The document discusses how to drive interactivity and engagement in webinars. It recommends using interactive tools like polling, Q&A, surveys, content sharing and group chat to transform webinars from presentations into conversations. This increased interactivity keeps audiences engaged for longer, improves content retention, and provides valuable data for lead scoring and follow up. The most effective webinars are highly interactive experiences that deliver qualified leads for sales.

1. 1How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
FROM PRESENTATION TO CONVERSATION
Drive Interactivity
and Engagement
in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER

2. 2How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
Webinars have become a top-tier marketing tool, with an ever-growing
number of companies leveraging this powerful medium to generate and
qualify leads. While highly effective, the use of webinars as a leading
marketing tactic means that audiences have many webinars to choose
from. Companies must therefore capture the imagination and attention of
attendees – or risk losing them to the competition.
From 2012 to 2013, average webinar viewing time jumped nearly 40%, from
38 minutes to 53 minutes, according to ON24 benchmark research data. Our
analysis suggests the increase is due to the growing use of tools aimed at
delivering a more interactive and engaging audience experience. Increased
levels of audience engagement result in longer viewing times and higher lead
values. This correlation means companies must transform their webinars
from presentations into conversations.
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT IS ESSENTIAL
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Top Tactics to Fill the Funnel
“How effective are the following marketing
tactics for you at generating new leads?”
Top Tactics to Accelerate Sales Cycle
“How effective are the following marketing tactics
for you at cultivating leads to sales-qualified status?”

3. 3How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
Webinars are ideal for creating an interactive environment, as audiences
tend to be more comfortable online than they are in person. Attendees
who might remain quiet in a live seminar are more likely to ask questions,
share opinions, post ideas and answer poll questions in a webinar. This
level of interactivity has multiple benefits:
• It broadens the reach of your messaging at no additional cost.
• Longer viewing times mean longer exposure to your content
and messaging.
• The more engaged audiences are with your material, the more they
will retain the content.
• It increases the number of marketing touches per event, enabling
companies to offer more information to a customer or prospect in
a single exposure.
• Increased interactivity provides richer data for lead scoring, enabling
more targeted and effective follow-up.
There is no right or wrong way to drive interactivity and engagement.
The key is simply to do it. How? There are many tools available today
to help you. In the following section we will examine four categories
of tools available on most webinar platforms that will enable you to
shift your webinars from one-way presentations to lively, engaging,
interactive conversations.
AVERAGE
VIEWER TIME
PREVIOUS BENCHMARK
54
MIN
38MIN
Source: 2013 ON24 Benchmarks Report
*Webinars averaged 45-60 minutes in length

4. 4How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
TOOLS FOR DRIVING INTERACTIVITY
AND ENGAGEMENT
The adoption of interactive tools into the webinar experience has come
slowly. Some tools like live QA and polling are fairly common, while other
tools like social sharing and collaboration are still rarely used.
1] SOCIAL SHARING TOOLS
These tools enable audience members to share your webinars, with their
social media networks. This greatly enhances the reach of your webinars by
leveraging the power of your audience’s social and professional networks,
amplifying your message and content.
“SHARE THIS” TOOL. The “share this” tool lets attendees choose from a
number of social media applications to share your webinar’s title, description
and URL with friends and colleagues. Social sharing tools can be imbedded
both in the webinar console and on registration landing pages to provide
multiple opportunities for your audience to share your events with their
peers. This increases the number of people exposed to your webinars.
SOCIAL MEDIA. In the age of social media, people are habituated to
broadcasting their every thought. If an audience member wants to highlight
something said in your webinar, they will typically turn to social media to do
it. By integrating social media applications like Twitter and Facebook directly
into the webcast experience, attendees can share their thoughts about your
content without leaving the webinar console. This keeps your audience
members engaged with your webinar while enabling them to amplify your
message and further promote your webinar.
Usage of Interactive Webinar Tools
Source: 2013 ON24 Benchmarks Report
81.20%
48.80%
35.50%
31.40%
17.10%
9.80%
7.60%
7.20%
6.50%
2.80%
0.50%
0.20%
0.10%
QA
CONTENT DWNLD
TWITTER
SHARE WEBINAR
EMAIL WEBINAR
FACEBOOK
LINKED IN
GROUP CHAT
SURVEY
WIKIPEDIA
IDEA GENERATOR
YAMMER
SALESFORCE CHAT

5. 5How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
2] AUDIENCE INTERACTION TOOLS
Engagement is highest when audience members are contributing to the
conversation and interacting directly or indirectly with the presenters and
each other. There are several tools to help enable this interaction.
POLLING. Polls are a great way to capture the voice of the audience.
Not only do they provide marketers with important information about
attendee interests, they also enable the audience to compare their own
experiences with those of their peers attending the webinar. Polls also
provide valuable data for promoting on-demand webinars. When you get
an interesting poll result, you can blast it out via social media channels
and include a link to the archived webinar to draw in additional viewers.
• Live polling keeps your audience engaged.
• Provides useful data on the interests of your audience.
• Increases lead scoring capabilities.
QUICK TIP
When using Twitter,
choose a pre-determined
hashtag, to encourage
a focused social
conversation. This also
enables you to easily track
and respond to audience
comments. Retweeting
audience comments can
be a great way to increase
your social connection
with your attendees.

