8 Tips for Selecting the Right Prospect Lists

Posted on January 29, 2012 by jessica.kleppang

Any marketer worth his or her salt knows John Wanamaker’s famous advertising maxim “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Unfortunately, it’s a very real situation for many marketers. In 2009, the Fournaise Marketing Group reported that, in 2008, 60 percent of all advertising spending it tracked globally failed to deliver the results expected; therefore, the spending was wasted.

When you consider this, it is easy to understand why brands often have a challenging time of accurately reaching and engaging their intended audience. Too often, companies overspend on low-value customers and prospects, and underspend on high-value opportunities.

Today’s marketing leaders are tasked to deliver better results in tight economic times while consumers have their hands on the information throttle, controlling when they want to receive information, or if they want to tune you out. Considering which customers and prospects to reach out to should go beyond list size, permission, cadence, content and deliverability. It shouldn’t be a guessing game; instead, here is what you can do to be improve your chances to win:

1. Set the Right Measurements
Yelling louder and more often means customers tune you out faster. Marketing leaders seek the type of attribution across all addressable media that they can get through email. If your marketing team sends traditional, mass advertising, then expect to see traditional results.

Also, are your organization’s goals, numbers and forecast results realistic? Will they grow and align with the addition of quality, profitable customers and prospects who want to engage with your brand? Will your organization’s list efforts have a positive impact on your other performance metrics?

Don’t let big numbers dilute your desired results. Identify what you want allocated to which segments of your target audience, whether it’s those who read your content, call you up, click through, advocate on your behalf or make a purchase. This should influence the quality, not the quantity, of your list efforts.

2. Does List Size Matter?
Don’t mistake a big list for a good list. Fattening up a list that’s designed to be successful can obfuscate your success. Big numbers may also camouflage ineffectiveness. If big quantities are unavoidable, create a separate list for a mass, less-targeted approach.

3. Start with the Best
Lead with your best customers— those who buy, cross-buy, stay loyal, advocate and have lower service costs. This is your best segment with regard to driving response, harvest intent and profit.

This is usually a no-brainer in concept, but gets tricky in practice. Given that the top 30 percent of customers and prospects are typically five times more profitable than the entire customer base, a generic, mass approach may cost huge profits. Filter out the unintended and undesired, such as promiscuous buyers with little loyalty intent, or those in an underserved geography. As you create and target the segments, personas and models for your promotion, blend in the necessary insight to help personalize the offer. Separate good customers from unprofitable ones; identify prospects who haven’t bought before.

4. Welcome Lookalikes
Incorporate those who resemble your best customers via website visitors, subscribers, those who have logged a phone call and other touchpoints where they reached out to you. This is your likeliest next group of customers. Insight such as income levels, regions, family status and more will highlight similarities with your target audience, clarifying those who make the cut.

5. Should You Include Your Social Audience?
If you have a social media presence and can track those who engage with your brand, then the answer is “yes.” Today’s leading edge consumer who posts a question, comment or review will be tomorrow’s new mainstream. According to an article on TechCrunch in May 2011, social media users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.

You’ll want to please your influencers. So, if this is not possible for you today, put it on your roadmap for the next year. If you incorporate social, create a corporate social media policy that empowers certain employees to respond to and engage your social media customer/prospect segment. Social media campaign management is emerging as a great challenge for direct marketers. As a result, most brands don’t take advantage of the great opportunity of integrating social media dialogue.

6. Add Relevant Insight
Whether targeting your best customers, first-time buyers or less profitable, infrequent customers, your list-building efforts should blend in the additional insight and important information that complements and helps create a richer understanding of your target audience. Including relevant elements such as historical interactions and purchases, product propensities, media and channel preferences, demographics, and interests will help shape the right target audience, as well as help personalize the right message.

7. Personalize the Engagement
Content might be king in that it’s the single biggest element to fuel sharing or engagement across your base, but it’s also expensive. Seek to leverage content from different sources while keeping production in one application and workflow to maximize resources and minimize time. Creative teams will consider all of the personas, preference parameters and relevant insight when creating the offer. A personalized offer and/or creative can drive a fourfold improvement in conversion.

8. Prepare and Coordinate to Follow Up Quickly
Companies spend a lot of time, capital and intellectual resources to serve customers. So it makes sense to invest in the technology to take the next step in a logical and timely fashion. In addition to non-IT response mechanisms such as proactive telesales or call center reps, you should automate your marketing systems with the right insight, channel, content and preference data so your customer-marketing system can recalibrate based on what a consumer does or doesn’t do.

