Thu Oct 13

5 Creative Ways to Encourage Your Audience to Participate in Your Webcast

The best kind of webcasts are the ones that successfully generate tremendous amounts of client interest. If your customers are engaged, they are more than likely to participate in your webcast and make it a success. But how do you drum up engagement? How do you put together a webcast that would reach out to your clients, that would make them walk into a shop or go online to pay for your products or services?

Don’t present; discuss

The best webcasts happen when there’s a dialogue, says the Entrepreneur. So don’t focus on giving out a presentation. Make sure you create an atmosphere that encourages your audience to ask questions. Turn it into a discussion, an exchange of ideas. Let them throw the ball and go with it. By opening the floor to a discussion, you do a whole lot to boost consumer engagement. And when they’re engaged throughout the discussion, you can expect your audience to be wholly invested in buying a product or paying for a service.

Ask for feedback

Some companies just put this at the end of a discussion. So when time runs out, some tend to cut this short, not realizing that this is an integral part of the discussion. You need to know what your audience thinks. By doing a webcast that’s solely focused on their feedback, on what your customers think about your products and services, then you have much more material to work with. Ask for your best and worst. That way, your team can hear both the positive and negative. The positive feedback should give them the morale boost they need while the negative feedback serves as a guide to help them figure out what they’re doing wrong and what they need to change or fix.

Create valuable insights

Don’t just blend in with the rest of the competition. Don’t sound like them. Provide a remarkable contrast instead. Stand out. That helps a lot in ensuring the crowd pays attention to you and your products or services instead of a competitor. Repurpose old topics and give them new approaches or takes. It’s not going to be easy to come up with insights but it’s well worth, especially if you want your customers to sit up and take notice.

Make them laugh or empathize

Humor is a good way to generate the kind of consumer interest you want. It makes your webcast stand out, makes it memorable. Tapping into their funny bone can increase consumer engagement by a whole lot. By incorporating humor into your interactive webcasting with services like BlueJeans, your customers will remember your brand or product longer and better than the rest. It can make them think about buying your best-selling item or availing of your award-winning service the next time they find themselves online. So do your best to entertain your audience. Think of yourself as a performer. You’ll have to keep on doing something that’s interesting to them, that hooks them in, if you want to turn those views into sales. You can also use compassion and empathy. Targeting your customers’ emotions is one way to get better consumer engagement. So make sure you do this but with a delicate touch. Don’t go overboard. Make sure the message doesn’t get lost in all the spin. If you use too much fanfare or have a heavy hand, it could turn out distasteful and the complete opposite of what you want. It would also help a lot if you invite an engaging speaker over, suggests the PGI.

Tell a story

The best way to do a webcast is to make sure you tell a compelling story, one that captures the interest and attention of your audience in a way no one else or ever will. Make sure the story matters to them. Take a look at some of Nike’s best campaigns. At the core of those stories is human resilience. That you can do it. That bad luck and bad things will happen. That you will fail. Repeatedly. But that isn’t the important part of the story. What’s important is that you know how to get back up again. That you don’t give up. That you should just do it. Because that’s when you succeed. That’s when you change the future. So don’t just market your goods and services. Don’t do a boring product launch and expect your consumers to be happy about it. Make it count. Tell a story.

So don’t just set out to use your webcast to market a new product or service you have. Take advantage of the medium to boost participation among your audience, to generate great consumer interest and create a deeper connection and bond with your regulars. With these five great tips, you’re sure to see a marked improvement in the quality of engagement you see in your webcasts.