Audience attention in webinars has three elements: things that kill attention, things that draw attention back to your webinar, and things that keep the audience’s attention in the first place.
I know these seem to be in reverse order of priority.
They aren’t.
None of us starts off being great at attracting and keeping attention on our webinars. We all have years of bad habits to overcome. So first we’re going to stop doing the worst things we do, and then we’ll move toward doing good things.
In other words, first, we remove stuff, then we add stuff, and finally, we rewrite stuff.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
The basics of removing stuff are to
- Take out distracting things. That’s anything where you went off-topic or down a rabbit hole. Anywhere you rambled. And anything that might distract the audience and lead them to go off-topic.
- Then take out things that take a long time to read.
- Remove things that don’t sound right even if they look right (anything that can sound like more than one thing or phrase to a listener).
- We also need to remove all unnecessary words.
- And cut any pictures that don’t match what’s being said.
Once that’s done, we need to add stuff. Specifically, we will focus on audio calls to screen and making sure all slides build. Finally, we’ll rewrite stuff.
We will enforce the rules about sticking to one message per slide. That we ruthlessly kill sentences, bullets, entire slides that aren’t moving the audience forward, even if we’ve fallen in love with them.
And we will make every headline as punchy, and direct, and impactful as we can.
We’ll also talk about interstitial slides, nails, when to use repetition and when not to, and looking at each slide as a canvas. Because we can usually predict where the audience will look, and for how long, when we make a slide.
Over time, you’ll have a tight narrative that smoothly moves the audience from your intro to your Call to Action.