It can be a challenge to keep your audience engaged during a webinar. To spice up your presentation, consider organizing your session as a roundtable. These discussions offer a more interesting experience by bringing different voices, perspectives, and personalities.
From our experience producing numerous webinar panel sessions, here are some tips for putting together a successful one.
The moderator can be an industry analyst, editor, or other expert who represents a neutral voice. They should help guide the conversation and create a story between the various points of view from the other panelists. Their expertise should enable them to prioritize questions for the panelists and respond with a thoughtful opinion on the fly.
Each panelist should represent a different part of the story to provide a well-rounded narrative. You could include a vendor, customer, and partner to get different points of view, or you could recruit panelists who match the intended audience demographics. For example, if your company sells technology products to large enterprise IT directors in healthcare, government, and education, then panelists should be IT directors from those sectors, and content should be targeted appropriately.
Scheduling a phone call for the moderator and panelists provides a time to set expectations and make sure that all speakers are on the same page. During this call, you might introduce the panelists to each other, determine the format, gather everyone’s point of view on the topic, and prepare seeded questions.
You should establish a loose framework of the topics you’ll cover, while allowing the audience to participate through questions. All panelists should be clear on the boundaries of the topic that you want to discuss.
