How Do You Structure a Webinar So People Stay Engaged?

A webinar needs three parts: an intro that hooks, tells a story, lays out three points and makes a promise; a body that teaches one point at a time and checks in after each; and an outro that recaps, ties back to the promise and gives one clear next step. Say the structure out loud as you go.

That is the structure Chris Schwager walked the Video Confidence Collective through, and it sits inside the wider guide to using video for sales and webinars. The video on this page is the full walk-through. The steps are below so you can use them tonight.

Why does a webinar need a structure nobody notices?

Because your audience expects it, even if they could never name it. In Chris's words, "they expect to be guided." They want to sit back and let you take them through the next 60 minutes, and they want to know what is coming up next.

The same principle runs through every short video Chris coaches. A webinar is just that structure stretched over 20 minutes, two hours or a whole day. Done well, nobody consciously sees the structure. They just find it easy to follow. For the single-video version, see how to plan the intro, body and close of a video.

What does a webinar intro need to do?

The intro has six jobs, and Chris ticks them off in this order:

1. Hook. Call out a specific frustration, fear or desire so people feel seen. Use "you" language. Skip "Hello, I'm Chris, and the title of this presentation is..."
2. Story. Your own journey through the same challenge, tied directly to the hook.
3. What is in it for them. The three points you will cover, so the roadmap is set in their heads.
4. The promise. What they will walk away with. Chris's example: "a very clear understanding of how to show up more confidently whilst reading from a teleprompter."
5. Who is talking. Only now do you introduce yourself, after you have stacked up value. It does not need to be your life story.
6. A teaser for the offer. Drop it in, do not sell it. The goal is to make it enticing enough that people stay to hear the detail at the end.

Three points is the sweet spot because it is easy to hold in your head. Four or five also work. If you genuinely have seven, group them into clusters so people can still remember where they are.

Why open with a story, and what counts as one?

Chris's point is that a story activates a part of the brain people usually fill with facts and experience. He cites an analysis of the top 100 TED Talks that found 65% were story driven, though he was not sure who ran it, so treat the figure as his recollection rather than a checked statistic. Use facts and experience in moderation.

A story is not the same as an experience. An experience is something you went through. A story can be about someone else entirely. Chris also points to Gabrielle Dolan, a story expert he has interviewed on the podcast, who makes the point that a lot of people who think they are telling stories are not.

One more reason to repeat your core message: Chris describes a panel beater in his old networking group who ended every presentation with the same tagline, week after week, until the whole room of around 50 people said the last word back to him. It was monotonous and it was sticky. Repetition is what makes a message stick.

How do you run the body of a webinar?

Run each point the same way, so the audience always knows where they are:

1. Announce the point. "Let's get into it. First point, what to do when presenting on camera for the first time."
2. Teach the main lesson. Take five minutes, ten, however long it needs.
3. Check in. "Who has questions? Great, let's move on."
4. Transition into the next point and repeat.

Keep repeating yourself and signposting. Chris's aim is to make it so clear that someone half listening, with one earbud in, can still follow the structure.

How do you end a webinar without it fizzling?

You do not need to spend long on the outro, because most of your time went into the body. It has five parts:

1. Recap. The three points, or the takeaways with the highest relevance, so people remember what to do after 45 minutes of information.
2. Reconnect to the promise. Say what you promised at the start and make sure everyone knows you delivered it.
3. Reintroduce the offer. This is where you explain it in detail.
4. Clear next steps. Tell people exactly what to do: buy, book, reply or click.
5. Wrap up. Thank them once and say goodbye.

On that last point, Chris is firm: stop thanking. Do not thank people at the start, and do not keep thanking at the end. Thank once and say goodbye.

How do you keep people from switching off halfway through?

Two tactics from the session, both about participation:

• Give people a reason to stay to the end. Tease a prize early and hand it over last. Chris's example was two movie tickets worth $50, going to the first person to type a one in the chat. It could be a book, a meeting or dinner for two. He calls it an insurance policy for keeping people engaged.
• Ask for cameras on. If you see cameras switching off, invite people back in: "Go ahead and switch on your camera so that I can see you, you can see me." Reading body language is what lets you adjust as you go.

