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[Complimentary Webinar] Healthcare Reform 2.0: What it Means for CME and Medical Communication Professionals (PART THREE) Worried Your Presentations Aren’t Up to Par? Learn how to spice up your slides and surpass the limitations of your event visuals (PART TWO) Worried Your Presentations Aren’t Up to Par? Learn how to spice up your slides and surpass the limitations of your event visuals Worried Your Presentations Aren’t Up to Par? Learn how to spice up your slides and surpass the limitations of your event visuals 7 Ways to Increase the Effectiveness and Attendance of Your Online Event (Tips #6 and #7)Authors
Ashley Brescia BeaconLive Brian Leon Evelyn Harbison John Duplin Kaitlin Erickson Keelin Quinn Patrick Wilver Scott Bradshaw Shelley Trudeau UncategorizedSchedule a Live Demo
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Posted by BeaconLive, May 1, 2013 11:12 am
Ask yourself, how much do you really know about healthcare reform? In this ever-changing industry, you have to be up on the latest waves of change that have the potential to completely revamp the healthcare system. If you are interested …
Read more
Posted by BeaconLive, April 5, 2013 9:40 am
What are you trying to say anyway? The key to any presentation is WHO are you talking to and WHAT are you trying to say. Knowing your audience, how they think, feel, react, helps the presenter to fit the context …
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Posted by BeaconLive, March 29, 2013 9:28 am
What kind of presenter do you want to be? A presentation can have a strong message and beautifully designed slides, but if the presenter does not deliver the webinar well, the event will fall well below average. A powerful connection …
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Posted by BeaconLive, March 22, 2013 3:02 pm
A presentation goes far beyond the visuals you present to your audience. Attendee interaction, pace and duration all affect the efficiency and engagement of your event. The anatomy of a presentation is made up of much more than a pretty …
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7 Ways to Increase the Effectiveness and Attendance of Your Online Event (Tips #6 and #7)
Posted by BeaconLive, March 14, 2013 9:46 am
Tip #6: Ask for Feedback and Suggestions Feedback is an essential component to the success of your event. You can hold as many events as you would like, but if they are not resonating with the customer you are wasting …
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7 Ways to Increase Effectiveness and Attendance of Your Online Event (Tip #5)
Posted by BeaconLive, March 13, 2013 10:51 am
Tip #5: Offer Live Chat and a Post Event Chat Transcripts Live chat is a useful tool to keep the attendees alert and focused. Without the opportunity to interact with the speaker, the audience is less likely to stay engaged …
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Secret Sauce for Successful Webinars
Posted by BeaconLive, March 6, 2013 11:39 am
Webinars can be tricky business. Between planning, implementation, and follow up, there are a number of different things an event provider must consider. Each presenter and provider has their own special method to plan a webinar, but some tips and …
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7 Ways to Increase Effectiveness and Attendance of Your Online Event (Tips #3 and #4)
Posted by BeaconLive, March 1, 2013 9:11 am
Tip #3: Encourage Social Media Conversations Before the Event Social Media can be an extremely effective way to reach out to customers and generate buzz around your upcoming event. Replace some of your usual news and updates posts with questions …
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What Is A Hashtag, and How Can I Use It During My Webinar?
Posted by BeaconLive, February 22, 2013 9:03 am
If you haven’t started using Twitter as a main tool of your social media and marketing campaign, you should! Right now! Assuming everyone already has a twitter account for business, you should begin exploring and investing your time into using …
Read more
7 Ways to Increase Effectiveness and Attendance of Your Online Event (Tips 1&2)
Posted by BeaconLive, February 19, 2013 10:31 am
Introduction To successfully promote an event takes precise planning, implementation, and follow through. Before you can even begin thinking about the presentation, you must brainstorm ways to get people interested in attending your event. In this blog mini series, I …
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TIP! It’s always a good idea to start off by telling your audience what you plan to tell them. Give them a quick intro with an outline of the topics you plan to discuss so they focus on your content and not wondering what’s next.
Throughout your webinar, it is important to include engaging questions along with all of the facts. Take the opportunity to involve your participants in the presentation by administering live polling questions. Ask for their opinions that can be answered with multiple-choice answers, then reveal the results to the audience. You can also involving them in the presentation by planting “seed” questions in advance to boost audience participation; a well thought out question will not only provide interaction immediately, but also inspire questions and comments during and after the webinar is finished. It is important to keep your audience both focused and engaged.