The goal is to be prepared in order to intelligently respond with the correct response that nurtures customer engagement. Your systems will sense when a particular customer is ready to buy and will deploy automated decision technology to optimize the outcome.

You needn’t do all of this overnight. Adopt an incremental approach that starts with identifying and reaching your target audience first. Blend the right insight that helps to personalize the message and build the customer marketing system that coordinates the right response. You’ll see higher rates of success with your campaigns.

By Tim Suther
Article Source: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/8-tips-selecting-right-prospect-marketing-lists/1

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Balancing Promotion with Content during a Webinar

Posted on January 23, 2012 by jessica.kleppang

Now that you are preparing your own webinar, you are probably thinking about what kind of balance you need between the informational or teaching part of your presentation and the promotional or selling segment. There is no set percentage of content versus promotion that you need to follow but there are some things to think about that will make your webinar work more effectively.

During your webinar you are going to need to take enough time to explain your product properly and build its value in the minds of the audience. If you do not take the time to extol your product and the reasons why they should buy it, no amount of pitch at the end of the webinar is going to sell your product or service. You need to teach your lesson or explain your product, taking the time to ask and answer questions and explain everything that is included in your offer. Explain exactly what they will be buying, show testimonial letters if you have them, and show them the ordering process.

Many people find that one hour is a good length of time for webinar. In a typical one hour presentation you would be looking at about 45 minutes of teaching or informational content and 15 minutes of sales promotion. But as we mentioned earlier, there is no set ratio of content to promotion, you need to give your presentation in a way that is effective for the products and services that you are selling.

You can make an excellent presentation in your webinar but if you forget to pitch your product properly you will not get very good sales results. The purpose of most webinars is to promote a product or service, so you need to allow enough time in the presentation for a good sales pitch.

If you spend most of your webinar pitching your product you are not going to build up trust and rapport with your audience. Without these you are going to have poor sales results.

If you get excellent sales results from your webinar then you probably have the balance of content to sales pitch right. If you are not getting good results then you need to think about either increasing your content or increasing your sales pitch while reducing the other component.

An effective webinar is going to have content that fully explains the value of the goods and services being offered. It will have a question and answer session, show testimonial letters and explain the ordering process. Once these things have been done in order to gain trust in the product, a competent sales pitch, using proven sales techniques, should be used to close off the webinar.

Using the suggestions above will help you to create a webinar that has both the content and the sales pitch necessary to make your presentation a success.

By Robert Plank
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4944407

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Use Teleseminars and Webinars in Your Business Development Efforts

Posted on January 15, 2012 by jessica.kleppang

Two ways that you can advance your business development efforts is by using teleseminars and webinars that provide a friendly, non- intrusive environment for your prospects and clients. This process allows for you to be in front of your prospects and clients whenever you can make the time. They can then participate when they feel comfortable and the time is right for them.

By using both of these methods, you can accomplish four things:
1. Reconnect with your prospects and/or clients on a continual basis.
2. Share information that may be important to their business.
3. Test and do research with a captive audience that will probably give you feedback and information that otherwise wouldn’t be available to you.
4. The ability to offer up one of your products or services for purchase or demo.

So how can you use these two formats to better your ‘biz dev’ efforts?

Teleseminars work well for those that are technically challenged and need a simple way to communicate. It’s also a fantastic method that enables you record the call and then make it available for playback at a later date.

Webinars are great when you have lots of visual images and for bigger ticket products or services. They also have the ability to be automated so you can offer your prospects and clients who were not able to make the live session(s).

So I want to encourage you to add teleseminars and webinars to see how they can enhance your business development efforts and maintain a better connection with those who you have contact with.

By Dave Krygier
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6796587

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How to Create a Winning Webinar

Posted on January 2, 2012 by jessica.kleppang

Anyone in a network marketing or MLM business knows that one of the most effective and efficient ways to present is via a webinar. Indeed, the concept has become standard procedure in the industry. All successful network marketers include webinars in their marketing activities. Newer affiliates often find presenting a webinar to be intimidating, even frightening. It isn’t. In fact, you’ll find it a fun exercise once you start hosting your own webinars. These tips will help ensure your webinars are successful.

