And this is absolutely possible, if the webinar’s content and the overall experience delivers unparalleled value to the audience.
However, it isn’t the easiest thing to command and hold your webinar audience’s interest for the entire duration of the session. More often than not, webinars tend to be one-sided lectures, where the audience plays the part of the passive listener, barely engaged or participating in the session.
To tackle this, there are multiple webinar engagement activities you can employ, and this article aims to bring you some practical ideas on how you can go about conducting an interactive webinar.
Let’s dive in.
Benefits of Interactive Webinars
Before we get to the interactive webinar ideas, let’s quickly take a look at why it is important to make your webinars interactive:
1. Creates a learning atmosphere
Interactive webinars help you understand your audience better. By seeking audience’s inputs via polls, surveys and other engagement tools prior to the webinar, you can gain access to the audience’s expectations from your event.
This data can help you craft a curated learning experience for them. You can personalize the webinar content based on their feedback, and make sure that they leave the session having learnt something of value.
2. Enables better understanding of the topic
As per this research, people learn more from being engaged in activities, rather than from listening to instructions. Allowing webinar attendees to freely express their thoughts, pose questions frequently and clarify their doubts during the session can help them gain a deeper understanding of the webinar topic.
3. Builds Trust
Interactive webinars indicate to the audience that you care about providing value to them, as opposed to just sharing your expertise on the topic. By allowing them to participate actively, you encourage attendees to open up, place their trust in your brand, and feel like they are a part of the event.
This creates a bond between you and your webinar attendees which can lead to brand loyalty and better conversion rates.
4. Presents networking opportunities
One of the surprising benefits of an interactive webinar is that it opens doors for both attendees as well as organizers to build their professional network. Features like breakout rooms allow you to divide attendees into smaller groups to enable targeted and closer discussions amongst attendees. This nudges them to build acquaintances and their professional network.
5. Increases chances of conversions
Interactive webinars serve as a great way of nurturing quality leads. You’re providing your audience with a valuable learning experience, which signifies that you value them and their time. As a result, your audience will be inspired to return for subsequent events to continue upskilling themselves. This gives you the opportunity to nurture these leads and convert them into loyal customers.
5 Interactive webinar ideas to increase engagement
Let’s check out some simple but super effective interactive webinar ideas for increasing engagement at your event.
1. Include a Q&A Session
Posing questions to your webinar participants is arguably the best way to make your webinar interactive. Devote a separate session exclusively to answer all of the audience questions to help them feel at ease and confident about raising their doubts.
Scheduling a separate Q&A session will help in better understanding of the concepts and boost audience engagement without disrupting the flow of the webinar.
2. Use Live Polls
Polls are an effective way of increasing interaction in a webinar. They serve as a wonderful option to pose questions to your webinar audience, without disrupting your presentation, and helps to involve attendees in the webinar content. You can also run polls to understand attendees’ opinions, feedback, etc.
3. Employ Quizzes
A solid webinar platform like Airmeet comes loaded with several engagement features, including gamification and quizzes. To keep your audiences involved in the webinar content, encourage interaction and to assess how well the content is being received by the attendees, you can employ a few quiz questions through the session.
You could either prepare a few questions beforehand to ensure timely execution or be spontaneous and contextually quiz your attendees – either way this is a great way to liven up the spirits and get the engagement levels up.
Airmeet also streamlines this further by integrating with Kahoot which helps in hosting pop quizzes during live sessions. This integration is great for making webinars interactive with quizzes, where attendees can answer questions, and check their scores without even leaving Airmeet.
4. Leverage Gamification Features
Gamification refers to game-like elements that help boost the interactive experience among the virtual audience. Incorporating puzzles and games into your webinars is a great way to encourage participants to engage with the content. Similar to employing quizzes, gamification also helps inspire participation from the attendees which you can further amplify by giving away prizes.
These apart, gamification in webinars can help with:
- Motivating attendees to engage- It helps create a sense of anticipation and curiosity among attendees, by appealing to their competitive side. The prizes or rewards also go a long way in inspiring them to interact with the activity.
- Builds a sense of community – When participants engage in a fun activity, it creates a positive, competitive bond between them, encouraging them to interact with each other more proactively and this plays a role in creating a sense of community.
5. Conduct a survey
To ensure that your webinar stands out, you need to interact with the audience even after the webinar concludes. Sending out post-webinar surveys is a great way to receive feedback from the attendees. This feedback helps you stay engaged with your audience, understand their experience, and make adjustments to upcoming webinars accordingly.
Tips to Boost Webinar Interactions
Here are some tips for you to leverage, if you wish to make your webinars more interactive:
- Provide relevant, valuable content: Remember – the more value you provide your audience, the higher the chances of them participating actively in your webinars, as they are inspired to dig deeper into the topic and learn more.
- Use engaging presentations. The content you deliver matters a lot, but the way you present it matters just as much. Invest in designing impactful webinar presentations with images, videos, graphics and other visual and interactive elements, that help break the monotony of speech.
- Leverage interactive tools: Most webinar softwares provide you with several interactive features that you can use during the event to engage with your audience. Leverage live polls, chats, breakout rooms, and screen sharing, to engage with the participants effectively.
- Employ Storytelling: Great webinar speakers almost always have a knack for storytelling, no matter who the target audience is or which industry they belong to. This is a powerful medium to capture and retain people’s interest and attention, and can transform your webinar’s engagement levels.
- Use Icebreakers: Icebreakers can help participants let go of their hesitation or inhibitions and engage with the webinar host and speakers freely. These questions may not be directly related to the topic, but can help you create a fun, casual and light-hearted webinar environment.
Bottom Line
Making a webinar interactive is not as daunting a task when you invest in the right tools, design the right strategies, and gain a thorough understanding of your audience’s needs and expectations. With the strategies and tips provided in this article, you will be better equipped to ensure participation and interactivity in your next webinar.
FAQs
Use a webinar platform that is scalable, like Airmeet, as it helps streamline several aspects of large scale events. Consider assigning moderators to handle specific tasks like managing questions or facilitating breakout room discussions.
Plan your agenda to include both presentation and interactive segments. Break your content into sections and include interactive activities in between. This keeps the session lively and maintains participant interest.
