How Do I Make a Webcast—A Beginner’s Guide

In essence, a webcast is a streaming audio-visual feed of a live event or meeting available online. Webcasts also offer interactive tools and analytics. If you want to make webcasts work for you, you need to know exactly how to go about making them.

To start, you need a checklist, which should contain all the essential details and themes around a specific subject you want to talk about. It’s necessary to use the right webcast software and remain aware of the best practices involved.

Let us look at the fundamental benefits of webcasts and the essential prerequisites of making a webcast.

The Benefits of a Webcast

Businesses have embraced webcasts as a cost and time-efficient resource. You can use versatile webcasts for meetings, events, workshops, product demos, and several other use cases. Since you can view webcasts over the internet, you can access a much larger audience.

Webcasts allow more significant interaction with live Q&A, polls, and social shares, which keeps participant engagement levels high. You receive detailed statistics and analytics that can act as insights for further decision-making. Finally, recorded webcasts can be archived and viewed on-demand.

How Do I Make a Webcast—A Checklist

The process of making a webcast can be broken down into five important steps. These are the steps you should carefully lay out in your checklist before getting started.

1) Goals

First off, it is crucial to have a clear idea of the goals of your webcast. Define what you are trying to achieve. Clearly lay out the primary purposes of the webcast. Have a plan for quantifying and analyzing the results going forward.

From there, you can get into the little details. If your goal is driving sales, it’s necessary to have concrete plans for lead generation and conversion. You can also define goals for registration and attendee numbers and figure out your cost per lead. These will help execute the webcast flawlessly.

2) Subject Matter and Speaker

For a successful webcast, it’s essential to have quality content and a speaker with the proper credentials. Perhaps, focus the webcast on a problem area that requires a solution. You can then use the webcast to propose a viable solution or fill a real gap in your market. The ideal webcast presenter should be able to flourish in an environment that requires quick thinking and advanced communications skills.

You can carefully arrange your content into sections and the sections into individual presentation slides. It’s of profound importance to create and sustain interest during the entire length of the webcast.

3) Delivery Platform

Choosing the right delivery platform is instrumental to the success of any webcast. There are several things to consider. You can focus on how much you want to spend, and plan accordingly. In addition, look at the functionality and features on offer. Consider how many people you are trying to reach and choose a platform that would support that volume.

For startups and small businesses, the budget might be the main concern. A solution with a low-price tag and limited features may be adequate for the time being. For larger companies, look for leading platforms with innovative features.

4) Webcast Promotion Strategy

To get the right kind and amount of people on board, you need to promote your webcast properly. The nature of your webcast will dictate your promotion strategy. A webcast that is focused on marketing outcomes will require an entirely different strategy than one which is more educational in nature.

Webcast promotion involves encouraging people to sign up and reminding them of the date and time. You can also provide attractive details about your webcast to keep interest high. If you are planning to offer the webcast later in a recorded format, inform your audience about that too.

5) Call to Action

The most vital aspect of a webcast is ending things with a call to action (CTA), which defines what you want your attendees to do once they have absorbed the webcast. If you have been showcasing a product, you can ask your audience to demo or purchase it. You can also ask them to get in touch or sign up for business communications.

The quality and forcefulness of your CTA will often determine the overall success of your webcast. The CTA will most likely be fresh in the attendees’ minds in the short term. For this reason, it’s crucial to design this portion of the event with care and thoughtfulness.

A Key to Success

With the help of these crucial steps, the process of making a webcast should become a lot easier. This simple checklist will enable you to cover all bases and give your webcast the best possible chance of success.