Treat it like any other presentation. A webinar is essentially a seminar given remotely. The biggest difference (which can work in your favor; more on that later) is that your audience isn’t right in front of you. Even so, you must follow the same steps you take for a standard presentation. They include:

Write down your objective. What do you want your audience to know or do afterward? Writing it down helps to keep you focused.

Develop an outline. This will also help to keep you on message.

Perform the research. Don’t assume you know the topic well enough to just wing it. Whether it’s online or off-line research, including interviews, take the necessary steps to collect your information. Don’t worry about becoming too informed about a topic. (Think of the professors who teach freshman-level courses.) The more you master the material, the more confident you will be. And you’ll be able to handle nearly every question thrown at you.

Create notes or a script. Some people figure that the PowerPoint slide will be enough. No, it is not. It’s ok to print the slides or masters; refer to those during your rehearsals and the webinar itself.

Speaking of rehearsals, you must practice your webinar. This is especially true if you’re using the webinar program for the first time. You want to make sure you know how to set the recording, start screen sharing, and take any other step(s) that are necessary. Practice at least three times before going live. Play your recordings. Listen and watch for areas that need improvement.

Rehearsing also gets you acclimated to talking with a headset on. It’s a weird experience initially. You can hear yourself, but the sound is muffled. (Your audio is not piped into the headset. Those are used to listen to callers when you’re in conference call mode.) This isn’t as much an issue with the half-headset design.

Put thought and effort into your delivery. Employ vocal variety – change your pitch and cadence, and insert pauses throughout. Speak naturally, and keep it conversational. Imagine that you’re talking with a couple friends. Let the dialog flow. But if you tend to talk fast and non-stop, work on that.

Also, remove any verbal tics. These can include the traditional Big Three: um, ah, and you know. I haven’t heard those very much. Instead, I hear a lot of these: so and now (at the beginning of sentences), along with actually and go ahead inside sentences. Each word or term has its place in your vocabulary. Just not in the frequency in which they are often used.

Add commentary during the webinar. Don’t just read the text on the PowerPoint slide (if that is what you’re using). Each phrase on the slide should trigger at least a paragraph of narrative. That’s one reason for rehearsing. You develop and practice what you’re going to say during the presentation.

Post your invitations, and send out e-mails. Post messages on social media, and include a mention in appropriate e-mails. Remember to include the registration link. How far out to announce? Some people say two weeks. I recommend no more than one week. In these busy times with so many messages coming at us, we’re not as likely to sign up for a program more than a week out. Send reminders about every two days, including the day of. That one can go out just a few hours in advance. (“Hey, folks, you still have three hours to catch my webinar on….”)

Hold the webinar even if no one shows up. It’s good practice for you. You gain experience meeting a time commitment. Plus, people could show up late. It’s bad form and bad for your reputation if you’re not there. Finally, you need experience preparing for a live audience. During your first few webinars you will feel the anxiety building in the moments leading up to the start. That’s OK. Put that anxiety to work for you by helping you deliver a more passionate webinar. In order to become comfortable hosting webinars, you have to hold them in a live setting.

Many people find that performing at home – that is, not in front of a live audience – is actually quite easy. And it allows them to really express themselves. They bee-bop in their chairs, pace around by the desk; move about to help them deliver a fine performance. It shows in their voice. You don’t need to sit still when you’re giving a webinar. Just don’t walk so far away that you unplug your headset.

Evaluate your webinar. Listen and watch the recording for ways to improve. Don’t get down on yourself. You’re likely to have technical glitches and times when no one shows up. Take a deep breath and plow on. Even if you’re not thrilled with a given performance, you can pat yourself on the back for putting another one under your belt.

Webinars give you a chance to showcase your knowledge of the topic, as well as your presentation and leadership skills. Offer them whenever the opportunity is appropriate – and the more successful you are, the more opportunities you will have.

By Tom Fuszard
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6556179

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Why Webinars Are One of the Most Effective Sales Tools

Posted on December 26, 2011 by jessica.kleppang

Webinars are one of the most popular ways to market within the guru community, and with good reason; they work. Webinars are fast becoming a major part of product launches and marketing in general. Many marketers are reporting that webinars have some of the highest conversion rates of anything they do. So what makes webinars so effective and how can you use them to inject huge growth into your business?

