In Wednesday’s article I discussed how interactive teaching far exceeds normal didactic, one-sided education for learning and how you can use webinars as a powerful means of informing and interacting with your prospects and building relationships.  Here are some insights on what to look for in a webinar provider and structuring your webinars for maximizing the interaction and rapport building:

Choosing A Webinar Provider

Use a webinar provider that has lots of built-in functionality for facilitating interaction with your webinar attendees.  For instance, Webex offer several interactive features during their PowerPoint presentation based webinars.  During your online presentations, you can conduct polls of your attendees where you ask them certain questions about whatever you choose or solicit their comments.  Attendees can indicate a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer by to polls by checking the green Tick Mark or red X respectively and the results are immediately posted.  If attendees find the webinar is going too slow, they can select the ‘Speed Up’ feature, or the ‘Slow Down’ feature if the webinar is going too fast, and this feedback is immediately sent to the webinar’s host.  As in a classroom, attendees can select the “Raise Hand” option and the host is notified of this, giving attendees the option to ask questions or make comments.  Webex also allows the host to give attendees the option of downloading whatever files they would like such as whitepapers expounding on the webinar’s topic, offering them at the end of the presentation.  Webex webinars are not expensive.  Currently you can have unlimited Webex webinars for upto to 25 participants per webinar for $69 per month.

There are some teleconference providers who offer free teleconferences, but I advise avoiding them.  The phone line quality is reportedly often poor, even with only a few people on the line, though these providers claim their teleconferences can host many more people.

Webinar Content

Your webinar’s content should address a wide variety of topics associated with your farm areas and the local real estate market.  For instance, there’s currently a lot of speculation and uncertainty as to whether the economy is recovering from recession and what impact a recovery has had on local housing prices (I personally our recession is typical overblown media hysteria and there never really was a recession, just a few market corrections that inevitably occur after any economic boom).  So now is a particularly good time to be giving in-depth analysis on what’s happening with the local market: where it’s been in the past 2 years, where it is now, and where you think it’s going.  Don’t neglect to continually poll your webinar registrants (either during registration or during the webinar) on what topics interest them.  People love to be listened to and understood, and the more you do this, the more you’ll build rapport with these people as well as understand how to market to them.  Get creative!  Try different topics continually and ones not necessarily on local real estate.  You could talk about the new restaurant in the neighborhood you recently dined at, or what happened at a local town hall meeting, or have an interview with the local member of parliament or state office on local property taxes for the next year.