If nerves are what is stopping you, here is how to get past your on-camera jitters.

Do you have to follow this structure exactly?

No. Chris is clear that this is a framework, not a bible. It is a system, like a recipe. The people eating the cake do not care how it was made. They care that it feels good. The same happens when you present your content.

If you want help showing up on camera for your next webinar, book a call.

Webinar structure questions

How many points should a webinar have?

Three is easiest. People can hold three in their heads, and it signals a clear roadmap. Four and five also work. If you have seven, cluster them into groups so it does not become forgettable.

Does this structure work for a short video?

Yes. Chris says every micro video he coaches follows the same principle at a shorter duration. A webinar might run 20 minutes, two hours or a whole day, and the structure still applies.

How long should the intro be?

In Chris's walk-through the intro took around five minutes of a presentation that ran 45 minutes or more. The bulk of your time goes in the body, not the intro or outro.

Should I thank the audience at the end?

Once. Thank people, say goodbye and stop. Chris says over-thanking, at the start or the end, is a habit worth dropping.

Video transcript

Auto-transcribed from the session video and lightly edited for readability. False starts are removed, member names are replaced with [member], and two asides, one about an individual member and one about a tool still in development, are omitted. Chris's words are otherwise as spoken.

Chris Schwager: Not many people know how to structure content around presentations and webinars, and for years, literally for years, they've been winging it off the back of other people's bad habits, or a presentation structure they've been told to use. I've been into larger organisations where they've been running webinars with great success for 20 years, and I think, what can I teach this guy? He's getting conversions, it's a highly targeted market, it's all good. But then I come in and express some new ideas to these people, and they're like, "Ah, right. I had no idea that would be a thing." I think what it is, is there's a conformity to the people participating in the webinar, so their expectations are so low that nothing needs to change. It's interesting, isn't it? We've just been taking on bad quality video and bad presentations, and relying on the quality of the information as the saving grace.

Well, you guys have this creative thing now. You can be dynamic, like the way I'm being with you now, manoeuvring around and changing things up, because I value you. I love you more than I love what I'm presenting. If I think about that in that context, it becomes very powerful. And by virtue of seeing all of you here and catching the nuances of body language, it helps my ability to present to you, and I think that's a really great tool for you to have.

Now, not all of this is going to be relevant to those who aren't doing webinars. Who is doing webinars, or has done, or is looking to do a webinar in the future? And isn't this amazing? I'm just looking in this general vicinity, I'm seeing some people go like this and some people go, "Yeah, I'm doing..." I can catch it all in one go, I'm not having to look around. When you get into these synchronous environments, it becomes a very, very powerful way to communicate.

So, webinar structure, let's rip in. What I really want for you is to understand that everything has structure. Every micro video I've instructed for you guys, for [member] and anybody, is the same principle at a longer duration. In a webinar it might be 20 minutes, half an hour, two hours, a whole day. You can still have that structure applied, and people don't know what you're doing. They're not conscious that you're presenting a structured piece of information. But here's the catch: they expect it. They expect to be guided. They expect to be informed of what's coming up next. They expect they're going to sit back and let you Sherpa them through the next 60 minutes.

So, Sherpa-ing. What are some of the things you'd expect to have in a webinar? Let's brainstorm. Open up your mics, no right or wrong answer, just belt them out. We've got a duration, a start and a finish, that's all I've got. I don't have a presentation yet. What would you expect to hear or see?

Member: Context. Why are we here?

Chris Schwager: Good. What else? Just shout them out. The problem, yep. What else? How about what's in it for them?

Member: Examples?

Chris Schwager: Beautiful. We'll put the examples in the body, start to show them. What else?

Member: What not to do.

Chris Schwager: Yeah, good. That could probably be in the problem area, what to look out for. What else? What about up this end? It's getting a bit quiet.

