Employees want to work from anywhere. In fact, 39% of staff members would immediately quit their job if their WFH/WFA options were revoked. According to a Gallup report, only 20% of remote-eligible staff members are currently working in-office and fully on-site. 

With more people working remotely than ever before, businesses need to adapt their internal communications strategy and how they communicate with their teams, regardless of their location. We’re seeing that when companies leverage internal communications tools like video, communication as a whole becomes more effective.

In fact, video-savvy teams were twice as likely to say their organization’s collaborative environment and staff training is “excellent” and 75% more likely to say that they experience “excellent” employee engagement at work.

If you want to energize your workforce, boost team performance, and drive efficiency at your business, consider these five important reasons you should use internal communications videos at your organization.

1. Effectively train and onboard teams

A distributed workforce comes with challenges. A recent report compiled by Vimeo and GlobalWebIndex found that 35% of HR professionals face significant hurdles with training employees virtually.

Insufficient training, onboarding, or sales enablement for current or new employees can have a serious impact on employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention. When team members don’t have a positive experience as a new hire, they’re twice as likely to look for a new job. 

To make sure your team doesn’t miss out on crucial education, mentoring, learning company values, and other insights about company culture, consider virtual training and onboarding videos to amp up your new-hire training.

Building an on demand training hub using high quality video tools can help boost employee training and comprehension. For example, Global coatings company Axalta provides customers with sustainable and innovative solutions — and this passion shines through in their products, practices, and training. For the past few years, Axalta relied on virtual training videos to reach their technical workforce of 13,000 professionals and provide effective internal communications. 

“Technicians don’t always want to travel to our training centers, it’s not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ for our diverse group of learners.”

Steve Hamaday, Virtual Training Manager at Axalta

Important technical training techniques – like the finesse of wielding a spray gun – are best communicated through high-quality visuals. “We found that missing those fractions of a frame was a huge deal for our painters, as they could be missing important learning points.” Steve Hamaday said. Investing in a high quality video hosting platform allowed Axalta’s team to provide the experience and training their teams needed to be successful.

When organizations turn training content into interactive video, they can improve team engagement. And repurposing events as on-demand enablement content allows employees to continue learning, refining skills, and work more productively.

2. Engage a global workforce

An engaged workforce can have a powerful impact on your business. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report states that businesses with engaged workers have 23% higher profits compared to other businesses. To facilitate more connective moments with your teams, you can use video to produce a town hall to highlight your executive team, host an internal virtual live streaming event with speakers and activities, or share important information asynchronously with recorded video.

Scaling corporate communications can feel like a challenge for even the biggest brands. Thankfully, a hunger for innovation coupled with the right tool for corporate communication videos can turn a workforce with thousands of employees into a strong, centralized community.

For example, Rite Aid rewrote its corporate playbook by pivoting from in-person meetings to virtual town halls. The result? The ability to reach more associates and a desire to run more live events. 

“Our first town hall on Vimeo was a pivotal moment that allowed us to reach more associates than we ever could through live, in-person events.”

Peter Strella, Director of Communications & Creative Media Services at Rite Aid

You can create stunning corporate videos, internal communication tools, and other video communications resources with easy-to-use production, editing, and live streaming tools. 

3. Close the communication gap

The data shows a sharp disconnect between senior leadership and employees in how they perceive the effectiveness — and frequency — of their communications. Specifically, 54% of execs say that they stream major company updates at least weekly, while only 20% of employees agree.

To bridge the gap, executives should consider increasing communications across all channels. Just keep in mind that your communications method — creating or doubling down on an internal comms or video marketing strategy — is only as effective as the content of the communication itself. Leadership teams should lean into authenticity and transparency to help get their message across.

“What we hear from employees is that what they want is more frequent communications, but my sense is that what they really want is more transparency.”

Anjali Sud, CEO at Vimeo

Authenticity combined with video creation can have a real impact on the future. Employees at video-forward companies were over 70% more likely to say their company was ready to face the future of work.

