webcastWebcasts can bring a lot of benefits to any business, big or small, but you cannot just turn on your video camera and start gabbing at the camera for three hours and expect to see any returns. You really need to put a lot of care into it, as you would with anything else you want to provide professionally. In this article, we will give you six great tips on how to knock that webcast right out of the park.
- Make sure that you actually create a plan for your webcast before you start anything.
You cannot just wing a webcast on the fly, since you want to make a professional first impression on your viewers. Make an outline of all the points that you would like to discuss. Then, expand on them so that you can identify what you may need to create in order to support your points. You may find that you will need to come up with some visuals so that your audience can better understand some complicated facts and data. - Try to come up with a very memorable title as well as a short but sweet description.
According to an article on eLearning Industry, one of the best things that you can do to come up with a great title is to make a promise to your audience. Tell them what they can expect from your webinar, and what they stand to gain from attending it. You can also give them a sense of mystery, which is why titles like “The Secret to a Great Webcast” are so popular on the internet. Most of all, though, make sure that your title conveys the fact that your webcast will be able to provide them something that they really need, whether for their personal use or to help them advance within their company. - Create slides that help complement what you are saying, instead of using them as cue cards.
There is a saying that goes something like this: if you are reading the text from your slides word-by-word rather than using them as a guide for your audience, then you probably do not even need those slides in the first place. If you are using a Cloud webcasting service like BlueJeans, then you will have even more opportunities to provide your viewers with material that will help them further understand the points that you are trying to make. You can use screen-sharing in order to present your slides, for one thing, but you can go further by providing them with virtual hand-outs and white papers by using the built-in capability of sharing files from your computer to theirs. - Tune in to your audience members’ emotional sides by using storytelling to get your point across.
We like to think that logic should trump emotion, especially when discussing anything about being professional or working in any type of business. However, there is a reason why advertising agencies are always trying to tug at their audiences’ heart strings, even if they are just trying to market very ordinary products otherwise. The reason is very simple: people are more likely to make important decisions based on their emotions rather than on any sort of logical thought, according to an article by Jim Camp on Big Think. - Do not forget to create a strategy for promoting your webcast and your offerings ahead of time.
The last thing that you would want to happen is to put all of that time and effort into your webcast, only to find that nearly no one is attending it. Worst still, you do not want to see that you did not convert any inquiries into potential clients, either. Do not just focus on your content plan when starting your work on your webcast. Make sure that you also plan for how to reach the type of audiences that you would want to have coming to your presentation. Then, make sure to come up with a great call-to-action at the end so that they can check out your product, service, company, or your personal website. - Encourage your audience members to participate by asking questions and filling out polls.
Do not treat your webcast as a one-way conversation. If this was the case, then you could have just recorded a video of yourself talking and upload it to a site like YouTube. A webcast is unique in that it encourages your audience to talk to you, so make sure to let them know that they are free to ask any questions that they have, preferably at the end of certain points during your presentation.
Keep these six great tips in mind the next time you want to start your own webcast. You will find that things will go so much more smoothly this way.
TOPICS webcast