How are you benefitting your audience?
In terms of structuring your presentation, it is often best to present your audience with a problem or narrative at the beginning, and then working up towards the solution or peak of the story. How you frame the challenges and present the solutions will directly affect the attention of your audience. If you present the information in an interesting way, your audience is more likely to remember it and refer back to your webinar materials. The better you present your information the more helpful you are to your audience.
About BeaconLive
At BeaconLive we understand the need to have all of your webinar or webcast under one roof. Hundreds of elements go into delivering your professional online event, so it is important to work with a company that can handle each piece of your event puzzle on your behalf. When you partner with BeaconLive we will pair you with a dedicated and professional account manager, event producer, and event moderator to provide you with the full service event support your event deserves.
TIP! Never assume your audience can hold their question until the end of the presentation. Halfway through your event, plan to take a moment to answer the questions that your audience submitted during the first half. This is a great way to draw them back and engage with them.
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[post_content] => A presentation goes far beyond the visuals you present to your audience. Attendee interaction, pace and duration all affect the efficiency and engagement of your event. The anatomy of a presentation is made up of much more than a pretty graphic on a PowerPoint slide. In this white paper, we will discuss choosing the best way to deliver your event to your audience, best practices for designing an effective visual presentation, and tips and tricks for engaging with your audience. By the end of this white paper, you will learn how the best ways to deliver a webinar or webcast presentation that will engage your audience from start to finish.
What’s the best way to get your content out there?? When picking a medium, you must select the method of presentation you think the audience will respond best to. For a basic webinar, your medium should amplify the message through a series of relating visuals and copy. When using PowerPoint slides, try to change your slides every minute or so. The longer a slide is left sitting up there, the more likely the audience is to lose interest and venture off to check their email. To keep them engaged with what you’re saying, set an amount of time you would like to stay under per slide and keep the content for each slide under this amount of time. When creating your visual aides, avoid too much copy by using relatable graphics. After all, if a picture says a thousand words, why actually put 1000 words on a slide? When you do use text, spice up the script just enough to illicit attention, but not to the point that people cannot read it. To emphasize specific phrases or words, use color or bold or italicize the font. Studies show, using bullets with minimal words rather than placing your script on the slides help your audience pay attention to what you're saying, not what their reading. The slides below show different ways to display content.
TIP! Bullets allow you to scan the main points without reading full sentences. A good rule of thumb is using 3 bullets with 6 words (or less) or 6 bullets with 3 words (or less).
In the technology driven world we live in, there are multiple mediums and presentation tools that can be utilized to deliver your message. Many companies write and publish white papers and other case studies to help explain services or general information. These media can serve as far-reaching, providing you with the ability to deliver your presentation to an audience anywhere in the world. Why not take every opportunity to provide your expert knowledge to everyone interested utilizing the state of the art, modern technology available.
Feedback is an essential component to the success of your event. You can hold as many events as you would like, but if they are not resonating with the customer you are wasting your time. Ask attendees to fill our surveys or rate the presentation. It is a short process, and the feedback can help you model your event around what the consumer wants in a presentation. Suggestions offer you the opportunity to engage customers and learn about what they are expecting from your event. Knowing you care about your customer’s satisfaction will help to humanize you as an event provider and show that you care about your attendees’ comments.
Tip #7: Make Your Events Available OnDemand
This almost goes without saying, but all events should be offered OnDemand. Potential attendees who were unable to attend the event, or wish to watch the presentation in clips or in it entirety in the future will utilize your recorded event. Take the OnDemand playback one step further by making multiple versions of the content available. The option to make print versions of the presentation, although costly, can interest customers and have a high return on investment. Just because an event is over doesn’t mean that you cannot still profit from it, so ensure that your event is easily accessible.
Brief Wrap-Up
These tips will hopefully help you transform your upcoming events into up to date attendee-influenced, interactive webinars and webcasts. Viewers will be excited to attend your event, and the attendee is the most important factor of your event. Remember these tips to ensure your customers feel involved and your events will be a success!