Executives have the opportunity to use video to close the communication gap not only through explainer videos but also through:

• Personable screen recordings and message videos that include company updates
• Q&As for global town halls
• Quick, asynchronous communications
• A video library of searchable content

For more executive comms strategies and tips, check out our Workplace Communications Workshop with leaders at Outreach, Meetup, Care.com, and Vimeo.

4. Drive efficiency with internal comms video

Work and collaboration have fundamentally changed over the years. And with that, teams are on the hunt for tools to increase efficiency, streamline communications, and adapt to any workplace environment.

From our experience, we’ve discovered two impactful ways to use video as an employee communication tool and help drive workplace efficiency: live streaming and screen recording.

Live streaming

Both Rite Aid and Paychex found success creating and live streaming company events (like town halls). 

Rite Aid used Vimeo to successfully facilitate its first virtual town hall. Its event was attended virtually by nearly 3,000 corporate and field leadership staff members.

Paychex traded in its travel expenses for live streamed events and reached 10 times more employees than it ever did in person.

Screen recording

The second efficiency driver is screen recording. When you add tools like Vimeo Record into team workflows, it can minimize the number of meetings and provide training opportunities, all while keeping projects moving.

“My team is using Vimeo Record to share product demos internally and to give our customers a preview of what’s launching soon. We love it! It adds a personal touch that you just can’t replicate with email or a chatroom message.”

Trevor Wolfe, Director of Product at Mailchimp

5. Scale knowledge-sharing opportunities

Knowledge sharing is important for nurturing employee growth and happiness. Whether for training, mentoring, or onboarding, employee knowledge that comes from within facilitates employees’ workplace success.

Hosting video recordings in a video library can make information more accessible and provide both new hires and legacy employees with the needed tools to succeed at work.

Our comprehensive guide, The Essential Corporate Comms Toolkit, can help you make sense of how companies of all sizes leverage live video to create engaging meetings for every employee, no matter where they are.

Organizations that are able to centralize their company knowledge effectively maintain consistency between current, new, and future employees. When you add video to your knowledge-sharing culture, those comms become even more efficient.

Wrap-up: Redefine how you work with video

The distributed mindset calls for a change in how you work, communicate, and collaborate with teams. All-in-one video communication solutions and corporate communication tools can help provide secure and flexible communications (and quality video) to keep business moving.

As the definition of where we work changes, don’t get caught up in outdated forms of communication. Reimagine how to make teams successful and bring the tools and transparency that help them achieve their best work. 

Discover more employee communications solutions

Originally published on June 12, 2019 and updated on June 1, 2023.

More than half (53%) of B2B marketers report webinars are a successful lead generation tactic. And 58% of B2B professionals say virtual events like webinars and online courses also produce the best business results — compared to assets like research reports and short articles.

58% of B2B pros say webinars produce the best business results.

Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report

And 62% of webinar attendees feel ready to request product pricing after watching a relevant vendor video. 

This makes it clear: not only do professionals use webinars as a great resource for internal communication and remote training, but webinars can also help generate leads for sales.

Learning how to create a webinar is half the battle. Successful marketers focus on designing content and presenting a compelling webinar that holds attention. So how do you do it? Thankfully, we’ve got some presentation ideas and tips for you.

We know webinars are a great way to attract leads, convert customers, and share your brand’s story. While webinar promotions and the right content will attract your audience, keeping their attention is all about nailing your live presentation.

In this post, we’ll dive into the nuts and bolts of how to design, write, and host webinar presentations — from choosing a webinar platform to gathering feedback. By the end, you’ll master the fundamentals of presenting an attention-arresting show. Here’s what we’ll review:

How to set up a webinar in five steps

We’ve distilled the art of creating a webinar presentation into five easy steps.

