3 things you must include in every webinar

By Gemma Falconer

Granted, there are a lot of things to think about when preparing a webinar (you can download a planning checklist here), but there are a few features of GoToWebinar that you should be utilising in every event to help you and your attendees get the most out of them.

Here are three things that you should be including in every single webinar.

Upload at least one handout to give away to your audience

You’ve done the hard work of promoting and getting people to register and join your webinar, now as well as presenting something awesome how about offering your audience something else for free? Everyone loves a freebie.

Add a handout to your webinar and give your attendees even more value from attending your event. A handout could be an eBook, a checklist, your presentation slides, summary notes or something else that is related to the topic and is relevant. By including a handout, you’re providing your audience with something useful. They may even share it with colleagues which can only be a good thing for brand visibility and it’s also something that can be referred to beyond the event, thus keeping you in their minds for a little while longer.

In GoToWebinar, you can upload a handout prior to starting your webinar, or during the live event itself if you decide to offer something on the fly (or if you forgot!). You can upload a number of different file formats: Doc, Xls, PPT, PDF, MOV, MP4, JPG, PNG, GIF, Docx, Xlsx, PPTx. You can upload up to five documents and they must be under 100MB each. Attendees can download a handout at any point during the webinar.

Click here to learn how to upload handouts into GoToWebinar.

Include at least one poll and ask your audience questions

The polling tool within GoToWebinar allows you to pre-upload up to 20 questions and each question can have up to five possible responses for your audience to choose from. You can launch a poll at any point during the webinar and your audience will see a screen overlay the presentation with buttons that they can click on to register their response. You can choose to display the results immediately, or later on during the webinar (however I always prefer to share the results straight away so that your audience can see how others in the webinar have voted while it’s fresh in their minds).

There are a few reasons why I love using poll questions within our webinars.

1. Polls offer you the chance to take a break from your presentation and get instant feedback from your audience.
2. They provide an opportunity to get the audience involved which will help to keep them engaged and connected to what you are saying.
3. You can use them to get real-time responses to a particular question which can provide you with more information on who you have in the audience and their thoughts / experience on a particular subject.
4. You can share individual’s responses with your sales team which can help them when following up with leads.

You can see how each of your attendees responded to a poll via the attendee report that can be downloaded via GoToWebinar after your event. The analytics section of GoToWebinar will also provide you with a visual result of the poll which can be useful to include in your summary email to your team for example.

You can read step-by-step instructions for setting up a poll on our support site.

Another way to make use of the questions pane:

Another way of keeping your audience engaged is to ask them a question and allow them to respond via the Questions Pane. We often do this to make sure that our audience is listening and to keep them involved in the webinar. It’s good to have a mix of engagement techniques so try using both polls and verbal questions. The more involved someone is in your webinar, the more likely they are to pay attention and not get so easily distracted with work, their phone or something else.

Examples of the types of questions we ask are:

1. Do you agree with this statement?… Type Y or N into the questions pane.
2. Do you think that it’s easy or hard to keep employees engaged at work? Type in Easy or Hard into the questions pane.
3. What have you enjoyed most about today’s webinar? Type your response into the questions pane.

And if an interesting comment comes in from one of your attendees, share it with everyone. The responses in GoToWebinar can only be seen by Organisers – so if you see a comment worth sharing, respond by saying something such as ‘Comment from Mark’ and click ‘Send to all’ so that your entire audience can see the comment.

Ask for feedback via an instant survey

Surveys are a great way to find out what your audience liked and disliked about your webinar as well as providing the opportunity to offer a call-back, a free trial or to request more information.

Within GoToWebinar, you can have up to 25 questions on your survey. There are a range of response options including multiple choice answers and text fields.

You have the option of allowing your survey to launch immediately after your webinar, or you can include it in your follow-up emails. However, I’d recommend that you allow it to pop up on people’s screens once they leave the webinar so that you can maximise the number of responses. Attendees are more likely to complete a survey straight after the webinar rather than an hour or so later when their attention has turned to other priorities.

Read more in the original article here.