The Educational Webinar – Part 3: Presentation Essentials
Part 3 of our special webinar tri series in partnership in partnership with The Gap. In each part we’ll be covering a key element of running educational webinars including Marketing, Technology and Webinar Preparation.
Webinar Agenda:
- Structuring your webinar content
- Crafting your slides and presenter notes, avoiding ‘death by PowerPoint’
- Best practice preparation and practise – Using scripts while retaining your ‘presentation style’
- The role of the moderator
- Use of webcams to enhance connection
- Presenting spontaneous polls
- Mastering the ‘call to action’
- Managing Q & A sessions effectively
- Creating highly engaging panel discussions
- How to end the session elegantly
NB: You can also read a full transcript of this session below.
‘Presentation Essentials’ Transcript
Charles Clark:
Good morning everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to part three of BOMA and The Gaps webinar series. This is the educational webinar and introverts paradise. And today we are looking at one of the most important parts, which is presentation essentials. So my name is Charles Clark and I’m thrilled today to be joined by Viv Brownrigg. Hi Viv.
Viv Brownrigg:
Hi Charles. Good evening and good morning in the UK.
Charles Clark:
So Viv is super well placed to be leading today’s webinar. She’s got 17 years experience herself presenting via webinar. And there are some significant as well as some more subtle differences between presenting face to face versus online. And so Viv is really going to dive into these today, as well as giving you a bit of a toolbox of tips and tricks to boost interaction during your webinars, so that most importantly your listeners stay engaged.
Just a little bit of housekeeping. Many of you will have been familiar with attending zooms yourself but just something to keep in mind if you are doing this to your clients, it’s always a good idea to have this slide just to explain how to use it. And the most important thing here really is that you can ask questions as we go. You can submit them by the Q&A pane. I’ll collate them. I’ll be moderating and then we’ll raise them at the end during the Q&A. So now Viv I’ll hand over to you.
Viv Brownrigg:
Thanks Charles. And great to be here. And yeah, we had an exciting little ride just before we kicked off. Didn’t we Charles? Little, little things.
Charles Clark:
I’m not sure I want many more exciting rides. That was for long.
Viv Brownrigg:
No, it was great. But we got there, just found a chord that was unplugged.
Okay. So welcome everyone and a little bit of a thought for this morning session. People don’t love public speaking and a lot of people are afraid of delivering their first webinar. So Richard Branson says, “Picture yourself in a living room, having a chat with your friends. You’d be relaxed and comfortable talking to them and the same applies when public speaking.” Now in fact that’s even more so true in a webinar because you have the comfort of sitting behind your screen, most of the people listening into you are clients, you know them well, and you’re in control as long as you are prepared. So I would argue that actually speaking at a webinar is infinitely easier than public speaking on a stage in a face to face seminar type environment. So let’s get in there.
Okay. Now a couple of months ago BOMA and The Gap did a survey. We asked you what your big webinar challenges were. And in the first two parts of this webinar series we dealt with the marketing anxiety. Part two we dealt with tech anxiety. Today it’s all about delivery and engagement anxiety. It’s also about how to structure your content for your webinars and how to make sure you get some sort of return on the time that you are spending. So that’s where we’re focusing today. We sent out some pre work a day ago and we’ll talk a little bit about pre work cause it’s a good engagement tool. And it was very interesting. Thank you to all the people that sent their pre work in really quickly. So we asked you how frequently are you doing webinars. 5% of you are doing them at least monthly, which is great. 39% of you are doing them from time to time and 56% of you haven’t started yet. So if you are in that 56%, don’t worry you’re in really good company.
We then asked you what the number one challenge was in terms of kicking off your first webinar and 44% of you said confidence. So it’s practice guys and you’ll get super confident. Even if a weird little techy challenge does come your way and you resolve it 30 seconds before you go to air. So you just get pretty seasoned at it the more you do.