Need more tips? Learn how to create a webinar, or check out Vimeo’s Webinar Confidential to hear real-life stories of virtual event mishaps and tips on how to run a great event. Watch now

1. Work out the webinar’s structure and presentation style

Dedicate this first step to ensuring smooth functionality and planning the nitty-gritty details of your webinar:

• What topic will you cover? 
• Who is your audience? 
• Will it be a real-time live webinar or pre-recorded? 
• Where will you host the landing page where guests can register for the event?
• Will there be an on demand video of the webinar available afterward?

Also, ask yourself how the webinar will unfold — the sequence it will follow, who will present, and the order of topics/content to share.

Once you’ve planned out the webinar’s basics, work out which presentation styles will complement your show: slides and audio, screen share, webcam, or a combination of the three. Ideally, show yourself and/or the speakers to connect with your audience.

2. Dump your thoughts into an outline

So you’ve ironed out details about your presentation style, webinar speakers, and structure. What’s next? A brain dump so you can start organizing your thoughts.

At the top of your outline, write down the key message you want to deliver. Next, write down all your topic-related presentation ideas — visuals, main points, transitions, etc. At this point, it’s advisable you don’t hold back or try to filter or pause to evaluate if an idea is good or bad. Simply write it down.

As you jot down your thoughts, add any supporting evidence to your points. Think examples, data, stats, and customer stories that tie into your main webinar thesis.

Now, work on refining your brainstorm into an outline. Here’s a three-step process to get your outline in top shape: 

• Filter: Whittle down all your information so you have no more than three to five key takeaways.
• Distill: Select the most impactful data and examples to back your points.
• Polish: Make sure everything in the outline aligns with your webinar’s goal and is relevant to your target audience.

Remember that it’s important to only present the most important, most impactful content.

As Chris Anderson, curator at TED, describes in the Harvard Business Review, try to limit abstract language and focus on concrete examples:

“If you try to cram in everything you know, you won’t have time to include key details, and your talk will disappear into abstract language…You need specific examples to flesh out your ideas. So limit the scope of your talk to that which can be explained, and brought to life with examples, in the available time.”

Your final outline should read like a script or guide that will map the webinar presentation.

3. Make a plan to engage your audience

There’s nothing more disappointing than a bland webinar that does little to excite the audience.

In fact, in a recent internal Vimeo survey, we found that the main reasons participants exit webinars are technical difficulties (59%), poor moderation (46%), or boredom (44%). This means it’s imperative to have your production in order and content that’s concise and relevant.

Of course, grabbing your audience’s attention with well-designed presentation slides is crucial — and we’ve got tips on that a bit later in this article — but attendee engagement and getting your audience to “act” during the live event is your top priority.

Online whiteboard software Miro’s customer education manager, Jennifer Clark, acknowledges the importance of improving your attendees’ user experience for this. Not only does it help convince participants to stay till the end, but it also encourages them to attend more of your webinars.

“I [engage attendees] by welcoming folks with music, asking interesting icebreakers to warm up the chat, and offering several opportunities to raise hands or respond in the chat throughout the session. Humor is critical too — if we don’t have someone’s attention or we aren’t interesting to listen to/look at, we’re not going to retain our learners long enough to teach them something cool.”

To create a memorable user experience for your webinars, try adding a few things like an intro slate, a handful of ice breaker questions to fire up the chat, and a pause between sections. This gives presenters and speakers time to comment live by answering audience questions from the chat or to pose questions to the audience to help them retain more info.

Clark also focuses on paying attention to the small details to make your webinar stand out:

“I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to think through the end-user experience for the webinar itself. The sound and video quality should be high, the field of view should be clean if you’re sharing a screen, and ‘do not disturb’ mode should be on.

We shouldn’t see any bouncing apps or notifications. I think those little details mirror what I’ve done in person as an educator. In the past, that let your audience know you care about the small things and want their experience to be seamless.”

Technical execution is critical to keeping folks engaged in webinar content. Schedule a rehearsal before the live event to troubleshoot any issues with video and audio prior to the live stream.

