Audience Engagement

Amidst of prevailing digital ecosystem, webinars have risen as an excellent medium of marketing for many ecommerce brands. 

Sending out a couple of customer service email now and then is good, but it is not sufficient to sustain engagement. Webinars come forward as a rescue in such scenarios. They help companies get in touch with their customers and stakeholders. However, you must know the techniques to make the most out of the webinars to receive all the benefits they offer for your business. Here are some of the ways/webinar tools to help you optimize your webinars, thereby boost audience engagement.  

Utilize live Engagement Tools

While live webinars are interactive by nature, they won’t make a great difference if the proper engagement tools are not being implemented. Even if there is a direct link between engagement and conversation, keeping the audience engaged is not a simple task. You must deploy some of the features that help you engage your audience. It includes-

  • Live chats for Q&A + Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions. These sessions help you include your audience in the conversation; thereby, they can interact and lead the conversation with prospective business experts. 
  • Survey and polls are some of the best ways of webinar audience engagement. They help you get insights into the audience experience by collecting statistics and other related information. For example, you can consider asking: “Was this webinar helpful?” or “How was your experience with this webinar?” in a poll. Also, consider creating a chart that displays the results of your survey. 
  • Gamified tests are fun and exciting ways of testing attendees’ knowledge and engage them in return.

Foster the binge-watch culture

You must be aware of the momentous popularity of today’s video streaming platforms like Netflix and Twitch. They have reshaped the idea of how the audience consumes media. ‘Binge-watching’ is a new streaming culture that has taken over these days. It creates an impulse that drives the audience to feel a strong urge to consume as much media as possible in one sitting. 
Make use of this trend for your webinars. Storing on-demand webinars help, you gather your entire content under one hub, which enables your leads to binge-watch all your webinars. 

Moreover, consider recycling your content through different social media platforms. You can do this by breaking down the webinars into easy-to-digest videos. Further, you can share these short and crisp videos on your social media accounts, including Twitter and Instagram.

A survey by Statista has revealed that 67% of the audience interacted with brands on Instagram during 2020. It implies that social media videos are one of the most effective ways to exploit video marketing for improving ecommerce sales.  

However, creating social media videos is not simply about chopping your videos up into pieces. You can hire professional video editors or invest in the best editing tools to create engaging video content, thereby boost conversions and invite interactions.  

Enable CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) 

One of the many benefits that come along with online events is their easier accessibility. You can watch a webinar session from any device. It has been seen that most of the attendees use their smartphones to watch webinars. Thus you, as a host of webinar event, must invest in CTI technology. 

However, what is this CTI technology? CTI or Computer Telephony Integration enable the interaction between telephones and computer systems to help you make your content accessible across both desktop and smartphone devices. Audience engagement becomes with such accessibility.

Cybersecurity is crucial

While video conferencing or digital events like webinars are effective in many ways, they bring a series of challenges concerning security. Thus, when operating in a B2B ecosystem, you must take care of the cybersecurity aspect with foremost priority. 

You can secure passwords for restricted access. This will enable access to only those who want to attend the webinar. 

Moreover, make sure you are encoding documents that contain sensitive information about your attendees, business partners or other stakeholders. Also, consider installing file detection for allowing antivirus software to detect where documents are coming from.

Boost your SERP 

You don’t require SEO techniques just for your business websites. It is equally important to implement the SEO skills for hosting webinars. You can improve the attendance number by boosting your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) positioning. For that you need to implement basic SEO strategies that include using the right keywords and descriptions, etc.

Conclusion

Webinars are a prerequisite for ecommerce brands to invite and engage customers in today’s digital world. However, hosting webinars just for the sake of it won’t help in the long run. You must incorporate some techniques to optimize your webinars, thereby improve the chances of better audience engagement. Once you decode the art of webinar audience engagement, nothing can stop you from creating an impact and building a solid customer base for your business.