Okay. So our agenda, fairly tight, but we’re going to leave a good 10 minutes for questions. So make sure they roll in and Charles will gather them up at the end. We’re going to talk about how to structure your content. We’re going to talk about how to avoid boring people with over complex slides. We are going to really spend some time on your pre webinar preparation. It’s preparation that makes you comfortable. We’ll talk about the role of the moderator. A few tips and tricks on your voice. And then we’re going to dive into five ways to increase engagement at a webinar because so different to presenting face to face. We’re going to talk about mastering the call to action so that your clients take something away from the webinar, do something to improve their business and so that you get some of your goals achieved. Maybe you’ve got some sales goals. Maybe you want to provide a new service to clients and you get the opportunity to pitch for that without coming across as a salesperson. We’re going to talk about the importance of the exit survey. So you get the feedback that you need. Then we’ll go to some questions and talk about some next steps.
So let’s just talk about webinar content structure. Now this is a bit of a tried and true methodology that we use at the Gap and it works really well. And you can mix this up a bit, for sure. For example, if you are doing a webinar that’s purely a panel discussion, then you won’t have many slides and you won’t have the structure but if you’re doing a presenting educational webinar, this structure really works. First of all you’re going to have some sort of welcome content. You’re going to thank your clients for giving up their time to be at the webinar. And then you’re going to do a brief introduction of panelists. Which is why it’s good to have a second person riding shotgun as your moderator, as Charles is with me this morning, because it’s a bit weird introducing yourself. So really brief introduction of panelists, brief rundown of platform features whether it’s Zoom or GoToWebinar.
It’s nice to have a thought of the day. Something’s really relevant to what you’re talking about. Something that gets people’s attention, makes them think. Then you’re going to very briefly talk about what you’re going to talk about. So into the agenda. Then you move into the learning points of the webinar. And then it’s good to then go to a short Q&A session. It’s good not to have the Q&A session at the very end of the webinar because you’re encouraging people to leave early, not participate in the Q&A and you may not get them to fill in their feedback survey, which is really important in terms of that call to action. Then you’ll present some next steps so that they do something with the knowledge they’ve gained and that you get the ability to perhaps talk about some of the ways you can help them, the services you can offer.
And then you can close with a parting thought. And then we find a nice elegant way for you to say goodbye. I’ve got a particular way of saying goodbye on a webinar. It’s pretty much the same every time. And it avoids that awkward who’s saying goodbye first kind of moment at the end of the webinar.
Okay. So we’re going to go and have a look at an example of that very shortly. We will go and have a look at the “Know Your Numbers” webinar pack and we’ll just look at the content, the slides. But I just want to remind all the Gap firms in the room that we’ve got 13 webinar kits sitting in the Gap portal right now. You’ve all, don’t reinvent the wheel, use what we’ve got there. It’s tried and true and it works. All of your marketing materials, all of your planning materials, all your processes and that all important slide deck with detailed speaker notes. There is everything there you would need. You don’t have to reinvent anything.
So let’s go and have a look at “Know Your Numbers” and here is the title slide. This is a PDF it’s not in PowerPoint. It’s just going to be a little bit easier for me to display. Here’s the moderator, Penny. Little bit about the GoToWebinar or Zoom features. Penny’s going to introduce Adam, he’s looking pretty confident. Thought for the session and then we move into the agenda and just notice short, sharp, crisp, numbered points. Not a lot of words on the slides. Why we need to know our numbers, overview of key reports and in we go into the meat of the presentation. And you can see that wherever possible we are using some nice crisp images. We don’t want too many words on the slide and we’ve wherever possible we’ll use a diagram or two.
And then we are into your next steps. What are you going to do next? And here’s how we can help you. So this is where we get the opportunity to talk about additional services we can provide. And I’ll talk to you in the session a little bit later about how you avoid coming across as a product pusher or a salesperson when you get to this point of the webinar. We can go to Q&A then. And then we thank our attendees and we elegantly close.
