If a presenter makes a great speech and no one cares, was it really a great speech?
As a webinar presenter, the only way you have to meet your goals is through your audience. People think we appreciate great minds that change the world, but what we really appreciate is the impact that those individuals have on others. It’s all about the audience, not the individual presenting.
To avoid being the person who makes the great speech that nobody hears, what if I told you that I had a consultant available to you who is always 100% right, and you could ask them any questions you wanted about how to improve your business or meet whatever goals you want? What if I also told you that this consultant was free and available right alongside you when you were doing your sales, conversion, or training work?
It’s the customer. The customer is always right.
You have to know what your audience thinks, feels and wants to work with them to accomplish your goals. Feedback is how you know.
Surveys, polls, and Q&A
These are the most popular forms of feedback that are available to you as the webinar presenter. There’s an art to using them.
Generally, though, you want to gather only the bare minimum of the necessary information about your audience before your webinar, and then progressively take your surveys and polls during your webinar to keep engagement up. In addition to these tools, incorporating video surveys might be an effective method to gather even more insightful feedback. An excellent resource for this could be Vocal Video. Vocal Video is the only all-in-one platform for remotely collecting, editing, publishing, and sharing testimonial and review videos. This innovative tool lets your audience share their thoughts and opinions in a more personalized and engaging manner, enhancing the overall interactive experience of your webinar. They also make for great tools to use during breaks if you are hosting a long presentation to keep your audience focused and engaged with the subject matter while there isn’t a presenter speaking on screen.
Post-webinar surveys are a great way to follow up with your audience to try and measure what impact you had on the audience, compared to what results your surveys had before and during the webinar.
Overall, considering this feedback is what will guide you into having good ideas for future webinars.
What to ask in your webinar surveys
It can be a little daunting to sit down and think up a list of questions to ask your audience just for the sake of filling out webinar surveys. This is the wrong way to go about it.
You need to first sit down and ask yourself what your webinar is fundamentally trying to change in people, and the questions of how to measure the before, during, and after phases of that change will naturally follow.
With webinar surveys, you are trying to measure the change you’ve created, and you are trying to feel what they want, so you can keep improving. Polls are more for measuring change, and surveys are more for gauging what your audience wants from you.
Notice that you do have to generate a feeling for what they want. Whether you are using multiple-choice or single-choice questions doesn’t matter that much. What people say they want, and what they actually want are sometimes two different things. Just because you do what someone says doesn’t mean you’ll make them happy – you have to do what they mean.
This means you have to take multiple surveys and continue to get feedback from your audience until you build a sense of being able to predict and mould the feedback response from the audience. Once you get to that level, you have pretty much successfully hypnotized an audience.
Feedback is like the magician’s wand of marketing. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes, but you use it to direct the audience’s attention, and in a way, produce the effect of the results you are looking to create.
