You need people to be already interested when they sign up: that way you have a good chance of maintaining their interest. So what do you need to do to earn the attention of your audience?
Convince them that it is important
Do people listening to you even know why they are there? They need to know why it is more important to pay attention than to do whatever else they might be doing. For this reason you need to secure their attention even before your online presentation starts. Focus therefore on the invitation as well as the opening of your webinar. Mention the explicit benefits of attending the session.
Make it more engaging
We are only human beings and as such we have a limited attention span. If people are not interested in the topic, staring at the screen will make them tune out. So you can try to engage your audience in various ways:
- Visual: show them something worth looking at
- Auditory: listening to you should be interesting and easy
- Kinesthetic: want the audience actually ¨to do something
Convince managers too
You should also make sure your audience's superiors know why your online sessions are important. Don’t allow participants to pull out just so they can deal with some minor issue or simply do something else instead. If managers have assigned someone to attend an online session, they should really let them be present at it. This is the conclusion of an article on the management-issues.com website.
-jk-