So not a lot of stuff sitting on the slides. I’m going to go back to my PowerPoint now. And let’s talk about PowerPoint, really important. I’ve seen some hideous presentations. You’ve probably seen some hideous presentations too, where there’s just too much going on. So the first point is we want less words. PowerPoint is about crisp points. It’s not about you regurgitating your speaker notes onto the slide. It’s too hard for the attendee to focus on all of that stuff. They want to hear you talk. And so we use more images. Now for those of you who are creating your own PowerPoint presentations for webinars, we use unsplash.com. So that’s unsplash.com. Free images, beautiful photos and it’s all crowdsourced. It’s lovely. And it’s very on brand. It’s very fresh. It’s very modern and you’ll just put a word in there and you’ll get heaps of images for that particular topic and you choose away.
So more images and those images could be internet photos. They could be diagrams. They could be a mindset out of the portal. So a picture tells a thousand words and it gives your attendees something to look at rather than just words. So they can look at the diagram and they can interpret the diagram. Don’t overuse animations. Don’t have things flying in from the left and flying in from the right and pirouetting all over the place. It distracts and it detracts. So just don’t, maybe use one or two animations for something super powerful, and I’ll show you one coming up, but don’t overuse it. And very importantly don’t stay too long on one slide.
Now this is the opposite advice I would give you at a face to face presentation. At a face to face presentation people are looking at you all the time. You’ve got other devices you can use. You’ve got flip charts, you’ve got whiteboards, you’ve got things you can hold up and show. Things you can hand around, hand out. You haven’t got those things at a webinar. So you really want to keep the slides moving and the images moving. So don’t stay too long on one slide.
Use lists, numbered or bulleted lists. And here’s a little trick for you. This slide is called “Seven ways to avoid Death by PowerPoint.” So I haven’t bulleted this list. I’ve gone one through to seven because that makes sense because we’re presenting seven ways to avoid. Speak in the present tense as I am to you right now because it’s the educational tense. It’s the instructive learning tense and use the active voice. So these are simple things that you do when you start to build your own PowerPoint slides.
Okay. What about preparation? Okay. Preparation is really important. And I can’t stress this enough. Please practice your presentation three times. Now I said to you before that presenting at a webinar is much more comfortable than being on a stage and presenting in front of 30, 40, 50, 100 people. Much more. You are sitting behind the screen. You are prepared, you are in control but you are only in control if you are prepared. Now if you don’t practice what you’re going to say, then it is going to be a hideous experience for you. So practice three times. Once in front of the cat because you’re going to feel a bit weird about talking to yourself. And secondly to the team, get some feedback from them. You’re not going to get anything from the cat. And then have the last practice by yourself where you’ve made a few little refinements.
Now it’s absolutely okay to have speaker notes. In fact I highly recommend it. And what I would suggest to you is this couple of different ways you can do this. You can print them out as I do and I draw all over them and highlight the real things I want to get to, and I’ll glance at them from time to time. Or you might actually have them up on a second screen if that’s your preference.
And here’s a little hint. The first couple of times you do a webinar is absolutely, if you don’t have your camera on while you’re doing the presentation, if you’re just putting your camera on for the Q&A session at the end, then it’s absolutely okay to read your notes out as long as you do it in a way that it doesn’t sound like you’re reading the notes out. Just by using some inflexion in your voice and varying up the words a little bit. And I’ve heard of some Gap members doing that and being totally comfortable the first couple of times. I do hope in time you’ll get to the stage where you can have the notes to the side, glance at them from time to time and be focused on the people and focused on the slide.
Now when you’re doing your practice sessions, please time yourself. If you are a great ad-libber, if you like to ad-lib a bit, please would you mentally add 10 minutes to how long you think you’re going to speak. Because I assure you that when you get in front of that virtual audience, you will ad-lib if you’re a bit of a king of wing. Now 15 minutes before kickoff without fail. Charles was there 15 minutes beforehand. One of my darling people had actually, we got new gear, new cameras, wiz bang staff. They were charging things up and they forgot to put a cable in and there’s about 20 cables in there. So we got there. That’s fine. There’s always, but be prepared 15 minutes before kickoff. Speaker notes at hand, tech check complete, glass of water within reach and you’re good to go.
