Last week on Creating Your Encore Career I talked with Rick Davis. Rick is a good friend, teacher, and self-proclaimed presentation specialist/playful otter. He helps people become engaging presenters who are prepped and ready for any occasion. Rick works with speakers, coaches, executives, sales professionals, and anyone with a desire to perform better whenever they are speaking in public or at private functions.

I know first-hand how Rick works and how great he is at what he does because he helped me prepare for my first webinar. Let’s pull back the curtain and look at how a webinar gets made as well as how Rick guided me in building my story and skills to create my first webinar.

The Webinar Creation Journey

Rick and I got together back in February and I explained where I was and what I wanted to do. From there, Rick came up with an itinerary of what he thought made sense for my end goal. 

We worked a lot on what I wanted my audience to take away to make sure the webinar communicated that. We also worked on the process of story and he helped me incorporate and communicate the stories I had. 

As I got into the content of the webinar, there were innumerable places where Rick helped me. He led me in figuring out my pacing and the images I used and in stepping away from the “PowerPoint bullet point” strategy I was used to.

Use Story

Story is such a good hook. It's personal and it makes people more interested in what you have to share. 

Rick and I started by expanding more of the stories I already had. We started with some childhood stuff and chronologically made it through anything that would help my audience get what they needed. 

One of Rick’s superpowers is knowing what an audience would want. I brought up one story from my career and Rick knew it was something that we needed to fine-tune and hone in on for my audience. I had the story inside me but had never found a way to express it very well so Rick helped me think through it. I could recite the facts but he helped me convey to people how I felt about the whole thing. 

Rick uses the SSRS system for telling stories so after he took me through the story itself he helped me understand its significance, its relevance to the audience, and the support piece. That last piece told the audience the action step they were to take based on the story.

Know Your Audience

The most important part of a webinar is knowing your audience. Find out more about who they are, what their challenges are, and what's keeping them up at night. Then you can start connecting with them on a different level. You can give them the answers and provide the value that they're looking for. 

Webinars are different than live presentations and definitely different than team meetings. There are a lot of different ways to approach a presentation based on what the audience needs. So, get to know your audience and then figure out what makes sense and what to use when presenting to them.

Follow these amazing insights from Rick and you’ll be ready to create and present your own incredible webinar.