The first aspect of webinars that make them so incredibly effective is the very nature of the format. Webinars use multi formats of engagement, including auditory, visual and kinesthetic (by allowing participants to ask questions and get responses real time) that all contribute to one of the highest levels of engagement by attendees. This ‘immersive’ format keeps people engaged and gives marketers a chance to convey their unique value proposition in detail, allowing them to make an air tight case as to why their product or service is of high value and worth of consideration by their prospects.

Another thing that makes webinars a ‘must’ for your marketing efforts is that marketers can carefully craft a storyline and ‘flow’ to their presentations that naturally lead attendees to a buying decision. By starting out with valuable information and content, asking permission to show their products and spurring people to action, the marketer has an elevated level of control of the presentation and thus, the prospects’ very thought process about the product and whether or not they should consider purchasing from product or service.

More specifically, webinars offer an opportunity for detailed testing of when exactly a prospect best responds to a sales message. By segmenting your list, and trying out a lot of different timing on their specific call to action, marketers can very easily land on a perfect sales message by experimenting with a ton of variables, including how much free content to delivery, what features and benefits of their product to emphasize and what type of call to action best resonates with their audience.

So how can you use webinars to your advantage and to grow your business? First, make sure you prepare a ton of great content to justify your attendees time. Think about a problem that they need solved, or a ‘problem’ in your niche or marketplace that is a ‘hotbutton’ issue. Then cover this issue, demonstrate that you have a solution and allow them to see that they can purchase your product to easily solve this problem or get the benefits your product promises. All good webinars uncover a problem, demonstrate a solution and allow the purchase of that solution.

Another really valuable use of webinars is to not just pitch products or services you want your attendees to purchase, but to use high quality, content rich webinars as a list building technique. Find partners in your niche, and offer to give their audience a high value webinar to help them solve a problem they might be having. This is a win for the partner as they continue to deliver great content to their audience, but you get the benefit of adding a ton of new leads to your email list as you can get the opt-in information for people registering to attend the webinar.

These are just a few aspects of webinars that make them one of the most compelling marketing tools in use right now. There are an infinite number of ways you can continue to test, tweak and promote your webinars that can literally revolutionize your business.

Original Post By Brett Anthony
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6194592

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When Should You Have Your Webinar?

Posted on December 18, 2011 by jessica.kleppang

Webinars and teleseminars are great tools for building your information or learning content product business. They’re also a great tool for creating learning content products. They are inexpensive to create, easy to produce, and very well received. But they have one minor problem that stumps even the seasoned professional.

How do you decide when to hold your webinar or teleseminar?

After all, when you run your webinar will have a major effect on attendance. Get it right and you’ll be swamped. Get it wrong and no one will show up.

So how do you decide when to hold your webinar? Here are seven questions you need to answer in order to make the decision.

1. Where are your customers? There are many time zones around the world. Where your customers are will therefore affect what time they have compared to your time.

2. When are you at your best? We all work on a daily biological cycle. The good ol’ night person/day person dichotomy. A webinar needs you to be on the top of your cycle. So when are you at your best?

3. When do you have time? Just because we’re at our best at a particular time doesn’t necessarily mean we’re available at that time. Your current appointment list will affect when you schedule your webinars for.

4. When are your customers most available? Although you are important when picking your time, your customers are more important. That means you need to know when your customers will be listening.

5. How likely are your customers to be available on that day? Time means more than just the time of day. It also means the day of the week. After all you want the majority of your customers to be available when you run your webinar.

6. When will you send out the advance notices? While it’s theoretically possible to run a webinar without sending out notices, most people do need some form of warning that you are putting on a webinar. This typically involves a series of emails in order to ensure that people get the notice in time. It’s important though to schedule these emails so that they are read by the majority of your customers.

7. Historically, when has the best time been? Up to this point we’ve been trying to guess as to the best time, which ultimately is the best we can do. But we need some idea of how good our guess will be. By testing and reviewing the attendance and signup for our previous webinars, we will provide an important level of feedback.

Article Source: http://www.teleseminarlive.com/teleseminararticles/2011/12/16/how-to-decide-when-to-hold-your-webinar/

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10 Tips for Effective and Engaging Webinars

Posted on December 11, 2011 by jessica.kleppang

Webinars, web-based seminars, have become a common way to present information. When you’re ready to host one to build your business, here are 10 tips to make sure it gives you the great results you’re expecting.

1. Define the purpose
Before you start marketing your webinar, make sure you know why you’re doing it, what you’re trying to accomplish, and what you hope attendees will get out of it.