Let’s talk about the moderator, very important. Now I’m aware that some of you don’t use a moderator, that’s cool. I would recommend that if you’ve got an admin or marketing person, who’s a little bit interested in tech. By the way the tech on Zoom and GoToWebinar is super easy. We’ve got complex camera and audio gear here because we’re actually getting ready for online master classes. So we’ve specked up the tech a bit, but it’s super easy.
Now the moderator’s role is really to open the webinar and take the pressure off the presenter. So here’s the moderator. The moderator has got the presenters back. Looking after the moderator. The moderator is also going to introduce you as a presenter because it’s fairly weird presenting yourself, particularly introducing yourself. Particularly if you’ve got future clients in the virtual room. They’re going to manage the tech, housekeeping, any chat messages that come through, the Q&A that comes through in the Q&A session. And they’re going to make sure that the webinar runs to time. Going to give you a little tip in terms of a little spiel you can use a little bit later, for if you think you’re going to be a few minutes over time.
Okay. Your voice does matter. It’s far less technical in a webinar than it is in a face to face seminar. But here are my three tips. Slow down, take some pauses, vary it up a bit. Vary the speed of it. Don’t go break neck speed the entire webinar, you’ve got to take a breath. Try to think about eliminating most of those ums and ahs because that’s fairly much a sign that you are not prepared and you don’t know what’s coming up next in your speaker notes or in the slides. Most importantly just be you, don’t be anyone else. Everyone else is taken. Be you that’s really important.
Okay. Let’s talk about how we increase engagement. Now webinars are fantastic from an education marketing perspective and incredibly amazing in this year, this very strange year we’re all living in called 2020. Where we’ve had to get out to people very quickly with the sort of support they need right now.
So webinars are great. It costs you nothing to hold one. It costs your client nothing to get to one. And they’re pretty time efficient as well. I reckon there’s three to four hours prep as a presenter for a webinar. That’s it if you’re picking one of our webinar kits and going. It’s leveraged support, so you can create marketing assets every time you do a webinar. Take a recording and you’ve got a marketing asset that you can repurpose. So incredibly useful asset to have.
The only downside of a webinar is you can’t see your clients. So how do you get them to participate? How do you get them engaged? Here’s five ways we can do that. Now the first one we can do is to send some pre work out prior to the session and you’ll notice that we did this. Charles did this a day ago and thank you for the good number of people who filled that in. Now the thing about pre work is it gets your audience to think a little bit about what they want out of the webinar before they turn up, it gets them prepped to be there. It also gives you some insights. So you can weave a little bit of that content into your webinar as I did before.
So I mocked up a couple of days ago, three questions for some pre work for a “Know your numbers” webinar and I just use survey monkey. Three questions. The first one, do you understand the difference between profit and cash? And so let’s imagine that how will you use this information? Let’s imagine that 64% of your clients come back with, I don’t understand the difference between profit and cash. Use that stat because it’s powerful. So you could put another slide up and you could say to your audience, it’s really interesting in your pre work, we discovered that 64% of you don’t understand the difference between profit and cash. And if you are in that 64%, that’s totally okay. That’s why you are here. That’s why we are helping you now and that’s our job. So you immediately relaxed your audience and they don’t feel bad for not knowing that. So you can really use that pre work to engage people.
Okay. At some point during the webinar I hope you will get your cameras on. So I tend to have my camera on throughout the webinar because I know I’m prepared. I’ve done three practices and I’m prepared and I’m comfortable doing that but that wasn’t always the case. I wasn’t always comfortable doing that. So when you start out, start out by turning the webcams on for your Q&A session only and then build up the confidence to have it on during the entire session.
So, here’s a snapshot of a webinar that I did a couple of months ago on outsourcing. I was super confident and comfortable with the topic. So I was happy to have my mugshot up there throughout the presentation. And you get used to that after a time. Now the third situation where you should have your webcams on is when you’re having a panel discussion. Really important that your panelists have their webcams on. And I’ll talk shortly about how to prepare for a panel discussion. So it is really effective.