4. Prepare a short but engaging introduction

A poor introduction can make attendees feel like it was a wrong decision to sign up, so they wouldn’t hesitate to take the exit route. Translation: you need a strong introduction.

So what makes a good introduction?

Start with a greeting

A simple yet effective way to start is with a ‘Hi! Welcome to [webinar title].’ It’s also a good idea to thank participants for taking the time to join you.

Reinforce the webinar is worth the time investment

Be quick to tell attendees how the webinar will benefit them. Consider sharing the takeaways in bullet points: three to four points maximum so you aren’t overloading things to the point that you make them easy to forget.

Or you can share a one-line take-home message. For example, a webinar on Google Analytics to track blog post traffic can have the following what’s-in-it-for-me message for its attendees: ‘You’ll leave feeling ready to use GA for tracking your blog performance.’

Share why you’re an expert in the topic you’re presenting

Introduce yourself next. Explain what makes you an authority on the subject. But instead of reading out your resume, consider summarizing your career highlights — packaged as a story. Stories are personal; therefore, they help you connect with your audience and gain their trust. A story is always way more memorable than a plain speech on what you’ve accomplished so far.

Explain your webinar’s structure

Think of this as your general housekeeping. It helps set audience expectations, which makes it an absolute must component of your introduction.

Simply tell viewers what’s in store for them. Have a live Q&A session at the end? Tell them so they can start writing down their questions. Have polls in place throughout the sessions? Again, tell them.

Vimeo’s Master Class on hosting engaging town halls shares key takeaways in four simple bullet points:

• Why are town halls crucial to your business?
• Tips for planning the best content for your town hall
• How to boost employee (attendee) engagement during town halls
• How to extend the life of your town hall

Pro tip: Create a useful template, checklist, or framework to get your audience to stick around till the end. Tell them you’ll be sharing a gift or freebie at the end. But don’t reveal exactly what it is — build the suspense instead.

5. Prepare your presentation slides

With the legwork done, start creating your presentation slides. Use the outline you’ve created to write copy for the slides. Roughly, you’ll need to work on the following slides:

• Section headers/dividers
• Text-heavy slide
• Combination text + high-quality image(s) slide
• Big stats slide
• Pull quotes

The key, however, is to make sure you don’t stuff the slides with too much text. A good presentation slide formatting rule that can help here is the 5-5-5 rule:

• Add no more than five (5) words per line
• No more than five (5) lines per slide
• No more than five (5) consecutive text-heavy slides

How to build a webinar: Four design tips

Now, for some expert tips from Vimeo’s design team. Don’t worry; you don’t need design chops for this.

1. Variety is the spice of presentation slides

Text-based monotonous slides are the recipe for losing audience attention. Our in-house design team suggests leveraging animation, GIFs, motion, imagery, or iconography to break the monotony. Short video tutorials, such as screen recordings illustrating a point, also work well. For example, showing a product feature in action.

The general rule is to have less text and more visuals since you’ll be voicing over information as you present.

2. Make your slides easy to read

Use a legible font that’s displayed at minimum 30 points. This is important for making your slides accessible to attendees joining using their smartphones.

3. Brand your slides

Design using your brand colors and logo in your slides for brand consistency. This will also help leave a memorable impression on participants, especially if they continue to join more of your webinars.

Splash, for example, creates presentation decks using its brand colors.

If you choose to keep your logo but want to experiment with other colors, follow this expert advice from a Vimeo designer:

“Choose colorways that are complementary and provide enough contrast to be legible (i.e., don’t use white text on an off-white background).”

4. Highlight key information

This helps you catch attendees’ attention better. Our designer advises you to “make important callouts big and bold! Whether that’s a quote or a key stat that you want to highlight.”

Now that you have a good idea about how to design and format your webinar presentation (remember: lower thirds are your friends!), let’s get into how to write a great webinar script.

