratitude by sending them a thank-you note and the further details that can lead them to your webinar updates.
DURING THE EVENT
Encourage engagement and be interactive
Much like in traditional seminars or events, a webinar requires a dialogue between the lecturer and the participants. Encourage your participants to open up their concerns and inquiries regarding your lecture and address them politely.
Be gentle in delivering your lecture to lighten up the ambiance and throw your questions in a creative way. You might consider telling a bit of your experience so that your listeners can relate and eventually they can feel comfortable talking to you in return.
Curate your content
Curation of your content is a major step to start conversations about things your audience is talking about. You must provide your attendees with the content that they are most likely familiar with.
You can aggregate your existing content by presenting the most relevant and high-quality information you can offer to satisfy the needs of your audience. Filter all interesting content, share the best news; articles infographics, etc that are relevant to your particular topic.
You can add your personal commentaries about it and other information that adds value to both you and your attendees. Curating your content helps you build your audience.
Include some professionals to join a live video during the event
If you’re eager enough for having productive and more interactive talk between you and your attendees, it is recommended to invite professionals or experts. They can actually offer a big help in explaining and adding more context to your content.
These professionals can help to strengthen and falsify your assumptions and points thus resulting in a healthy dialogue. You can also ask these people to post details and promotions of your conference on their websites.
It is still necessary for you and your guests to be familiar with the topic to avoid confusion to your listeners.
Collaborate
Your webinar won’t work out if you won’t address your attendees’ concerns. You must keep in touch with them and must work hand in hand.
Having a healthy dialogue between you and your listeners can actually open new doors of discovery that can benefit both sides. In addition, you can also make your attendees collaborate with your learning session by making them your valuable contributors.
This creates an impactful learning experience; you can acknowledge them by featuring them during your session.
Take advantage of the situations
During the session, you can actually take the advantage of discussing some important
messages you may have. You can insert advertising your future session events together with complete details and links that can be used by your attendees to keep track of the event.
Don’t make long advertisements and make it precise. You can consider asking your attendees to give their insights for your upcoming webinar events and make them feel free to comment on your presentation.
Using these virtual conferences, you can set up a full course in a month with a shorter time session on a specific day. This strategy can help you and your attendees in many ways
- It can offer you more time to contemplate and think about your topic
- It can offer more time to your attendees to absorb the contents of your presentation
- It will build a long term relationship between you and your attendees
- By recording the presentation can still be accessible in case of conflict.
- It is more likely of your attendees to go back to your session because in the first place they simply have more time
Make it short and sweet
Long talks can sometimes be boring, isn’t it? Don’t let yourself believe that the shorter time you share your content to your audience the shorter information you will to offer.
You can do a brief but concise presentation. Be specific and don’t add up any unnecessary information. This short term presentation can offer more time to your attendees to do other things and eventually this can result in a great response from your attendees.
Promote future events
Keeping in touch with your attendees can be a great help to draw more participants in your future webinar events. Create emails with interesting and attention-grabbing details that will keep the interest of your attendees to attend to your future webinar.
Use all your social media platforms or website to provide details and other information that will keep your audience on track with your events.
The takeaway
While these virtual events are significantly convenient than other alternatives, that doesn’t mean that it will be easy and won’t take time. The above-mentioned tips are likely to help beginners in launching their own webinars.
Furthermore, all of the tips above are manageable so the chances of hosting a webinar for beginners will be in great height.
Keep in mind what are the reasons why attendees join your session. You must inspire them and offer them a memorable experience with your presentation. Allow a free conversation and try to listen up to their insights.
Whenever you feel pressured feel free to sit down and catch your breath for a moment, everything will be alright!
The Smart Solution
Already have your thousand attendees? Let’s help you run that successful event. Seamless, high quality, and limitless webinars can be hosted using JetWebinar.
JetWebinar offers the best and worry-free platform for businesses, companies, organizations, and influencers. You can choose from a small scale event to a big one. From online meetings to virtual summits, there are no limits.
There’s no need to install or download bulky applications, with JetWebinar’s technology your webinar or online event will be downloaded to the cloud and will be available to any devices.
Their platform is flexible and will cater to any of your online events.
Ready to host your webinar? Click here.