O
kay, let’s talk about in session polls. This is a really good way to actually boost interaction and get your clients to do something during the webinar. Now you can do this on Zoom, you can do this on GoToWebinar, you can run an instant poll. However, we prefer Mentimeter. And the reason why we love Mentimeter is it gives you more options. You can do a word cloud. This is a word cloud and you can see the attendees have been asked one question and a number put “few attendees.” So that’s the biggest set of words in the word cloud. So you can see what the biggest issue is. You can do a word cloud, you can do a free form, you can do multi-choice, you can do scaling. There’s a ton of options there.
So let’s do a bit of an instant poll now. And I’ve just got Mentimeter minimised. I’m going to alt tab across to Mentimeter now. Here we go. So I want you to go into menti.com and put in the code 4 7 7 2 1 0 3. Maybe we’ll get one out of Charles. Charles. So what’s your ninja skill? Now we’re not going to make this technical, let’s have some fun. So a ninja skill is something you’re really good at, even if it’s pointless. For example being an expert at falling upstairs. So is somebody going to put their poll in? Not coming up. Nobody going to go and share. Nah it’s not coming up. Not quite sure what’s happening there or whether nobody, but this does work. It worked absolutely a treat this afternoon.
Here we go. Standing on one leg, I love it. Here everyone’s got over their shyness now. Photoshop, beautiful. Business development, I love you, you’re fantastic. Doing webinars, love it. Okay. Slipping on ice. I wonder if Mark Telford, I wonder if that was Mark. Prep, very good. Falling over. Speaking to business owners, I love it. Fantastic. So you can see and then they start scrolling, talking to new clients. Procrastinating. You did actually procrastinate a bit but I’m sure you’re not the last one to do it. So that’s fantastic. So this is how you can really and once that screen fills up, they’ll then start to scroll over to the first ones again and you can keep replaying them. So this is just one type of instant poll that you can do. And that’s fantastic. So let’s go back to our slide deck.
Okay. So instant polling, really, really good. Have some fun with it. Think in advance about what the poll’s going to be. Set up the Mentimeter in advance. You’ve got it alt tab, you’ve got that file open and minimised and you’re just going to alt tab between your presentation and Menti. Ask people to slip the code in and away you go.
Okay, let’s talk about panel discussions. These can be really powerful. But there’s a few tips and tricks here. So here’s a screenshot from a panel discussion on outsourcing that I did a couple of months ago. I had, there were two presenters myself and this lovely chap down here from Connect. And then of course, Jade was our moderator and we had three panelists here. We had [Johno 00:26:10], Jason and Matt. So we actually practiced. Now we actually put a bit of thought into this.
So the first thing I would say there’s three incredibly important tips. The first one is someone needs to manage the panelists. So, because I knew what questions we really wanted to drive out, before we went to the audience for questions. That was me. So I managed asking the questions of the panelists. When it came to opening the floor up to attendees for questions, Jade took over because she was looking at the Q&A pane. So have someone manage the panelists. Okay. So that’s typically the presenter, the chief presenter.
Okay. So second tip is, please do a practice run with the panelists. And there’s two reasons why you’d want to do this. The first one is you want to do a bit of a tech check. Do they have, does their audio equipment work? Do they have a headset so that you’re not going to hear a lawnmower starting up or something else weird going on? Do their webcams work? Okay. So you just want to do a bit of a tech check. Do they know how to mute themselves, et cetera, et cetera. Second reason you want to do a bit of a practice run off the core questions you will ask them is you don’t really want some weird sort of surprise that is totally out of left field with what everyone else is thinking. So you just want to be a bit careful there.
So that’s my third tip. So how I organised this is I came up with, with the help of these three panelists, six questions. Now I gave two to each of them and they actually went away, this is a week before the webinar, and they thought about how they were going to respond. And then we had a practice session and others could dive in to that question as well. So we had a core six questions and then Jade, as moderator, took it out to the floor to the attendees and said, “What other questions have you got for Johno or Matt or Jason?” And they came with extra questions. You don’t get through a massive number of questions in a panel discussion because everyone starts getting excited and talking about stuff and it goes all over the place. So it’s the panelist manager’s job to make sure you bring things back and focus on the questions. So it worked really well. And you could see Johno’s in full flight here. We actually, I don’t know, he’s a very funny guy. And he started cracking jokes about Trump and it really got quite funny.
