Webcast is a portmanteau word that springs from pairing up web and broadcast. It essentially means broadcasting over the internet. It’s ideal for many business applications.
Marketing
You can use sponsored webcasts to boost leads and increase consumer interest in your products or services. It can also lead to a growth in your traffic. Those works to improve your conversions and sales. Given how much video consumption has grown over the years, trends and technologies involving the creation, promotion and storage of video content is going to be more important as the years go by. By adding webcasting to your communication tools, you can make these trends and changes work to your advantage.
Corporate communications
The BlueJeans Wolke Webcasting tool makes it easy for you to communicate within and outside of the company. Webcasts are a great way to do town hall meetings so you could update your staff on the company’s future, direction and current state, making sure you’re all on the same page on the work that still needs to be done. You can also use those webcasts for company announcements to your clients or market.
Human resources
Video now makes it easy to onboard and recruit a new hire. It used to be that recruiters only had CVs and phone calls to rely on, along with chat messages and emails, before they had a face to face meeting with an applicant. That made for a longer recruitment process. With video calls, hiring specialists now have more to work with, allowing them to make faster decisions on whether a candidate would suit or not. That’s cut down the downtimes and productivity lags common in companies looking for qualified applicants to fill up empty positions. With video, recruitment teams now have faster hiring timetables and outcomes. Presenting benefits is also easy and could be done in an engaging way.
Investor relations
Webcasting services can be used for conferences, analyst days and even video earning calls. That’s all possible when you have a reliable system on your side. If you want to improve relations with your investors, you can rely on webcasts to help you get those presentations right, says the PGI.
Sales
Webcasts can be recorded, saved and archived. That means your webcasts don’t just go into the void when you’re done. You can recycle them and use them to generate leads. The record and replay feature also makes it the perfect training tool. Want to give new hires sufficient background on their work before they start? Webcasts can function as a handy treasure trove for all that information. New hires could watch webcasts to complete their training. It’s also a good way to give your clients or partners product updates.
What you can expect
As video becomes more central to your corporate communication strategy, you can expect the following results:
- Bigger audience. Webcasts are ideal for huge audiences. That’s quite a shift from the one on one communication styles that we’ve seen over the last few years. This doesn’t negate one on one advertising, though. Think of it as a good way to cover all your bases. With webcasts, you can pull off mass marketing campaigns and efforts in a better way.
- In the past, the problem with mass marketing was that it rarely had access to consumer data. For instance, it was difficult to determine whether someone was buying a magazine because of the issue or because of a particular topic. With webcasting, it’s easy to see if the person is looking at a particular product and to match another product offers the shopper might like. Your efforts are targeted so your advertising budget isn’t wasted.
- Video consumption has grown and more and more of those viewers are using their mobile to go online. That means there’s a need for video solutions that work on mobile platforms. That’s easy enough if you have reliable systems you use for making your webcasts and podcasts. Those formats are compatible with plenty of third party mobile apps, ensuring there won’t be any problems with your viewers. They can watch your video content with ease.
- Ultimately, the name of the game is engagement. The best advantage to using video is that it engages audiences in a way—about 1200 percent more—that text and images, combined, never could. Dry facts and figures aren’t going to do much to boost attention and interest in your pages, says Small Business. But webcasts can completely turn that around. If you have trouble racking up engagement levels in your pages, this might be the solution you need to get your ROI up.
As more companies realise the importance of video in the years to come, the last thing you want is for your competition to leave you behind. If you think your engagement needs a boost, it might be time to give webcasting solutions a try.
Photograph by TheAngryTeddy