Member: That would be a wrap-up of what you've covered and what they can do.

Chris Schwager: Good. So key takeaways?

Member: Next steps.

Chris Schwager: Beautiful. The next steps could be more of a call to action. One thing we're missing, which may not always come up, is an offer. You're pre-empting this offer. It's an idea. I'll take you through it in more detail, but you're not selling the offer here, you're just dropping it in, because you want the offer to be enticing enough to get them to the end, to actually explain the offer in detail. Interesting, right? If this was 60 Minutes and someone was like, "Holy shit, man, I want that shit," they're going to be top of mind when they get to the final stage. Give me the free coaching. Give me the bloody two movie tickets. Can you imagine? I've got two movie tickets to give away, and someone's like, "Yeah, I can take that." Only one catch: you've got to hang on to the end.

Now I've just brainstormed some ideas around this. In your workbooks, this is just the intro, just the first part. Look at all the stuff you've got to do in the intro. We've got to tick all these off. So, hook. We know about hooks. [Aside about a tool in development omitted.] Call out a specific frustration, fear or desire, make them feel seen. Now, that might even be something you do pre-presentation, something you put into the description or the title of your presentation. But that is a really clear opener that's not, "Hello, I'm Chris, and the title of this presentation is..." Watch your next webinar. I guarantee there's some monkey on the other end who doesn't know any better who's going to start the presentation like that. I guarantee it. You're not going to, because you've got a new way of doing it. It could be, "Right, in this presentation I'm going to smash you with the three top things that are going to blow your mind." Because if you're here, you're here because you want to buy, right? It's you language, it's hooky, it's captivating. It's not, "Hi, I'm Chris, and for 25 years I've been doing me, we, I, us, our." This is all just love them. Appreciate that you've got nine people or 100 people on the call. Just love them, give it all over to them, and do the presentation with that in the back of your mind.

So, hooking in first. Then we go into story. It relates to the hook. It's your journey through the same challenge. If the hook was, "You're here because you're struggling to present yourself in the best possible light on camera," then I remember a time when that was me 15 years ago, and that transitions into the story. Now, story starts to activate a part of the brain that people typically fill with facts and experience. This chart shows exactly what I'm talking about. This is a TED Talk rip-apart, effectively. Someone, a novelist, a publisher, picked apart the top 100 TED Talks and tried to understand why they worked, why they were the top, and they broke it down to 65% of all those TED Talks being story driven. So don't underestimate it. If it's facts and experience, just in moderation. Remember, there's always a way to open up their brain, particularly for those who aren't facts and figures. Like me, I'm the creative, I want stories.

Member: Can I ask a stupid question? What's the difference between experience and story?

Chris Schwager: There's no stupid questions, but go ahead. Good question. A story can be a non-experiential story. My experience is something I went through, but I can tell a story of this woman who went down to the thing and she... you know what I mean? That becomes the story. I've interviewed people who specialise in stories. Gabrielle Dolan, on our show. Go and have a listen, because they take it to the next level. One of the things she talks about is that most people who tell stories are not telling stories. You'll get a glimpse if you go back. Kev, maybe you can go and file through the Gabrielle Dolan episodes and see if we can drop the recent one in the chat. I've interviewed her twice, and she's a story expert.

Member: So is it that it's someone else's experience, not your own? Is that how you differentiate stories?

Chris Schwager: No, not necessarily. Let me tell you a story that doesn't involve me. It's about Barbie, and Ruth Handler. Barbie was a Mattel product, and someone interviewed her and said, "Tell me why Barbie exists, why it came about." She said her purpose was to put Barbie into the marketplace to empower young women to be whoever they wanted to be. When Gabrielle heard this, and I was on the podcast with her, she said, "Why is that message not on the front of every Barbie packaging?" That's the premise of both of those episodes, if you go and track them down. Really powerful. So we're underutilising what's already here, because we don't know the difference between a story and not a story, and we also don't have the discipline to have it repeated on every bloody package. We just run out of motivation and go, "Oh, that's that tagline." I always tell people, "I'm the youngest of eight children." You guys wouldn't even know that. That's part of my story, but I barely have it anywhere. Oh, I drowned three years ago. You can barely find that stuff. So it's about being confident in the message you're sending, and this is good for you, [member]. Understanding and being confident that that's your message. It's repeatable. Good or bad, it's it. That's what I'm going with. Because repetition is what's going to Nike-fy it, so it's so repeatable that it becomes sticky, and people go, "I understand that, that's that [member] guy."