So panel discussion’s can work very well. Now what you’re trying to do here is you’re trying to tread a careful line between being totally spontaneous, where you absolutely don’t know what’s going to happen, what you’re going to say and whether you’re going to have enough time to say it. And you don’t want to be the other way. You don’t want to have this manicured studio type look where it looks like it’s all very rehearsed and it’s not very real and it’s all very practiced. You don’t want that. And that’s why you don’t need to stress about people’s backgrounds. You don’t need to worry about whether their video is fantastic or not. Look at the videos and hear the quality’s all quite variable but that’s okay. Audio and being able to hear people well, that’s super important. But you know what, in 2020 everyone’s been on Zoom a million times, everyone’s video is fairly variable. It doesn’t matter. So focus on the questions, not on the video.
Okay. So that’s that on panel discussions. Okay. Chat and Q&A very, very important. I’ve got three tips for you and you can see that from time to time I glance down on my notes and that’s absolutely fine. You’re being real. You forgot something. You want to get back to it. So three important things. First of all I think it’s great if your moderator organisers and runs chat and manages the Q&A session because it’s a nice bouncing off between two people. It gives, it varies up the voice a bit and it does protect the presenter a bit. And so it’s really important. And also the moderator can help make sure you stick to time. So if you are running short of time, somebody’s asked a really long complex question or we’ve got carried away with time, which does happen. And you’re worried you’re going to run over time but you don’t want people to leave the webinar and you want them to fill in the feedback form at the end of the webinar, which is super important. Your moderator can say something like this. “We’ve got a few minutes left. We may be going over time, just two or three minutes. If anyone needs to leave the webinar, please remember to answer the brief exit questions that’ll pop up in your browser as you exit.” So you’re just reminding people to do that.
Now the second tip I’ve got when it comes to chat and Q&A is it’s really good to have three backup questions for your moderator, that you’ve given to them in advance. And there’s a good reason to do this. And you pick questions that are relevant, that people will genuinely be interested in the answers. People are a bit shy at being the first one to ask the question, just like you were a bit shy being the first one to answer the poll when we ran that Mentimeter. And what you find, people don’t want to be the first one or they’re a bit bashful, is my question a bit silly? So the best thing is if you got backup questions, you start to ask the first one or two questions. You’ll find that the questions start to flow in there because people are relaxed and they’ve kind of got permission to do it.
The third tip I’ve got is if you get a very obscure or highly detailed question, the question’s 15 lines long, it’s got seven ifs, buts and maybes in it, you can’t even really understand the question. Best to park that one. And the moderator can send them back a nice message saying, “Hey, great question. Quite a bit involved here. We’re going to come back to you after the webinar and give you a detailed question because you really deserve that. And we’ll do that.” And avoid asking the question because you could really turn everyone off and you’ll lose the engagement level. And make sure you do actually do that, super important. So there’s really three very important tips for your moderators for Q&A.
Okay. Let’s talk about that all important “Core-to-action” next steps slide. It’s important that your clients do something with the information they learn at your educational webinar. And if you are also wanting to offer them new services so that they get the help they need in their business, you need to put it out there. But you don’t want to come across as being a salesperson. You’re not a product pusher. So the way to avoid coming across as one, is to always provide a free or a do it yourself option. And I’ll give you an example of that in a moment.
If you’re wanting people to engage you in services and I know how challenging are at the moment out in the business world as countries flip in and out of lockdowns. But you can’t do everything for nothing. And if you want to help your clients and provide service, you’ve got to put the prices on your slide. And you can’t expect them to opt into a service, to ask for service in that exit survey if they don’t know what it’s going to cost. So super important that you put the price on slide.
Now your opportunity to get your clients to do something new or to position those services and provide those additional services is not over once the webinar is concluded. Because you can repurpose, reuse those recordings with people who didn’t come to the webinar, who couldn’t make it for whatever reason. And of course you can follow up.