Five tips for writing a great webinar script

A webinar script is a written version of what a speaker delivers in their presentation.

You need it as a guardrail to structure your thoughts into a cohesive layout while helping you communicate key points efficiently.

Besides outlining your introduction, webinar agenda, and call to action, use the script to include timing details (how much time you’d dedicate to each section and speaker) and navigational instructions such as which slides to share, interactive elements to intro, and more.

Begin writing your script as soon as you’ve finalized your presentation topic — go back to the outlining step in the section on how to create a webinar presentation for a refresher if needed.

Then follow these five steps to write a good webinar script.

1. Know your audience

Your webinar content can only be as relevant to your audience as your knowledge of them is. Speak their language, use examples that resonate with them, and touch on their pain points — show them you did your homework.

Here are a few tips on how you can write a simple script that is relevant to your audience:

• Remove business speak or jargon.
• Get rid of heavy vocabulary and an overload of abbreviations.
• Use as many short and medium-length sentences as possible.

Most of all, always front-load sentences so that important information is at the start.

The more you know your audience, the better you’ll understand their struggles, how to solve them, and how to present that solution within your webinar. By extension, you’ll be able to engage attendees better. Briar Goldberg, the director of speaker coaching at TED, talks about this:

“When your audience doesn’t feel like your words apply to them, when they don’t understand what you’re trying to say, or, worse yet, they don’t care about your ideas, then your carefully crafted slides, agenda or jokes simply don’t matter.”

A useful starting point then is one that Goldberg shares: ABC or Audience Before Content. Translation: before you put pen to paper, research your audience. The following three tips will help:

• Ask the marketing team to share audience demographics and buyers’ persona.
• Understand why attendees are making time for the webinar — what do they really want to learn?
• Figure out your audience’s expectations and how you can meet their expectations (social listening and asking this question in your sign-up form are two helpful ways to find your answer).

2. Know your goal

When learning how to create a webinar presentation, don’t saturate your content with too many ideas. Doing so dilutes your main message.

Semrush’s head of influencer marketing, Anton Shulke, stresses the need to have a clearly defined goal:

“Before doing a webinar, ask yourself why you are doing it, and if you have multiple reasons — just drop it. Webinars as any type of content serve one [to] two purposes; defining them before starting the work is absolutely essential.”

But what if you’ve gotten to this point and realized your goal isn’t necessarily relevant? Time to revise. What can you do to refine your intention and make your purpose better match your content and audience?

Revising your webinar’s goal is also crucial for writing a script that aligns with your goal and helping you tie in goal-relevant examples, screens, product tutorials (if needed), and calls to action.

3. Leverage storytelling

Good presentations are ultimately about telling a great story. Stories and real-life examples fascinate where business speak bores people — there’s science behind this too.

But what does this mean for you? Start with a story and build your ideas into your presentation as examples. This can help differentiate your webinar content, making it memorable and more human.

In a product-led webinar targeted toward people at the bottom of your funnel, for example, this would mean you don’t focus on your company or product. It means you tell a story about a customer, their problem, and how your solution can help them achieve their goal.

At Vimeo, we’re fans of sharing our customers’ success stories. It’s why in our Master Class on engaging town halls, we shared how Rite Aid created successful all-hands meetings with video.

Pro tip: If you plan to back your story with data, choose only two to three mind-blowing statistics. Dumping a laundry list of numbers increases your audience’s mental load.

4. Use the three to five takeaways rule

This one’s a hat tip to Vimeo’s content and programming lead, Julie Bergstein, who leads our event strategy.

The plan is easy: strip your script down to its simplest form. Why? Because simple is easy to understand and easy to remember.

One good way to keep things simple is by reducing your audience’s take-home messages to three to five points, according to Bergstein.

“I always like to highlight three to five key takeaways that our audience will walk away with so that they know exactly what they’re in for. Then, I always map the different ‘sections’ of content directly back to those three to five takeaways. At the end, I’ll reiterate the takeaways on a slide (in slightly different wording than the earlier slide) to really drive home the main points.”

