Webcast is a great tool in the enterprise video solution space that businesses use to connect and collaborate with stakeholders—internal or external. It is indeed a great video platform for businesses to disseminate knowledge, update employees on new processes or policies and even stream live events. Businesses have realized the importance of enterprise webcasts in their communication strategies and are widely using this tool as a means to reach out to a wide audience. Truly, webcasts have become the go-to tools for businesses, helping enterprises with their communication; but it is not always easy to create a successful webcast.
Webcasts indeed present businesses with a number of advantages including the biggest and most important one being cost; but using such kinds of video platform is not easy as it sounds. From choosing the right vendor, to creating awareness about webcasts and most importantly executing webcasts perfectly, enterprises have to keep a lot in focus to make the most of this communication channel.
It starts with choosing the right vendor to help support the business in their webcasting needs. The business needs to look at its overall objectives and choose a partner that can understand the business, its operations employees and other stakeholders.
Delivery or execution is probably the most important aspect that needs to be focussed on. You can have access to rich webcasting tools but if you fail to focus on the final delivery, the entire webcast will not make a significant impact. Here is where content plays a crucial role.
One of the prime reasons that a webcast can fail is a presentation that is boring or confusing. In a webcast, the material that is being presented needs to be impactful, important, and should be worth sharing. The presentation, be it a slide deck or a video needs to be visually as well as textually appealing so that it engages the audience spread across different regions.
Delivery of the presentation goes hand in hand. The anchor or the presenter must be a subject matter expert in the session that is being delivered and must be a capable speaker who can engage the audience with the right kind of messaging. Not only this, the presenter/s must be aware of the webcast tools. The technicians must ensure that the anchors know how to access the various webcast features such as Q&A, analytics, etc. No matter how good the presentation and the presenter are, a couple of rehearsals are absolutely essential to set the tone and plan a successful final event.
Webcasts are a great way to share knowledge. Businesses often fail to realize that engaging the users doesn’t only mean one way communication. In fact, by bringing the audience into the conversation, you can make your webcast much effective. Webcasts offer tools like ‘raise hands’ or Q&A. Use such tools to make your event more interactive.
Another challenge that businesses need to overcome is mobile viewing. Often, webcasts come out perfect on desktops and laptops but not so much in mobile devices. Considering that the world is on the go, it has become essential to synchronize webcasting to mobile devices. Similarly, it’s equally essential to ensure that your webcasts can be viewed without any glitch from any network, and not just office. Quality of the webcast plays a significant role in engaging the audience. Would you want to view a webcast that has poor video quality or has bad sound quality? Thus, when setting up webcasts, ensure that all technicalities are in place so that the audience receive high quality experience throughout the streaming.
Another best practice that enterprises should follow is record the webcast and have it available so that users can easily get access to it if they want to watch it later. Once the webcast is over, always send out a feedback form asking the users on what they felt was good and what aspects can be worked upon.
Plan, rehearse, execute, and take in feedback. That’s how you can create impactful webcasts to deliver messaging that matters.