2. Determine who your audience will be and tailor the presentation to them
A lot of people multi-task during webinars, so do everything in your power to present information that grabs their attention and doesn’t let go. Schedule lively speakers, and make sure you have fascinating information to share.

3. Design an excellent presentation
In addition to creating a wonderful talk, spend as much as 20 hours building a simple and interesting slide deck to accompany it. Make sure they work well together.

4. Do a trial run
Well before the day of the webinar, test the connection, computer, webcam, and headset. Every webinar platform is a little different, and this is the only way to know for sure that everything will work. While you’re at it, make sure the moderator knows his duties and can handle technical issues and problems.

5. Show up early
Give yourself plenty of time — get to the office, or wherever you’re running the webinar, at least an hour ahead of time — so you can identify problems and find someone who can take care of them.

6. Give clear instructions to the attendees
Let them know about the features you plan to use and how they can participate. Urge attendees who plan to ask questions to use a headset to avoid echos. (Ask the moderator to apologize, but to block audio access to anyone causing an echo.)

7. Engage participants every few minutes
With an in-person seminar, the presenter does something every 10 minutes or so to re-engage with the audience. With a webinar, since there’s no direct contact, presenters have to do it more often, to avoid losing the audience.

8. Make sure to ask specific questions
Don’t say, “Does anyone have a question?” Instead, if the webinar is about the best time to do things in the workplace, ask, “Who knows why 10 a.m. is the best time to give a presentation?” Involve your audience.

9. Conduct polls
And share the results as soon as they’re in. Polls are a great way to involve everyone in the webinar, and they can be used to transition into or out of a topic.

10. Give something to stay front of mind
Webinar attendees want something in return for their attention and participation. So after the webinar ends, email a thank-you note to attendees, and include some tips related to the topic. Information, in the form of succinct tips, is something they can refer to and share. If there were any hyperlinks from the presentation, include them as well.

Just because the webinar ended, doesn’t mean the conversation has to as well. Send attendees a survey a day or two later. And then a week later, follow up with an email asking how they used — or plan to use — the information they received during the webinar.

By Mark Di Vincenzo
Article Source: http://blog.anymeeting.com/marketing-with-webinars/10-tips-for-effective-and-engaging-webinars/

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3 Web Conferencing Tips for Small Businesses

Posted on December 4, 2011 by jessica.kleppang

Web conferencing is a great way for small businesses to expand their reach and cut down their costs. The cost of web conferencing software and web conferencing services has come down considerably making it very affordable for small businesses to take advantage of its use.

There are several web conferencing companies out there who offer a different set of features, benefits and price points. Look at what you need and how web conferencing fits into your marketing and business growth strategy before you decide upon a service to use. Read on for tips on how small businesses can use web conferencing and webinars.

1. First contact
Rather than thinking of web conferencing as a means to eliminate all travel permanently-which may not be an option for a small business that relies on its ability to make and maintain relationships-use it to eliminate needless trips.

How many times have you turned everything on its head and shelled out hundreds to fly across two times zones to conduct a sales trip, only to have people cancel at the last minute? How many times has an initial meeting been a complete waste of time because the person sent to meet with you has no authority to make purchasing decisions? Unfortunately, this happens a lot when you’re meeting with new customers. But everyone needs to pursue new customers because that is how we grow our business.

However, if you use web conferencing to vet new clients, you can save those useless flights out of state. You can get a read on a potential client’s seriousness and commitment to actually doing business prior to stepping on an aircraft, before you ever lay out money for a ticket.

That is time and money saved. In fact, other small businesses just like you are cutting their travel costs while growing their new business.

2. Slash meeting costs
Gathering everyone in the same place to brainstorm is the old way of doing business. But that is not the most cost-effective way to do business in today’s market.

You can get all your employees together online and work through a problem without having to shell out to have them travel to your office. If you have salesmen spread out in a variety of territories, you want to minimize the amount of time you pull them off territory to be in a meeting. Web conferencing helps you accomplish that.

You can all view the same document. Anyone in the meeting can have the floor and show their desktop or a document on their computer. Everyone can see and hear the same thing-just as though you were in the same room.

3. Cut training expenses
Training is an important part of running your business. After all, you need to keep everyone abreast of any changes or new protocols and knowledge. How do you do that without incurring massive travel andvaccommodation expenses? With web conferencing, of course! Another benefit for training is that it limits the time your sales force is off their territory. That helps increase revenue and limit lost profits.

