Chelsi Nakano
May 02, 2016
On March 16, Spencer Waldron of Prezi and Andrea Goodkind of BrightTALK teamed up to host a webinar on the power of visual storytelling in B2B presentations. Read our recap below:
Looking for leads? Tell your story with a webinar.
How do you tell your story in a way that gets your customers to take notice? Increasingly, marketing teams are leveraging rich, multimedia content to get the job done. In particular, webinars have been on the rise as a key tool for engaging prospects and driving leads to the sales team.
According to the 2015 Demand Gen Report, 73% of marketers listed webinars as the most successful engagement tactic for generating top-of-funnel qualified leads. Additionally, 65% of marketers said that webinars were most successful in helping to convert and accelerate mid- and bottom-funnel leads. Webinars are so powerful because they require active engagement from the audience. Your prospective customers are taking 30 minutes out of their day, answering live poll questions, participating in Q&A, and providing you with feedback—and all of these activities provide your sales team with data that enables them to have much more valuable conversations.
In exchange for all of this engagement, your audience expects to get something of value. You need to create a presentation that provides attendees with clear, actionable takeaways while also building an emotional connection to your brand. This is where visual storytelling comes into play.
Take full advantage of your next webinar with these visual storytelling tactics.
When it comes to actually building a rich webinar presentation that will keep your audience engaged, there are a few key tactics to keep in mind. Follow these steps, and you will be able to tell a visual story that will drive results, whether you’re looking for marketing-qualified leads or trying to close the deal.
1. MAKE SURE YOUR DATA TELLS A STORY.
Most presentations involve data, charts, or graphs; we often include these elements because we are trying to convince our audience of something. As discussed above, data and charts alone are not the best tools for getting somebody to make a decision. Combining data with a story is a much more powerful way to persuade your audience.
If you want proof that storytelling plus data is a more effective way to persuade people to take action than data alone, consider a real-world example from the Save the Children Foundation. The foundation ran an A/B test of two brochures, each one designed to drive donations. The first brochure had charts, facts, and figures about global poverty and hunger. The second combined this data with a story about a girl whose life would be directly impacted by donations to the foundation. The brochure with the story drove twice as many donations as the one that only contained the data.
When crafting a presentation designed to persuade your audience, first start with an emotional hook—a story—that will drive people to make the decision you want them to make. Then, back that story up with the right data, so your audience will be able to rationalize their emotional decision.
2. USE “MICRO-STORYTELLING” AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY.
When you first display your presentation to your audience as they’re waiting for the webinar to start, they will see some sort of holding slide—often times, this is a simple title slide. This title slide presents, in and of itself, an opportunity to tell a “micro-story.” You might choose to include a simple tip along with your title, or open with imagery that sets the stage for your message to come.
The point is that you should not leave any space within your presentation untouched by your brand’s voice and story. Take advantage of every space available to you when it comes building a relationship with your audience, from the moment they first see your presentation to the survey they fill out at the end of the webinar.
3. BE AUTHENTIC.
With the amount of noise that marketers have to compete with today, authenticity has become increasingly important. People have become inured to cheesy marketing messages, and instead seek out authentic content to determine which brands they can trust.
When it comes to building authenticity into your webinar presentations, steer clear of generic clip art and stock images. Spend time finding images that feel real, and bring your message to life wherever possible with real examples. For example, if you’re including a customer testimonial in your presentation, don’t throw some text on a slide and read it out to your audience; instead, ask your customer to tell her story on a video, and play this video to your audience. Or, even better, get that customer to come onto your webinar as a speaker and tell their story live.
4. USE VISUAL METAPHORS.
Visual metaphors are powerful tools for making your message more memorable for your audience—which is a good thing if you’re trying to get them to take action after your webinar is over.
Take the three main points of your presentation, and try equating each of those with a visual or image that represents what you are trying to say. For example, if you are talking about the challenges and successes of a certain business initiative, consider using the image of a mountain to represent both the obstacles along the climb and the success at the summit.
Want even more tips and tricks for telling your brand’s story in a visual, engaging way in your next webinar presentation? Head to BrightTALK to watch the full webinar on-demand.
