Webinars have become increasingly common as they’re one of the best ways for an organization to become a thought-leader in their industry.
While there are a lot of affordable webinar services you can use today, there’s a lot more when it comes to conducting the best webinar live streaming for small business needs.
Even though webinars are an application of live streaming technology, creating a useful webinar requires a bit more than finding the most effective way to broadcast high-definition videos.
In this blog, we’re going to take a look at how to live stream a webinar perfectly including the planning, equipment requirements, promotion, and management of your webinars.
Planning For The Webinar
The first step towards live-streaming your webinar is planning for the webinar. To prepare adequately, you have to start with the content of your webinar. The content of the stream will end up dictating the theme of your webinar.
In the planning phase, it can be a good idea to create a complete outline for the stream. This way, you can plan for the content of the webinar like the script, the slides, and the overall general tone.
In order to live-stream a webinar on the most popular online webinar platforms, you have to submit meta-data and details about the webinar. Finalizing these details in the planning phase of the webinar also allows you to live-stream your webinar more conveniently.
Lastly, it is a good idea to think about the webinar from the point of view of the audience. If you use professional live webinar services, you can get detailed analytics on most of your previous webinars. This data can help you tweak the webinar you’re planning to be more impactful, effective, and valuable to your audiences.
Managing The Equipment
There are three main aspects that you need to consider when it comes to the equipment you’ll use for the webinar. These include the camera and microphones, the encoders, and the network.
1. Camera and Microphones
The camera is easily the most critical piece of equipment when it comes to webinars. Top live streaming companies know the value of using state of the art equipment as that leads to a better viewing experience for the audience and makes the webinar more impactful.
What microphone you’ll use will also severely affect the quality of the webinar in general, as most webinars are voice-intensive. In fact, it can be argued that audio quality is more important for a great webinar than video quality. Even a low-cost webinar service knows the value of exceptional sound quality.
2. Encoders / System
Encoders are vital when you broadcast high-definition videos in real-time. Due to the size of high-definition videos, not everyone can stream the video in full quality to their devices. In order to accommodate different internet speeds, encoders are used to transcode the video on the fly so the same quality of input video can be viewed in varying conditions by different audiences.
Encoders can either be software-based or physical hardware solutions. These days, most affordable webinar services usually provide their own encoding solutions. Still, their quality might not be up to the mark, and you might have to use a third party dedicated encoder to create the best output for online webinar platforms.
3. Network
Lastly, the network is also one of the most important aspects of webinars. As a lot of data is being uploaded every second when you’re live on online webinar platforms and the quality of your internet connection will directly affect the quality of your webinar.
Promoting The Webinar
While creating a webinar using professional webinar services is usually pretty straightforward, it is another story, building an audience for it. While top webinar companies provide promotional services too, having your own promotion plan for webinars is also important.
Most promotional plans for webinars involve creating a solid distribution strategy. The distribution strategy should ideally include reaching out to people over different channels like email, social media, blogs, and websites.
If you are using a low-cost webinar service for events, you will most likely have to handle the promotional aspect yourself. Most brands usually promote their webinars heavily on channels such as social media and also do some direct online marketing using emails.
Lastly, having a list of previous viewers can help a lot in promoting the webinar. Most platforms that provide the best webinar live streaming for small business needs, usually offer a capturing mechanism that can be used to obtain contact data from the audience.
Managing The Webinar
While a lot of work goes into creating the perfect webinar, a lot more work starts once the webinar is live. There are a lot of things that can go wrong when you’re live, and you need real-time management of the webinar to ensure everything is working perfectly.
Another aspect of managing to record a live webinar session is ensuring that the audience is continuously engaged. A lot of webinars have a Q / A section where the audience asks questions about the topic to the hosts. It is also essential to have real-time management to pick the best questions and handle the demands of the audience.
Even though professional webinar services usually provide real-time management as an additional service, it is better to understand the process for yourself too in order to provide the most value to the audiences, which eventually makes your webinar more impactful and interesting.
Conclusion
Live-streaming a webinar may seem like an easy thing, but in reality, to create a compelling and valuable webinar, you have to spend a lot of time and resources. While there’s no shortage of affordable webinar services, finding one that’ll serve the needs of your business perfectly can be a complicated process.
Dreamcast is a dedicated end-to-end live-streaming company that does everything related to live-streaming video, including webinars. We hope this blog was useful and provided a bit of clarity. Keep reading our blog to learn about the latest in the world of live-streaming video.
