Becoming expert

1. Develop compelling slide artwork. Your slides are a representation of your company or brand. If you are doing multiple webcasts we recommend employing a designer to develop your unique look. Remember that your cover slide will be a key feature for attracting your audience and is visible in your BrightTALK™ Channel.

2. Find your presentation style – experiment with new styles until you are comfortable. Read the feedback that your audience provide. Sometimes they can be brutally honest (and even a little rude!), but pay attention to their complaints and it will significantly improve your performance.

   1. Speed of delivery is often faster than a physical conference
      We see a lot of feedback about the speed of presentations, mostly too slow and sometimes too fast – either way getting the right pace of delivery is important to your audience.

   2. Humor
      We find that there is a strong connection between presenters who manage to relax and be humorous with receiving positive feedback from the audience.

   3. Use votes as transitions between subjects
      One of the hardest areas to get right, but making votes a seamless part of your webcast is a sign of a true professional.

3. Have existing questions to kick-start the Q&A. There is often a pause at the end of the presentation while a presenter waits for the first few questions to come in. We see the best speakers drumming up questions throughout the presentation or having their own pre-defined questions to get the Q&A session rolling. Once an audience get going with their questions there can be no stopping them, so leave enough time for the Q&A.

4. Keep questions rolling in by building on each question – develop a conversation. The best Q&A sessions build on the first question answered, almost like telling a story, one question leads to another and so on. If you already answered a question there is no need to answer it again just because it was asked by a different person. Find a way to tackle the topic and credit a number of people at the same time.

5. Know your audience and use your customer insight to develop topics you are speaking about. Use your votes to test the subject matter for upcoming webcasts. We’ve found that renaming a topic can take it from being the least popular to the most popular subject, so be prepared to experiment with titles. Use your audience to ratify the topics of interest.

6. Promote, promote, promote – especially if you have a BrightTALK Premium, Custom or Enterprise Channel. Email is the most effective tool we know for building your audience and we encourage you to develop your email templates to professionally communicate the quality of your webcast program. The social media tools available with your channel provide over 50 free ways to promote your channel. You can also advertise your webcasts and build an audience through an awareness campaign.