I was in BNI, a networking group, for about six years, and this panel beater used to get up and say, at the end of his tagline every week, something like, "You bring it to us, and we fix it, and we fix it good." Really random. But he repeated it every single week for years, to the point where he'd say, "We fix it," and the whole 50 people in the crowd would go, "Good." It was monotonous and boring, but it was so sticky. It worked because he was relentless about presenting that message. We just don't do it, guys, including ourselves. We don't do it enough. That's the message: visibility is a leadership standard. That's it. When we won an award recently, we asked our AI bot, "What do we do with this award now that we've got it?" It gave us all the possible places it could go, across the site, email signatures, banners, social. It was ongoing, and it was quite a lot of work to implement, but it was good that we had a checklist to tick off, because had we not, we would have said it once and forgotten about it. It wouldn't even be on the site. You'd have to really search for it. So grab whatever it is and go, "There it is." Really shove it in people's faces, whether it's a tagline, your video or your message. Good or bad, I'm going to jam this into your face. That's the modern world we're in.

So let's return to the introduction. I'm going to belt through this a bit quicker now. Story, we did a bit of a tangent, thanks [member]. What's in it for you? Clarify what they'll learn, an overview of the presentation topics. This is where you'd go into your three-point method. "In this presentation, you're going to learn one, two," and say no more, there's a third. Three. In their brain they go, "Cool, it's one, two, three, I know what I'm in for." The roadmap is established. Now, three works, and so do four and five, but three is easy, because if it's seven it's like, "What was the first one?" It becomes quite forgettable. So don't try to jam it down their throat. Even if there are seven, try to find a way to tranche them into clusters, to make it easy for them to know. Like I said right at the start of today, I'm going to cover three things: Zoom, switching, webinars. Boom. It's in your head. I planted that little seed for you.

Setting the promise after that. Tell them what they'll walk away with. "By the end of this presentation, you're going to have a very clear understanding of how to show up more confidently whilst reading from a teleprompter, and never have to worry about second-guessing your performance." Boom, that would be a promise.

Who's talking? Now, after all that, I can talk about myself. "Oh, by the way." What you've done is stack a whole bunch of value before you talk about yourself. "By the way, I'm Chris, 25 years, da da da, youngest of eight, drowned in the pool. This is what I do, I love it, blah blah blah." Move on. It doesn't need to be your life story for a standard webinar. If it's a webinar about a personal development journey, yes, of course, tweak it. Otherwise, that's how I'd play it. And "stick around, please, to the end, because I'm going to give away two movie tickets worth 50 bucks. Who wants movie tickets?" This is the point where you go, "Yeah." Well, you've got to stick around to the end.

So let's rip in. First point. I've established three, and now I'm ripping into the first point. This is the body of the presentation. We've spent that time, that might have been five minutes of the intro, but then we spend the majority of our time in the body. This can be body one, body two, body three, but we cluster it into: intro, first point, teach the main lesson, check in to make sure they're all good if you can, and use that to springboard into the next topic. I promised I'd give you point one, what to do when presenting yourself on camera for the first time. You'd even go as far as, "Let's get into it. First point, what to do when presenting on camera for the first time. Who's presented on camera?" You get a bit of feedback, and you go, "Right, let's get into it." Then you teach the main lesson, what people need to know when presenting on camera for the first time. You can spend five minutes, ten minutes, however long you need. "Just checking in now. Who has some questions on what it takes to present themselves on camera for the first time? Anyone? Great, let's move on." Because the next section is tying in the read from the teleprompter. That's point two, which is equally important. Getting that message right is equally important, so let's go on to point two now: organising your message.

