No matter who your audience is or the purpose of your webinar for you and your team, the one key to success is keeping your attendees engaged. It can be something webinar hosts find a real challenge, as engagement can be hard to determine across a screen. That's why, in this article, we’ll be sharing our top 3 tips on how to keep your audience engaged - and keep them coming back for more!

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You want the businesses, educators, and curious people on the other side of the screen to log out of the webinar feeling heard and excited for what you have to say next. You want your webinar to bring a high ROI and leave your clients, your brand, and your business in a better place than before. 

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Did you know immediate engagement is the main reason 75% of marketers prefer to host live webinars? Pretty high - but keeping people engaged is not always the most straightforward of things.

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So, how can it be done?

1. Keep them clicking

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The difference between a good webinar and a not so good one is simple, a good webinar has people leaning into their screens. A bad one? It has people looking anywhere else but the screen. So how do you keep eyes and ears on your webinar? Get your audience involved. 

Having people participate with your webinar can be as simple as asking questions throughout your webinar and sending out a survey at the end of the session. Surveys draw viewers in, make them reflect on what's being talked about, force them to lean in and make choices. These steps, even for one question surveys, transform attendees from viewers to active participants.

Providing two-way interaction is key to making your webinar event standout. It's been proven that the highest rated webinar performers incorporate a larger number of multimedia elements during their webinars - from embedded media, to surveys and polls. One study found that 78% of highly successful webinar creators used polls and that 73% used surveys. Surveys have the dual benefit of both engaging webinar attendees, and giving your company meaningful feedback.

Along with keeping your attendees engaged, polls can create great talking points for your webinar content and your speakers, as well as provide some great insights and stats that you could use post-webinar.

Gamification, or incorporating game-like systems into a webinar, is a stellar way to create engagement. Even a short webinar can benefit from small group activities. Incorporating play, with the use of competitive team scenarios and point systems improve networking and attendees will be able to absorb more because gamification maximises learning. It’s also a great way to get people talking…

2. Keep them talking

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One of the best ways to make a webinar successful is to make sure people feel heard and included in the conversation. Opening the webinar to discussion is an effective and natural way to create inclusion, so make the most of those chat andQ&A boxes!. 

If there are lots of questions around a topic you discuss or share information with in one webinar, a post-live webinar Q&A session could be a great way to keep the conversation going and act as a natural extension of the conversion with your audience.

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People from everywhere can tune in and ask their questions. 81% of all analysed webinars in one survey used Q&A to drive audience interaction, making it the most popular engagement tool, so however you choose to incorporate it into your webinar activity, be sure to do so that your audience can really feel a part of the conversation. After all, we all like to be included, and it can make the content really personalised to your audience, which is always a bonus!

Removing geographic limitations means that people all over the world can come together and chat online - and then they can chat about their webinar experience on other platforms. This makes webinars a great way to expand consumer reach by using word of mouth. 

Keeping people talking after the webinar is a fantastic way to continue engagement and grow brand awareness. If you’re wise enough to invest in visually branding your webinar (hint, hint, find a platform that empowers you to do just that…) , post event content shared by your team and participants will naturally grow that brand awareness as it’s shared online. 

Once you start the conversation, it’s all about keeping it going.

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3. Keep them coming back 

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Of course you want your webinar to leave a lasting impression, but even better? Give them something to hold on to and awesome resources (branded, of course) to take away and really make an impression. In 2019, 70% of all webinars offered resources for attendees to download.

Downloadable content is popular: 50% of an audience will, on average, download presentation slides, according to one survey.

It’s important to note, post-event engagement is a wonderful way to nurture attendees down the market funnel. Keeping people coming back also means your webinar should feel like something worth coming back to. So be sure to get the (seemingly) basics nailed.

Hosting a webinar that has speakers and participants that are well lit, with good microphones and cameras can completely change the experience of attending the webinar. Production quality and presenter preparation plays an important role in this and makes people more likely to engage and come back again. 

It also benefits other engagement tools. Presenters need to know how to engage through the platform, so they need to be familiar with the virtual Q&A functions and other programmes specific to their presentations. 

However, when you’re setting the virtual stage for your webinar it's not just the videos that matter - it's the way they are framed. Creating the right environment for your webinar also means finding a place and context to incorporate your branding into the event. 

You want people to feel like they are in the same virtual space, connected to each other through your brand, not just through an anonymous video call. For B2B webinars a holistic approach to engagement leaves clients with a fully rounded experience, so not only have they engaged by listening, speaking and interacting - they’ve also passively been absorbing your brands messaging and voice.

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This kind of subliminal engagement is what will make your webinar memorable. Which is important because you just had an amazing, engaging webinar so why not make sure you get credit for it?

We hope these tips help you to get brainstorming your own engagement opportunities! Here at Tame, we’d love to be a part of your next webinar and help you maximise your engagement. Need some help getting started? We’re here to help, so drop the team a line and we’ll do our best to lend a hand. 

References: 

1. LiveWebinar: “Webinar statistics 2021: 70+ webinar stats you need to know”
2. On24: “What Top-Performing B2B Marketers Do Differently”
3. On24: “ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report”
4. Review42: “Top Gamification Statistics of 2022: Next Level Gaming”
5. Finances Online: “54 Gamification Statistics You Must Know: 2021/2022 Market Share Analysis & Data”
6. Findstack: “The Ultimate List of Webinar Statistics for 2022”