“Presentation is an essential element when creating a great webinar.”
Ken Burgin, the creator of hospitality resource website profitablehospitality.com, recently spoke to the Australian Businesswomen’s Network about the importance of presentation in webinars and how to get the basics right. Your audience is constantly interpreting visual messages and responding to your design choices. In fact, the subliminal messages inherent in the design of the webinar will affect the audiences’ appreciation of your business or product. Simple choices in colour, spacing, typography and wording all act as representations of your brand, and a fault in any of these areas can undermine an audience’s ability to understand what is being said.
Construct a linear narrative
A webinar is a form of presentation that needs a beginning, middle and end. This structure might be:
- What you are going to talk about
- The content you will cover
- What the next call to action is
Your audience will understand your webinar better if you create an organised structure for your content. This will not only reduce the sense of chaos that can come with large amounts of information, but it will give your audience a better appreciation of your essential message, and how it relates to them.
Images
Pictures are a critical element in webinar design and often determine how engaged an audience is with the content. Images need to be relevant and accurately depict what is being discussed. Screenshots can be a useful way to present a realistic depiction of the topic or product. Metaphorical images on the other hand, can be helpful if you want to use exaggeration to encourage the audience to understand the topic in a the broader sense. Metaphorical images can also help if you are explaining more difficult information, by giving the audience familiar to relate to. Avoid using clichéd images, as the audience may become bored or even annoyed and they could disengage with the webinar as a result. Stock images can be bought from stock libraries such as Flickr which is free and iStockphoto which is very inexpensive. It is important to always be mindful of copywrite and credit other people’s work or use original images.
Layout
When designing the layout for your webinar it is often very useful to first create a template. This allows you to incorporate the company logo into the design to remind the audience of the brand, and it also ensures that the whole presentation looks cohesive and sophisticated. Reduce clutter — Negative space around the subject can help a webinar appear very dramatic and attractive. This gives the designer better control over where the audience is looking and guides them to the most important pieces of content. Too much colour, image or text can be overwhelming to the viewer and the messages can be lost in all of the noise. A simple and clean layout will ensure that the audience gets straight to the point and really hears what you are trying to tell them.
And last but not least, the Text
Text is an essential part of any webinar. It holds the key messages and describes the main pieces of information you want to audience to walk away with. However, no matter how interesting the text, if it is not organised in a clear manner it will ultimately be useless. Bullet points are a great way to organise content into small bite-size chunks which can be easily understood and taken away by the viewer. The key is to use bullet points sparingly and reserve them only for critical pieces of information. When applying bullet points, it is important to build them one by one in time with what is being discussed. People tend to read ahead, so by building bullet points into your presentation, you can ensure the audience is engaging with the current discussion. The key to a successful webinar is to keep the audience engaged. Webinars are hosted on the internet which is saturated with possible distractions. There is nothing keeping the viewer there apart from their own interest. That is why design elements are so crucial to webinars. Images, text, sound and layout all have to be considered in the production of a webinar because these are ultimately the deciding factors for whether the viewer stays or logs off. Ken Burgin co-presented the How to Create Great Webinars webinar. You can access the recording here. Premium Members get free access.