So this is all about giving the choice of yes’s and really understanding the value ladder. So for example, bottom rung of the value ladder. Let’s imagine we are running the “Know your Numbers” webinar, so it’s free. So we’re on the first rung. The do it yourself option might be just simply to send them the guide to your financial reports and they can start doing some learning themselves. So that’s free.
A low cost option might be, let’s just have one meeting and we’ll spend 90 minutes teaching you how to interpret your P and L and balance sheet. So let’s just have a low cost meeting, we’ll provide you with a tonne of value. Or let’s go up the ladder, deeper engagement. The relationship’s deeper, the value is much higher and let’s facilitate a business planning session. So this is the choice of yes’s also known as the value ladder. And so here’s an example. Here’s a slide out of the “Know your Numbers” webinar. And you can see we’ve started with a free meeting. Of course that’s the complimentary client review or it could be proactive accounting meeting for a future client. And up we go the value ladder. So don’t be shy but always have one or two free options in there. So people don’t think that you’re selling to them every time they come to a webinar or else they’ll be turned off.
Okay. Before we go to questions, it’s really important that you have an exit survey and you can do that out of Zoom now, that’s relatively recent. So you don’t have to send a survey monkey after the fact. So it’s really important that you have an exit survey so you get feedback. And you’ll find in the Gap webinar kits, that these exit survey suggested questions are sitting in each kit. So how valuable did you find this webinar? It’s really important you get feedback. Positive feedback will really boost your confidence. Based on today’s webinars, here’s where you’re repositioning, as you did on that slide, the services you can offer and you’re putting your freebies in there. Very important. What three actions will you take? What other suggestions do you have for educational webinars? Really important. 30 seconds it’s going to take them to fill that in. So super easy. So you need that feedback.
Okay. We are going to go to questions and I’m going to stop sharing now so that you can focus on us rather than that PowerPoint slide. So…
Charles Clark:
Fantastic.
Viv Brownrigg:
Charles, do we have questions?
Charles Clark:
Yes, we do. And I’m going to start with the most recent one first because it’s a relates to a slide that you just covered on the “Call-to-action.” And the question is, should you start with the free option first or the highest value? And I suspect that you might say you could give all options.
Viv Brownrigg:
You give all options. Basically you’re giving all options and people decide where they are. They decide where they are. And look, there’s two schools of thoughts, a thought on whether you should, on the slide put the free options first and then build down to the highest value option. I personally do it the other way because you really want to spend some time on explaining the value on that business planning session, for example and you’re working your way down. Now some of you are not ready for this. You are just not in a position. I understand how difficult cash flow might be for you right now. But to get you started, let’s just send this guide to you. So you’re getting them on the value ladder. So I put the freebies last personally, and that’s how we tend to do it on the slides. Yeah.
Charles Clark:
Great. And then another question from earlier on. And this one is around engagement and it’s, what is the best way to get engagement if you only have a few people on your webinar e.g. less than 10?
Viv Brownrigg:
Well first of all I really want to make this, this is super important. I want you to imagine that you’ve got a hundred people on there. I want you to imagine there are a hundred people there because for every person that, I don’t know how many clients you have, but for every person that turns up to the webinar, there’s going to be another three or four that you can send that recording to. And people like to digest the content in their own style, on their own terms, sometimes on their own time. Some people want to look at the recording in their own time. So make sure you put as much effort into the webinar as if there were a hundred. So to get engagement, what I would do is I’d really focus on pre work. Now if you’ve only got 10 people coming to the webinar, you’ve got 10 people that your administration assistant or that you can actually follow up on the pre work.
Hi guys. And this is where you can use a few tips. Hey, looking forward to seeing you at the webinar. Look 80% of our attendees have filled in the pre work, I’m just waiting on yours. Okay. Would be really great to get your input. Then you can get to that webinar and you’ve got 90% participation on the pre work. So you’ve got a really good snapshot in the room. I would argue actually that it’s easier to get more participation the fewer the people attending. Yeah. And very important for that one, that you’ve got three or four backup questions for the moderator, so that you get to a point where some bright spark out of that 10 goes “I feel confident asking a question now because I’m not the only one asking questions.” So make sure you got backup questions, do pre work and get that camera on as soon as you can and do some sort of meaningful poll in session. But the pre work for a small number of people, I’d really hit that hard.
