Think of a webinar as your own online presentation whether a sales briefing, training session, marketing meeting or remote gathering of your team. These events are easy enough to put on. All you need is a descent digital camera, access to a laptop or desktop and an interesting presentation. Think about avoiding these top five mistakes when launching your next webinar series:
- Don’t use unreadable graphics – don’t make apologies for graphics or charts viewers cannot read or understand. Don’t use them. Unreadable charts and graphs show poor professionalism in your presentation. The audience really does want to learn and hear from you, that’s why they signed up for the webinar in the first place. Enlarge a section of a graph or chart if you believe it necessary to make your point.
- Don’t talk about what you don’t know – There’s a lot that each of us know and there’s just as much we don’t know. Stick with your strong suit. Talk about what you know best. Audiences are pretty savvy these days. It won’t take long for your webinar participants to figure out you don’t know the material. Don’t waste their time or purger your reputation.
- Keep the pace moving – Because you won’t be able to detect if your audience is nodding off during your webinar, you’ll need to keep the online event interesting, relatively fast-paced and interactive where possible. Because the Internet has fostered such a high level of instant gratification, your audience will have little patience if things grind to a halt. Keep the pace of your online presentation moving.
- Stay on schedule – before the webinar starts do a run-through and time yourself for each slide. Take a piece of paper and record what slide you need to be on for each five-minute interval in order to finish the presentation on time. Finishing the webinar five minutes early is even better. This gives you a few extra minutes to talk about what might pop into your head that relates to what you are talking about.
- Too Much Promotion – too much selling during the webinar and people start leaving in droves. People may want to buy the product or service, but first they need to hear what pain it cures, what benefits it delivers. Don’t mention the product or service until half way through the presentation. This signals to the audience that conveying the information is more important than selling the product or service.