Don’t be afraid of repetition — throughout your presentation, loop back to the main points from your outline and continually drive your webinar takeaways.

5. Trim your script to fit the presentation’s duration

Before you consider your webinar script done, give it one last round of edits.  

Take care of two things in this final step:

• Read your script out loud. You want to know how it sounds to the ear. Rewrite or get rid of sentences that are overly complex, don’t add value, and aren’t easy to understand in one go.
• Time your script. Read your script with the timer running in the background. Don’t stop even as the time exceeds your presentation’s duration. This will help you figure out how much speaking time you need to cut so you can shorten the script.

Six tips for presenting webinars

There’s only one thing that you need to practice now: your delivery.

It’s easy to think about “winging it,” but there are areas in which preparation can save you from wasting time (i.e., rambling, not knowing what to say next, etc.).

So here are six simple tips for presenting webinars like a professional:

1. Practice each slide

Without practice, you’re likely to ramble instead of making a concise argument. Plus, you’ll likely shower your audience with a ton of “umms” and other filler.

Delivering such a presentation does little to hold your audience’s attention. The solution? Practice. Lots of practice. If you can, get someone on the team to help you. Or record yourself and listen to where you’re stammering or going off-track.

If the webinar has more than one speaker, it’s a good idea to chart the webinar’s flow, including time slots for each presenter. From there on, do a run-through to see how each presenter is doing and to fine-tune the flow (and transition between speakers).

2. Rehearse your pacing and tone

You don’t need to change the way you speak. But your pacing will need work. As will making sure each word you say is delivered clearly. Miro’s webinar host talks about this, too.

“Pacing is critical; the audience shouldn’t feel like we’re blazing through features [or pointers/ideas] or spending forever on one feature [idea]. It should take advantage of attention while moving freely enough to capture wandering minds.”

Practice will help you strike the right balance for pacing. Here are a couple of tips for nailing your speech and tone.

• Speak clearly with micro pauses. Consciously take steps to clearly say each word to make sure your audience is able to digest your message.
• Work toward an energetic tone. A slow, lazy tone indicates the webinar is going to be a slow kill. An interested, dynamic tone, on the other hand, is welcoming — and will help you retain your audience.

3. Check your internet connection

Poor internet speed can cause your presentation to stutter or freeze. Since your aim is to provide an amazing attendee experience, make it a rule to check your internet speed a week before the event.

You’ll need a minimum of 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps) upload speed for hosting a webinar, but an exact estimate depends on audience size and the hosting platform.

4. Host from a noise-free webinar environment

This ensures your voice can be heard as clearly as possible. It also removes distractions for you, making it easy to keep up with your train of thought.

To this end, make sure you:

• Close all background tabs. You don’t want a song playing in the background only to find out it’s coming from one of your zillion tabs.
• Host from a room with soft surfaces. Carpet and curtains absorb sound and reduce echo. If you’re working from home, make sure the room is inaccessible to children and pets.
• Wear headphones. It reduces background noise and echo.
• Get a professional microphone. Research proves audio quality ranks higher than visual quality. This means your laptop’s built-in microphone simply won’t cut it. Consider investing in a lavalier or clip-on mic that can save your audience from straining to keep up with you.

Have some extra budget to spare? Get a boom arm for your mic so it’s positioned close to your mouth to minimize background noise.

5. Recruit a team to help you pull it all off smoothly

For large events, you may need a few more teammates to help pull everything off smoothly. A moderator, for example, helps manage comments pouring through your live chat or Q&A or moderates the most upvoted questions to the speaker(s).

A spotter, on the other hand, is an extra pair of eyes that regulates all the technical stuff during a webinar.