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[post_content] => Tip #5: Offer Live Chat and a Post Event Chat Transcripts
Live chat is a useful tool to keep the attendees alert and focused. Without the opportunity to interact with the speaker, the audience is less likely to stay engaged and pay attention to the webinar content. Offer a moderated live chat feature so that the audience can pose questions to their fellow attendees, as well as presenters. Ask the presenters to use the most pertinent questions as a wrap-up at the end of the presentation, connecting the audience and making them feel more involved. Conversation and attendee input helps the audience to be more invested and ultimately have a bigger stake in your content.
In addition to offering live chat services, provide a post event transcript of questions and comments on your OnDemand platform. Attendees may not have had the opportunity to write everything down themselves, or they remember questions they would like to ponder further. This idea, which is a low cost option, offers your customers a convenient way to remember all the information and relive your event. Formatting as a PDF or Word Document is a small but effective way to ensure that your transcript gets fully utilized.
Idea! Be sure to write a follow up blog post shortly after the event. Within this post, be sure to summarize the major points of the event and restate questions posed by both the attendees and presenter. Add elaborative responses, in an effort to quell the post event questions that are sure to follow when your event is finished.
[post_title] => 7 Ways to Increase Effectiveness and Attendance of Your Online Event (Tip #5)
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[post_content] => 
Webinars can be tricky business. Between planning, implementation, and follow up, there are
a number of different things an event provider must consider. Each presenter and provider has their own special method to plan a webinar, but some tips and tricks are consistent no matter what event provider you choose.
During this blog, we will discuss how to spice up your webinar, make it interesting, and ensure that your audience gets exactly what they want out of your event. We might even throw in a Beacon special tip or two!
Marketing. Promoting your event is as important as the actual delivery. Advertising correctly and efficiently directly affects the number of people who sign up for your event, and the type of buzz your presentation is receiving among customers.
Set Aside Lots of Prep Time. Add additional time to your practice period to prepare for your webinar. Though they are a similar concept, webinars and live presentations are an altogether different beast. In this case practice really does make perfect, and the more you feel confident with your webinar, the more likely your event is to go off without a hitch.
Own your message. You need to know exactly what you are trying to say and how you are going to present to your audience, before you even start your event. By owning what you’re saying you are showing your audience how much you actually care about your presentation, and how hard you have worked to help them get the most out of your event. Also, know your audience to gage how to deliver your message. Audience personalities and interactions can make or break your event.
Engage. Create a strong “hook” opening. Entice your audience by beginning with a question or strong statement, the more controversial or interesting, the more conversation or attention it will demand.
Focus on teaching. People are attending your webinars to learn something. Make sure to take questions when time allows, and if you cannot get to everyone in the allotted amount of time, be sure to follow up with attendees after the event. Give out your contact information after the session to ensure your audience has a way to get in touch with you if they have further questions they need answered.
It’s all in the follow through. Congrats! You’ve finished the preparation, and successfully delivered an engaging and useful webinar, but your job is not done yet. Take time post- webinar to reach out to attendees and absentees alike to collect feedback or offer additional resources. Follow-up thank you emails or a survey asking how you did are valuable customer building tools. It will keep your audience coming back for me, and feedback can help you to improve your presentation or material. Also, placing the presentation on an OnDemand platform can help you reach out to attendees and absentees.
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[post_content] => Tip #3: Encourage Social Media Conversations Before the Event
Social Media can be an extremely effective way to reach out to customers and generate buzz around your upcoming event. Replace some of your usual news and updates posts with questions posed to your followers. Posing questions and asking for comments of your followers shows that you are interested in customer engagement and respect your followers opinions.
Tweet the topics you want to learn about or tips regarding online events to followers and speakers. Use social media conversations to give attendees a stake in the content of the upcoming event. Encourage the audience to tweet of post their relevant questions and comments throughout the event, and offer a Q&A session at the end of the presentation. Attendees are much more likely to pay attention when they are involved in the content and the presentation.
Idea! Respond promptly and enthusiastically to questions from your followers. Don’t forget to thank them for their input and pose follow-up questions or comment to keep the conversation going. A conversation with a customer is much more likely to generate positive buzz for an upcoming event, than sending out newsletters or emails.