See the way I'm repeating myself? I'm making it so crystal clear that some monkey with half an earpiece in, looking at his laptop, is still able to follow the structure behind this. And nobody knows you're running a structured webinar at this point. But you've laid out all this structure, it's making it so easy for them to follow. They're going along, boom, boom, boom. I know there are three points, you're up to the second one now, you segue. I'm getting it all, it's all coming to me, which is great. You do your three points, and you start to wrap them up, and we get to the outro.

In our little example here, we said key takeaways and a detailed offer. We're at the back end now. Again, not something we need to spend a lot of time on, because we've spent most of our time in the middle. We wrap up and say, "Let's recap the three points." Your recap doesn't necessarily need to be three points. They could be takeaways, things of high relevance or importance that you want to make sure they remember, because you've given them 45 minutes of information and you want to make sure they remember what they need when they walk away. So: get prepared for your thing, point one. You could pull up a slide around this. Get organised, arrive 15 minutes early, get your text all loaded up. Those could be the things you lay out and say, "This is your checklist." Super easy. Recap on the points and why they're important. Reconnect to the promise. I promised I was going to give all of you the ability to present yourselves on camera, a clear understanding of how to do it, so you can walk away knowing what to do next. You can just repeat that promise if you want to. To tie back to your promise at the start: did you deliver? That's pretty confident, if you say, "I know what I promised you, and I delivered it, and I'm going to make sure you all know I've delivered it." That's just bringing it to the surface. Another clarifying part of the presentation.

Reintroducing the offer. "I'm going to give away those movie tickets in a sec, so stick around. I'm just about to wrap up, there's only five more minutes left." When you do that, it's another little catch to keep them holding on. If you're reading the room and they're switching off their cameras and checking their emails, these tactics of re-engaging them are really, really powerful. I'll spend one minute on this. If cameras are switching off and people are disengaging, no matter where they are, you can say, "Go ahead and switch on your camera so that I can see you, you can see me, and just like everybody else here, I know I'm giving you all the love and value you deserve today." [Aside about a member omitted.] That's a little tactic you can use that's really helpful, and I've explained a lot of these to your team, [member]. It's really powerful for keeping people engaged, and this has got to be more interesting than watching you guys listen for 45 minutes. Participation is going to be key in getting these things going.

So, who wants the tickets? [Member], you're up. Just type a one into your chat, whatever tactic you need. The first one to type a one in the chat, boom, gets the movie tickets. It could be that. However you want to run it doesn't matter. It's an insurance policy to get them to the end. Then you give the ticket, the book, the meeting, the dinner for two, whatever it might be. That's your insurance policy to keep them engaged.

Clear next steps. Tell them exactly what to do next: buy, book, reply, click. As I mentioned, I do this for a living, this is what I do every single day. If you need to book me in, Kev's going to put a link in. So this is very much the call-to-action area. And these are wrap-up lines now. You can hear it all closing up. And that's pretty much it. Thank you. Bye. Don't keep thanking. Don't thank them at the start. We over-thank like crazy in this country, and it's so fucking annoying. You hear it on podcasts. Somebody like [member] will be on the podcast saying his bit, and I'll reply as the interviewer, "Thanks for that." Jesus Christ. It almost spells out that I haven't been listening to him at all. "Thanks for that, [member]. Right, I'm moving on to the next question," rather than just giving the next question. So stop thanking is the key takeaway. I'm thanking once and saying goodbye.

That's on the last page of the workbook, page 50, the last section. You can go and grab those. Checkbox: are you completing all of those things? That's one for you and your team. Checkbox it, [member], and make sure they're covering off those things. What I've given you is a framework. It's not like a Bible, "that's the only way it's ever going to be." It's not. But what I'm demonstrating is a system, like making a bloody cake. In order for the cake to be delicious, people don't give a shit about how the cake was made and how long it was made for. They just care that it feels good when they eat it. The same thing happens when you present your content.