6. Curate questions for the Q&A session in case engagement is low

Ask for questions ahead of time. This will help you fire off a Q&A session immediately without having to fill the awkward silence until attendees share their questions. Gather questions using the webinar sign-up form or ask your social media or newsletter community to share their questions.

How to conduct post-webinar feedback surveys

A successful webinar doesn’t end once you reach the last slide. Post-webinar feedback helps you understand how your hard work translates into value for the attendees. As you wrap your presentation, be sure to tell participants you’ll be sharing a survey form in a follow-up email.

Some presenter feedback survey questions you can ask are:

• What’s your biggest takeaway from the presentation?
• How can we make the webinar better for you?
• What would you like to learn next?

You can also ask participants to rate your presentation with a few questions, such as:

• How likely are you to recommend the session to a colleague?
• Would you like to learn more on this topic?
• What percentage of the content shared with you was new?
• How would you rate the host’s presentation skills, presentation pace, and knowledge of the topic?

Webinar presentation best practices FAQs

Discover the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about presenting webinars.

How do you structure a good webinar?

A webinar’s success is typically dependent on the preparation that goes into it. In order to structure a good webinar, follow the steps in our guide to:

• Set up a webinar
• Design a webinar
• Write a webinar
• Present a webinar

What makes an effective webinar?

Arguably, the most important part of a webinar is what the speakers say. Visuals are important, but a webinar script can make or break a presentation. If you want your webinar to be effective, you need to first create an effective script. Effective webinar scripts include a variety of relevant data and statistics, examples, anecdotes, and casual communication. And don’t underestimate the power of purposeful pauses.

What are the 13 components of webinar presentations?

Thirteen is an arbitrary number created by a European webinar provider, but since you asked…

The 13 components of webinar presentations — as outlined by Online Seminar — include the following:

1. Communicate audience expectations.
2. Create a clear structure.
3. Keep slide information brief.
4. Build a dynamic presentation.
5. Involve participants actively (engage your audience).
6. Encourage attendees to take action (include a CTA!).
7. Practice! Practice! Practice!
8. Present slowly and thoughtfully (watch out for a pace that’s too fast!).
9. Alternate your eye contact between the screen and the audience.
10.  Explain your actions (e.g., “Now I’m starting a pre-recorded video…”) to increase clarity.
11.  Explain who has asked any questions you address.
12.  Don’t forget a post-event summary!
13.  Keep your closing statement concise.

Wrap up: Webinar presentation 101

Hopefully, you have a stronger idea of how to create a webinar presentation that will wow your audience. With these expert insights and presentation ideas, you’ll be able to host an awesome webinar that keeps your audience glued to their screen till the end.

Take a deep breath. Success is in identifying your presentation’s goal, packaging information in three to five takeaways, and practicing your script beforehand. Don’t forget to create breathable, clutter-free slide decks and engage your audience with polls and Q&As. And just remember: your ultimate goal is to connect with the person on the other side of the screen.

Go live with your next webinar

Originally published on July 2, 2021. Updated in May 12, 2023.

A well-executed virtual event sparks connections and inspires attendees, regardless of where they’re logging in from. A boring event? Well, we all know how those turn out — your survey email goes straight to SPAM or your event recording goes unwatched. 

Mastering the art of virtual events is key not only for experiential event planning professionals but for marketers as well. If you want to engage virtual attendees, you’ll need a creative vision, a powerful live streaming platform, and the right virtual event idea to get started.

So without further ado, here are 31 internal and external virtual event ideas to engage your employees and attendees.

What is a virtual event?

A virtual event takes place exclusively online. From conferences, festivals, award ceremonies, live sports, and faith-based live streams — virtual event ideas can range from quick virtual meetings or webinar sessions to multi-day experiences.

The beauty of virtual events is that they are cost-effective and without physical limitations. With online events, marketers don’t need to stress about occupancy rules, printed materials, furniture, swag budgets, or astronomical bar tabs.

As long as you stay focused on engaging your audience in a meaningful way, you have full creative license to make your digital experience perfectly tailored for your brand.