Tip #4: Give Attendees Easy Access to the Speaker(s)
The presenter features in your online event should never be merely a talking head or stagnant image. This creates audience disconnect and can promote distraction and audience members “checking out” of your presentation. Involve your speaker as much as possible in the event promotions and ask if your presenter is willing to allow attendees to send them questions via email, twitter, or any form they choose. This open communication makes the attendees feel more personally connected to the speaker and increases the likelihood that they stay alert while attending your event.
Idea! Similar to how your company should launch a social media campaign, get your presenters involved on social media. Open the event up to live chat and questions from the audience. Publish presenter blogs and bios on various sites, promoting them through your company twitter, as well as the speaker’s personal twitter. Interactions will help to humanize the presenter, making them more approachable for questions before, after, and during the event.
[post_title] => 7 Ways to Increase Effectiveness and Attendance of Your Online Event (Tips #3 and #4)
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If you haven’t started using Twitter as a main tool of your social media and marketing campaign, you should! Right now! Assuming everyone already has a twitter account for business, you should begin exploring and investing your time into using hashtags as part of your social media marketing strategy. Hashtags consist of the pound sign (#) followed by a short buzzword or short relevant phrase.
What does a hashtag do anyway?
Hashtags are attached to tweets as search mechanisms, and as a business, attaching your own personal hashtag can help Twitter users to easily find your tweet (or a topic within many tweets) in a search function. (For example, we often use #BeaconBlog to promote our Blogs. When you type in #BeaconBlog, a list of all our tweets using the hashtag will appear. If others tweet using the hashtag #BeaconBlog, then their tweets will appear in the search as well.) Hashtags can help to boost customer engagement and spread the word about your business or event. Here are a few quick tips on how to use hashtags to the best of their ability:
Introduction
Idea! Incorporate the latest news and current events, or add a creative theme to the presentation. Current events are stories that are relatable to the audience, and can help to hold their attention for a longer span of time. Consider major news, such as the inauguration, or trends in the media. Relatable information piques interest and could help your event to stick better in your attendees minds.
Tip #2: Create a Structured Communication Schedule
Though eye catching, detailed emails and newsletters are important, the time at which you choose to release event promotions is even more important. Timing email reminders regarding your event can make or break the attendance you get. Release a reminder too early it may fall under your prospective audience’s radar; send it too late and your attendees may have scheduling issues. To avoid losing attendees to the exact science that is email reminders, we recommend sending out email reminders three weeks prior to the event, following up with the prospective attendee a week before the day the event is scheduled for. Avoid the dreaded delete button by consolidating multiple emails and newsletters into one email a day.
In addition to periodic email blasts, it is important to schedule social media and blog posts in accordance with your event schedule. In such a global and mobile society, social media is one of the best platforms to reach out to prospective attendees; however, keeping up with regular postings can become a time consuming chore. We recommend using a social media management dashboard, such as Hootsuite or TweetDeck, to properly manage your various social media postings. Be sure to post entries relevant to the upcoming event topic and include links in your posts that can help attendees prepare for the events. As with email campaigns, structure is key to social media success. Too many tweets and people with stop paying attention, too few and the will forget about your event entirely. Use your social media management tools to find out when your audience is looking, to determine how often to send updates, and to track the best times to reach your followers. All of these tips can help to promote successful email and social media campaigns.
Idea! An event calendar posted on your company website and in your emails can serve as a useful reminder for your attendees. It can also serve as a promotional platform for future events, so that when your audience clicks to view their reminders they also explore your other events. Providing your audience with a visual reminder can help the event to stick in their mind. It’s definitely worthwhile to use one!
Keep your eye out for tips 3 and 4, which will be posted on Friday, March 1st!
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[post_content] => Ask yourself, how much do you really know about healthcare reform? In this ever-changing industry, you have to be up on the latest waves of change that have the potential to completely revamp the healthcare system. If you are interested in staying informed, BeaconLive is offering a complimentary webinar on Wednesday, May 15 at 2pm EST / 11 am PST. Debra Gordon, award-winning medical writer, will be hosting the webinar, taking her audience through the ins and outs of the ever changing healthcare field.
After attending this complimentary interactive webinar, you will be able to:
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