6. 6How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
QA. Enabling audience members to submit questions to the presenter
during a live webcast is one of the most widely used tools, with more
than 8 in 10 webinars incorporating it. With the ability to see who is
asking each question, presenters can refer to people by name, making
the interaction feel more personal. One new QA trend we are seeing is
presenters answering questions throughout the presentation rather than
waiting until the end, thereby increasing the level of interactivity during
the webinar.
APPOINTMENT SETTING. Enable highly engaged viewers to set an
appointment with your company right from your webinar console. This
is the pinnacle of marketing effectiveness. Our research shows that
appointment attendance is higher when a prospect self-selects the
appointment as opposed to appointments set from sales calls.
SURVEY. Surveys are an ideal way to gather more information about
each attendee, providing for better quality follow-up. They also help
presenters consider the effectiveness of their webinars. Was the content
on target? Was the presenter effective? Was the presentation beneficial?
The more feedback you get, the better you can adjust your presentations
going forward.

7. 7How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
Survey Tips
• Keep your survey limited to just a few questions. The longer the
survey, the fewer people will fill them out.
• Include a text box for attendees to add additional comments. There
may be issues that you are not aware of that will get mentioned.
• Avoid survey questions that query for additional attendee data. Your
audience wants to feel like you care about their opinions, not that
you are just interested in their potential as customers.
In addition to the commonly used closing survey, it can be helpful to
push out a pre-webinar survey during the registration process. Surveys
can be imbedded onto registrant landing pages, providing registrants
with an opportunity to share their expectations of your webinars. This
not only drives interactivity from the start, but it also helps presenters
ensure that they are meeting audience expectation.

8. 8How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
3] CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
Your target audience is busier than ever, and competition for their
attention is fierce. Marketers must therefore find ways to increase the
number of marketing touches in each interaction. Content distribution
tools are a great way to accomplish this. Here are two tools that do
it well:
RESOURCE LIST. This is an easy-to-use yet critically important tool
for marketers. With a resource list you can upload additional relevant
content and make it available directly from the webinar console. Upload
white papers, datasheets, case studies or anything that supports the topic
of the presentation. Every piece of content is an additional marketing
touch as well as a way to better understand and qualify leads. It is
important that content be carefully selected and well targeted to the
presentation; too much content will reduce the effectiveness of the
resource list.
VIDEO. Video increases both engagement and viewers’ retention of
content. It also provides an opportunity to add additional content to a
webinar. There are countless ways to incorporate video into the webinar
experience– everything from professional studio recordings to streaming
of a live seminar to simply setting up a webcam, which can add value
and help presenters better connect with audiences. Pre-recorded videos
such as company overviews, product demos or other thought leadership
content can be integrated directly into a webinar presentation to
enhance your story. Video integration of any kind is a compelling way to
increase the engagement with your audience.
• Webcams, live event streaming, studio and demos.
• Video = higher attention and responsiveness.
• More dynamic presentation of content and ideas.
QUICK TIP
By strategically choosing
the resources that you
upload into the webinar
console, you can
ascertain the interests
of your audience by
examining which content
pieces they did, or didn’t,
download. This could be
useful in determining the
next logical step in the
customer journey.

9. 9How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
4] GROUP COMMUNICATION COLLABORATION TOOLS
Today’s audiences are accustomed to sharing ideas and seeking
feedback from their peers in real time. If they are engaged with your
topic they will want to talk about it with other attendees – a capability
enabled by several powerful communication and collaboration tools.
GROUP CHAT. Group chat allows audience members to interact directly
with one another during a presentation, either anonymously or by name/
organization. Since comments are unfiltered, we recommend someone
from the presenter’s department monitor the chat to keep it on topic
and clarify any misconceptions. There will always be one or two
naysayers; a colleague can help re-direct the conversation into more
positive territory.
IDEA GENERATION. The idea generation tool enables group
brainstorming, feedback and collaboration. Presenters can pose a
question or topic to the audience; audience members can then answer
the question, share their own ideas on the topic, comment on ideas from
other attendees and/or rank the ideas and comments. Idea generation
differs from group chat in that it is a more authoritative, focused forum
for sharing ideas and getting feedback.

10. 10How to Drive Interactivity and Engagement in Your Webinars
ON24 WHITE PAPER
Improved interactivity and engagement lead to increased webinar viewing
duration, content retention and, through social media channels, broader
reach of your content. Ultimately, more interactive webinars enable
marketers to deliver better qualified leads to the sales department.
By analyzing each attendee’s viewing time, responses to polls and surveys,
questions asked, content downloaded and comments made on social media
or group collaboration tools, marketers can create a behavioral profile to
better understand the interests of all webinar leads. Attendee profiles can
then be scored to determine the next step in the marketing prospect cycle.
Intelligent webinar lead scoring, based on interactive data, results in higher
qualified leads and increased sales conversions.
Create Behavioral Profiles Of Your Attendees
• Registration data.
• Viewing time.
• Social media engagement
• Questions Submitted.
• Interaction with polls, surveys and chat.
• Content download.
SUMMARY. Delivering highly interactive and engaging webinars increases
the value of your events for both you and your audience. Your attendees will
retain more of your content and value your webinars as a trusted source of
information. As webinar presenters, you will gain much more insight into the
needs and interests of your prospects, resulting in a significantly higher lead
conversion rate.
There are many interactive tools to choose from. Figure out which
engagement tools work best for you, and turn your presentations
into conversations.
THE VALUE OF WEBINAR INTERACTIVITY

11. © 2014 ON24, Inc. For more information on the benefits of the ON24 virtual environment, contact us at 877-202-9599 or visit www.on24.com.
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