Have you grown tired of attending webinars? Are you the person who has to host these digital meetings for your team?
Whether you’re hosting or attending if you’ve had your fill of these meetings, it may be time to employ some tips to make sure you can have productive meetings. You can put these tips to work or send them to the host to suggest your meetings need to be better so that everyone can get something out of them.
What is the Meeting Agenda?
Do you have a plan for your webinars, or are you simply flying blind and hosting these meetings because you have a weekly schedule that says you need to? When you have an agenda, and you’ve created an actual schedule for the conversations you’ll have, the meeting can run more smoothly and be much more productive for your team.
Is Your Technology Operating Properly?
Have you checked your Wi-Fi signal to ensure you have a strong enough signal to offer the highest quality of audio and video feeds for your team? This is one of the most important aspects of any digital meeting. If you, as the host, don’t have the right connection and ensure you have excellent audio and video output, you’re going to lose your audience and never get your message across.
Discuss a Niche Topic
If the webinars you host aren’t for your working team but for a group trying to connect with your company, you need to discuss something that is a niche topic. This needs to be something specific, and it needs to answer questions or solve problems for your audience. Whatever you’re going to teach people and discuss during your meeting, it needs to be geared toward making things better and easier for your audience.
What is Your Teaching Style?
Webinars offer the opportunity for you to utilize several teaching styles to help your audience. If your topics can be drawn out on a whiteboard while you talk about them, that might work great for you. If sharing your screen with your voice in the background works well, give it a shot. Understand what your teaching style is so that you appear comfortable and confident when making your presentation.
Carry Your Audience Through the Transformation
The audience you teach will arrive at your discussion in one state, and it’s your job to help them leave in another state. They could show up with a mental block they can’t seem to get through, and you need to carry them through it to the answer. How will you go about bringing your team from the beginning to the end, so they leave your meeting having learned something useful?
Build a Structure for Your Webinars
You’ve created the agenda; now think about how long you want to talk about each topic, how long you’ll have for comments and questions, and how you’ll transition from one topic to the next. A good rule of thumb is to keep your webinars to around 50 minutes. This allows you to have meetings that are short enough to keep your team engaged and long enough for you to share your information.
Think About Your Webinars from Your Audience’s Perspective
What are viewers seeing? It’s important that you know exactly what you are showing your audience on the screen. If you’re showing your face during some of the meetings, what is your background? Will everything you share in your meeting be accepted and understood by your audience? Think about the topic, the level of difficulty of the subject matter, and what your viewers will see when they tune in.
Use the Rule of Three to Make it Memorable
Repetition and the Rule of Three can work wonders for you. As you’re building your agenda, think of a way to give your audience three things you want them to take away from your webinars. Once you have these three things, find a way to share them at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, and at the end of the meeting. This will help make your meeting more memorable to your audience.
Interact with Your Audience
Plan specific stops in your presentation for questions and answers. Be prepared to go over some of the content more than once to ensure everyone is following along. Remember, you’re teaching your audience something they might not know. Your team wants to learn from you, but you have to interact with them and engage with their questions and concerns to help them get the most out of your webinars.
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