Article Source: http://www.teleseminarlive.com/teleseminararticles/2011/11/30/3-web-conferencing-tips-for-small-businesses/

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4 Tips for Using Email to Support Webinars

Posted on November 27, 2011 by jessica.kleppang

Seasoned webinar and teleconference hosts use email to promote their events, driving targeted prospects and customers to attend. Through trial and error, we’ve discovered some best webinar practices regarding email:

Make sure your email invitations are well-formed and tested, before they leave your desk. A good rule is to send out both text-only emails and HTML emails, and see how those on your list respond. For B2B audiences, HTML is preferred, because it is more attractive and professional-looking, while B2C audiences seem to respond better to personalized text-only messages from people they know.

If you are going for HTML messages, make sure all your images appear correctly and your links work. Send the message out to yourself first, and then test each link. We’d also recommend looking over the phone numbers and even testing those. If you are using a bridgeline for your conference call or on-phone portion of your meeting, you should be able to call the number and hear the operator ask for your ID code. As you can probably imagine, a typo in a phone number or access code will actually prevent people from joining your call or webinar.

Plan an email campaign that supports your event, in front of your active mailing list. Often it helps to come up with ideas that are really event-related. You can ask your audience for questions in advance in a follow-up email or say something about your guest speaker, if you have one. Always try to offer more than “just a reminder” right up to the last hour before your presentation, and then send that reminder out to everyone who has signed up.

Following up is also important, after a webinar or online event. Using two lists, one for registrants and one for attendees, send out a survey using an online survey company. Here you can ask for suggestions about the day and time of your events, the interest level in the subject or presenter and for other details that may be helpful to know for next time. And if you can, have your next webinar already set in the calendar and offer a registration for that one. You can also offer your replay (be sure you have one) to both lists, and if it’s a free event, you can let people know it is OK to pass it along to interested friends. Keep track of your replays by creating a shortened URL link (like bit.ly) that can track how many opens you’ve received.

Webinars, online meetings and teleconferences are great ways to supplement the quality of content your company makes available to customers and prospects. Keep refining the webinars, and don’t overlook finessing your appearance when it comes to the email campaigns that support them.

By Gary Jesch
Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?4-Tips-for-Using-Email-to-Support-Webinars&id=5478480

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6 Tips for Hosting Your First Webinar

Posted on November 20, 2011 by jessica.kleppang

Are you ready to get into the exciting world of webinars? Before you get started, there are a few things that you need to know to help ensure that your first webinar goes off without a hitch.

Preparation is the key when it comes to conducting your first webinar. By taking the time to take care of a few essentials ahead of time, you can reduce beginner’s stress and make sure that your final product is polished and professional.

1. Give Yourself Enough Promotional Lead Time.
You’ll need some time to attract an audience to your webinar. The industry-recommended standard is about two to three weeks. Any longer than that, and you’ll run the risk of having participants forget about the event. Any shorter and you may not be able to attract a large enough audience.

2. Do a Few Run Throughs of Your Webinar Content on Your Own.
This step is important for two reasons. First, you’ll be building confidence in your skills as a presenter. Second, you’ll be able to spot any weak points or potential problems in your webinar before you go live in front of an audience.

3. Test Your Equipment The Day of Your Webinar.
You’ll need a microphone for your webinar and if you’ll be doing live video, a webcam. Do a quick equipment test a few hours in advance to make sure everything is operational. This will give you enough time if you should have to replace anything.

4. Send out Reminders to Registered Participants.
Email your participant list a few days before and the day of your webinar to remind them. Make sure to include the time zone you’re in to avoid any confusion. You can also utilize services like Twitter and Facebook to help remind your audience.

5. Always Remember to Smile.
It’s all too common to feel stressed out before and during your webinar. By preparing you’ll be able to lessen that stress, and always remember to smile. Your audience will feel more relaxed and more engaged, and they will feel more engaged with the content you are presenting.

6. Utilize Interactive Elements.
An involved audience is an engaged audience. Remember to include polls and other interactive elements in your webinar. This helps you as a presenter by taking some of the burden off of you, and it helps your audience to feel as though you care about their opinions.

We all have to start somewhere, and while your first webinar may take some time and effort, the process will get easier and before you know it, you’ll be a pro!

Article Source: http://blog.anymeeting.com/webinar-best-practices/6tips-for-hosting-your-first-webinar/

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