Tips and benefits for extending your reach and growing your audience through hosting a Zoom webinar or other platform webinar
Whether you’re facilitating a Zoom webinar for the first time or brushing up on telehealth best practices, strengthening your presentation skills will help you thrive in a world pivoting toward remote-first work. As a chiropractic doctor and frequent public speaker, I’ve rounded up my tips for delivering an impactful webinar, plus insights as to how these tips will benefit your chiropractic practice right away.
Extending your reach
Delivering webinars allows chiropractors and functional medicine practitioners to extend their reach beyond the doors of their office and the local community of patients.
Webinars allow you to present on a variety of topics within your area of expertise and reach an online audience located anywhere in the world.
While many webinars in the chiropractic field are generally slide presentations, you can foster better audience engagement using a video platform like Zoom. With a dynamic video presentation, you hold greater power to inspire and educate your audience.
Diversifying your revenue stream
Another benefit of delivering impactful webinars is creating a diversified revenue stream. As a chiropractor or functional medicine practitioner, you may have already experienced a time or times of decreased revenue — such as a lull in in-office visits during COVID-19.
Webinars present an opportunity to make up for that decrease by adding a new revenue stream to your business model.
Being authentic
People attending your webinar will relate best to a presenter who demonstrates authenticity. Deliver your webinar from your actual work-from-home space, roll with interruption and smile through technical issues.
Showing your humanity and being your authentic self builds trust with your attendees — and helps you engage an audience that was otherwise focused elsewhere.
Zoom webinar or other: choosing a webinar type that works for everyone
You can also extend your reach by diversifying the type of webinars you give. Live webinars are an excellent opportunity to connect with your audience by allowing attendees to interact with you virtually. On-demand, or pre-recorded, webinars have their own set of benefits.
As an attendee, you can watch the presentation when it’s convenient for you. As a practitioner, creating content for on-demand webinars not only saves you time in the long run, but helps you iterate your message with every new download.
Regardless of which type of webinar you choose, both present an opportunity to collect patient data for future outreach. Whether an attendee signs up for your live webinar or selects to access your on-demand content, he or she does so with an email address. That contact information helps you build your online audience and reach potential new patients.
Delivering your message with energy
Webinars are a great opportunity to improve your public speaking skills, without the pressure of an in-person audience:
- Practice what you’re going to say ahead of time to avoid delivering your content in a mechanical way.
- If you plan to read from a script during your webinar, finish each sentence by looking at your audience (or camera) to make your presentation feel natural.
- Body language goes a long way in a virtual presentation. Smile at the audience, even when you can’t see them.
- Speak in an upbeat tone — gesture in the direction of your audience.
Doing these things will help deliver your message with a strong presence. Not only will you engage your audience, but they will leave your webinar feeling energized instead of Zoom fatigued.
Making your webinars interactive
Engaging with your audience will go a long way in making them feel heard and connected. During your webinars, interact with your audience by incorporating polls in your presentation. Encourage participants to use the live chat to ask questions, and be sure to leave time to answer questions or respond to comments during your webinar, as well.
Another way to make your webinars interactive, especially if you’re creating on-demand content instead of a live presentation, is to feature a guest on your webinar. Interviewing another medical professional whose expertise aligns with the subject of your webinar will bolster your messaging, as well as help extend your reach to your guest’s audience.
Webinar follow-up
Following up with your webinar attendees is key to converting them into potential patients. Try to do this within a day or two of your webinar.
Ideally, you should follow up with a recording of the webinar for your audience to rewatch — and hopefully share! — but at the very least, include the presentation slides. Providing both options increases the chance of your audience revisiting, remembering and referencing the content, as well as returning to garner more of your expertise in the future.
Admittedly, there are some downsides to delivering webinars, such as the inability to conduct a hands-on demonstration. However, the benefits mentioned above outweigh the negatives and will help complement the services you offer in your practice.
By delivering webinars, you’re able to extend your reach to an audience you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Whether you provide your webinars live or on-demand, this telehealth approach will not only diversify your revenue stream; it will also help amplify — and solidify — your thought leadership in the field.
Robert G. Silverman, DC, DACBN, DCBCN, MS, CCN, CNS, CSCS, CIISN, CKTP, CES, HKC, FAKTR, is a chiropractic doctor, clinical nutritionist, national and international speaker, author of Amazon’s #1 bestseller, “Inside-Out Health,” and founder and CEO of the Westchester Integrative Health Center. The ACA Sports Council named him “Sports Chiropractor of the Year” in 2015. He is on the advisory board for Functional Medicine University and is a seasoned health and wellness expert on both the speaking circuits and within the media, as well as a frequent health expert contributor on national blogs such as Consumer Health Digest. He has appeared on FOX News Channel, FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, The Wall Street Journal and NewsMax. His new book, “Superhighway to Health,” is expected to be published in August 2020.
