If you want to deliver a stand-out presentation to potential clients or partners online, PowerPoint won’t be enough. You’ll need a system that lets you display quality content to a large audience, and gives them the opportunity to communicate with you directly. In this situation, webcasting is the ideal solution.
If used effectively, webcasting can supercharge your marketing strategy and drastically increase your exposure. Since webcasting enables you to reach an extremely broad and geographically-dispersed audience, it’s ideal for generating brand opportunities.
Another major perk of webcasting for marketing is that it’s cost-effective. Webcasts are presented live, so you won’t need to invest heavily in editing software and multimedia staff for post-production. Of course, you can still record your webcast, so your target audience can watch it at a later time.
It’s estimated that 87% of online marketers use video content, demonstrating the potential impact of this medium.
Webcasting lets you to leverage the key elements that make video content effective, and directly communicate with prospective clients and customers. As such, it can play a key role in your marketing strategy.
If done right, your webcast presentation can reach an extremely large audience. This presents a wealth of conversion opportunities. The good news is that this task isn’t nearly as daunting as it might seem. There are also plenty of open-source tools that can make it even easier.
Let’s walk through the process, one step at a time:
Step 1: Develop an Engaging Script
Although you don’t necessarily want your webcast presentation to sound scripted, it’s important to develop a comprehensive script beforehand. This will enable you to better structure your webcast, address key selling points, and tailor your approach to reach your target audience. You’ll also want to leave ample room at the end of the presentation for fielding questions.
There are a variety of open-source tools that will help you create and deliver a stellar webcasting script. One notable example is TeleKast, a teleprompter tool that will enable you to clearly see your script, without having to break the flow of the presentation. This tool even lets you highlight sections of text, to indicate cues or important questions.
Step 2: Optimize Your Presentation Slides
In order to deliver an impactful webcast presentation, you’ll need to complement it with engaging visuals. Whether you want to demonstrate company growth, showcase a new branding strategy, or reveal your latest products, it’s crucial to do so effectively.
When developing the slides for your presentation, you’ll want to keep the information on each one short, direct, and compelling. Bullet points should be implemented whenever possible, as combining your audio with walls of text will likely be off-putting to viewers.
It’s also important that your slides are presented in a way that tells a story, rather than simply conveying facts. By adding interesting anecdotes, case studies, animations, quotes, and other storytelling elements, you’ll have a higher chance of increasing audience engagement.
Once again, there’s a variety of free and open-source platforms available that will help you craft optimized presentation slides. LibreOffice, for example, is a user-friendly option that lets you create animated diagrams, add transition features, upload media files, and much more. It also supports embedded font, so you can use established branding in your presentation.
Step 3: Use Quality Webcast Software
Naturally, you’ll want to invest in a webcasting platform that is robust, dependable, and easy to use. You’ll also want it to have features that facilitate effortless interaction with your audience on a large scale. As such, it’s worth choosing webcast software that streams to mobile devices.
Although there are open-source webcasting alternatives, they often leave a lot to be desired in terms of features and capabilities. However, one fairly substantive alternative is OBS Studio. This free tool offers live video capture and mixing capabilities, a customizable interface, and plenty of video and audio configuration options.
Step 4: Record Your Webcast
Armed with your script, optimized slides, and reliable software, you’ll be all set to deliver a compelling webcast presentation. However, you may also want to record your webcast, and make it available for on-demand viewing. This will ensure that it can be seen by audiences who didn’t get to watch it in real time.
To do this, you can consider uploading your webcast to your company YouTube channel (if you have one). Platforms like OBS Studio offer streaming support for YouTube, as well as other video channels. In turn, these videos can then be uploaded to your website or company blog.
In addition, many webcasting tools have a built-in recording feature. However, if yours does not, there are several open-source screen recorders available to choose from. Filmora Scrn, for example, lets you record high-quality video and audio with ease. It also includes an editing suite, so you can tweak your recording for optimal display and size settings.
Your webcast presentation could prove pivotal for making new connections and broadening your audience. As such, it’s important to make sure the event is well planned and presented. As we have seen, the process of creating a stellar webcast presentation is both achievable and affordable, and there are plenty of tools that can make it even easier.
Do you have any questions about developing and delivering an outstanding webcast presentation? Let us know in the comments section below!