Charles Clark:
Fantastic. And then our last question, and this is around the time or the length of a webinar and… Actually we’ve just got another one come in. So I’ll just do this one. And then one more. So I remember a few years ago, webinars were all about an hour. This one tonight is 45 minutes. I know a lot of businesses are very busy and so a lot of you out there are concerned that you might be going even too long at 45 minutes, but what’s your view on 45 minutes or maybe even shorter?
Viv Brownrigg:
Yeah, totally. Look, when I first started doing webinars 17 years ago, we used this godawful platform called WebEx. The technology was horrible. The technology is absolutely beautiful now. And yeah, we used to run one and a half hour webinars. Incredible. Isn’t it?
Charles Clark:
Viv, your cameras turned off.
Viv Brownrigg:
Yep. I’ll just see what’s, I just wonder if it’s gone on to low bat actually. I wonder. I’m not going to get up fiddle it.
Charles Clark:
We can still hear you so that’s okay.
Viv Brownrigg:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we used to do one and a half hour webinars and then we went to one hour 15, and then we went to one hour and we’ve gone to 45. So what we are trying to do is really respect people’s time. It’s super important. Some of the webinar kits sitting in the portal, one of the governance ones we’ve just published is designed to be 30 minutes. So short and snappy, don’t labor the point. And less is often more. Let people get those short bites of information and then let them get on their way. So we are going to be producing more and more webinars that are even shorter in length and in two and three parts. So you can do a part one, a part two, a part three. So these are ways that you can get more people to come to your webinar.
Charles Clark:
Fantastic. Well, thanks everyone so much for your questions. As Viv said earlier that’s not quite the end of the webinar. We’ve just got a few slides left. So Viv if you start sharing screen again and yep we’ll. We can see that.
Viv Brownrigg:
All good. Okay. So our next steps, now I know this has been one hell of a year. Everyone’s pretty tired. It’s November and yeah, it’s been a hell of a year, but make a plan and actually start rolling out those webinars. The firms that are doing it, its working absolutely brilliantly for them. Not only is it supporting their clients right now in a time of absolute need but it’s actually bringing them new clients, which is incredible. Use your Gap webinar kit, don’t reinvent the wheel.
Carefully time critical webinars and it’s got some critical webinars probably coming up in the UK around additional government support, HR support for example. You can go to air with a webinar, do the marketing for a webinar, Three days before you run the session when times are critical. A lot of evergreen topics that are sitting in the portal, so you can recycle those. You can run those every quarter. You don’t need a huge number of webinars to be able to do one a month. And keep an ear to the ground for dynamic type topics, such as software for document management for example.
Now for those of you who aren’t Gap members, if you fill in the exit survey, just tick the box if you’d like access to our free webinar process guide. We’ll get that to you. And if you aren’t a Gap member, talk to someone at the Gap and we are going to make this super easy for you to roll out a webinar program.
Okay. Parting thought. And this is super true. On Monday the Gap team, the whole Gap team got an email from a Gap firm in New Zealand rolling out their webinars. And they got this absolutely beautiful email from a client saying, “I can’t say thank you enough for the free webinars you are running. You’re teaching us so much about how to run a better business. We are hopefully going to be the first generation, of the first couple, generation in our family to actually own their own home.” And that was just the most humbling piece of feedback I’ve ever seen. So if you can speak, you can influence. If you can influence, you can change lives and to all the [Gappy’s 00:45:53] out there who are doing that. Thank you very much because you’re really making us proud. Okay guys, that’s all from us today. Thank you Charles for moderating and being your usual cool, calm, cucumber self. Thank you to everyone for being on the line. We’ll see you again soon. Bye for now.
Charles Clark:
Brilliant. Thanks everyone. Have a great day.
