Gone are the days when webinars required complete PowerPoint presentations, or even hours of content prep time.
This doesn’t mean a decline in content quality, or a growing laziness among content producers and presenters. Far from it. It just means that quality and value for both the audience as well as the presenting company can often be generated with far less work, simply be getting a bit more creative about the format.
For example:
The Group Panel
Pick a topic that’s of value to your intended audience, and invite a handful of experts to come talk about it. Prepare some questions and expectations in advance (come with examples and not just theory, for example), but otherwise find a great moderator and let the conversation drive the value. The visuals on the screen, in some cases, will be secondary. Pick some images that generally represent each conversation topic, but let the discussion stand on its own.
The Moderated Q&A
Pick a good enough expert and you’ll drive attendance from people who want to ask that person their own questions. Have a handful of questions ready for the expert in advance, to get things rolling and keep the conversation on track, plus ensure that the moderator is carefully choosing questions based on topics that other attendees would likely want to learn from as well.
But in this case, your webinar is really about the expert and their content, which is exactly as it should be.
The Double-Box Video Chat
Same idea, slightly different format. Instead of worrying about stock images that represent the topic you’re covering, put the moderator and expert (or panel) right on screen. Laptop webcams are just fine. Again, focus on the content and the personalities. Choose those right and you’ll still have a highly engaging conversation, with great content, that still drives great audience registration, attendance and participation.
And of course, each of these formats can form the basis of repurposing into a variety of other channels and formats that significantly expand the impact and ROI of the initial event, all still with far less up-front bandwidth and prep time required vs. the traditional, PowerPoint-heavy webinar presentation.
Organizations that focus on highly-active content marketing programs need to create a ton of content. That means it’s even more important to find ways to produce quality content faster. Hopefully, at least for one format and channel, this gives you a head start.