Check out our complete guide on how to plan and host a virtual event.

Team entertainment event ideas

As the work environment becomes increasingly remote, leadership teams have to remain creative in planning employee engagement activities. According to HubSpot’s 2022 Hybrid Work Report, 40% of remote team members miss connecting with colleagues spontaneously. So take a look at these seven virtual team entertainment options and start planning your virtual event today.

1. Movie screening

Everyone watches movies at home, but rarely do we get a chance to watch movies with coworkers and friends. A virtual movie night or screening for your team offers a nice change of pace from your typical virtual work events. 

Stream a film in a virtual group setting where people can watch and chat about the movie together. Make the experience even more interactive by hosting virtual gatherings before and/or after the screening to discuss the film.

2. Music concert

Nothing beats an in-person concert, but great musical performances can transcend virtual spaces. And it’s probably easier than you think to live stream a music concert. 

This year’s Coachella festival was available for virtual audiences through one of six separate live streams. So if concert-goers weren’t able to make it out to the desert (or didn’t want to pay $5 for a bottle of water), they can still enjoy their favorite performers’ sets.

You could even include a dance party or karaoke to shine a spotlight on team members and bring your musical event to a whole new level.

3. Theater performance

It may seem daunting, but a live theater event can be a unique, attainable way to offer virtual entertainment to your audience. Theatrical video guru Jim Glaub recommends pre-recording the performance you’re going to live stream. A second or two delay can interrupt an acting or musical beat, so streaming a previously recorded live performance is your best bet. 

Not sure where to start? Talk to acting teachers and colleges in your area to get connected to great live theater performers.

4. Museum visit

While most of us would prefer to travel the world to check out famous museums, it’s still pretty great to view art collections from afar. As live streaming services have improved, remote museum visits have become a real possibility for sharing entertainment.

There are great museums all over the world that offer virtual experiences. Use Google Arts & Culture to put together an online tour for your team, and they can discuss the world’s greatest works over coffee.

5. Casual party game

Murder mystery and other types of casual games translate well to an online environment because they don’t require many game pieces. But they do require audience communication!

Learn the rules of Werewolf and teach your employees how to “survive the night” in this virtual game. You can serve as moderator or designate a team member to keep the game running. 

6. Sporting event viewing

There are a few key dates every year all sports fans have circled on their calendars. From the Super Bowl to the World Cup, these types of important matches are best enjoyed with others. And if attendees can’t be at the game in person, watching along with fellow fans can make it more fun for your audience.

Hosting a virtual sports-watching party can be a great way for team members to enjoy the camaraderie of rooting for their favorite teams in a virtual setting.

7. Dinner party

Another way to kick back and relax with your colleagues and teammates is with a remote dinner party. Everyone eats, and you don’t necessarily have to have a set “menu” if you host a virtual dinner event, so it’s a natural way for employees to get together and connect.

And although you don’t have to provide a menu or recipes, it can be fun to follow a general “theme” like “spicy” or “favorite family meal.” Then teammates can share their recipes if they choose, or your company can sponsor the meal from a local restaurant.

Team professional learning event ideas

In 2021, one-fifth of trade shows were organized as virtual events — so it’s not only possible to do so, but it’s also a popular option. A virtual professional learning event is a great way to keep audience members and employees engaged.

8. Fireside chat

A fireside chat is a great virtual event idea to host for employees. Achieving the “fireside chat” format can be as easy as setting up a live stream broadcast for your team.

Industry thought leaders and motivational speakers are two great options for leading a presentation on an interesting topic.

9. Training

While a lot of options on this list are meant to spark connections and build teams, we also want to share virtual event ideas that can help you turn work necessities — like training and onboarding — into more engaging (and fun) events.
A great example of an engaging training event comes from the global coatings company Axalta. They wanted a modern way to reach their nearly 13,000 technicians without relying on decade-old in-classroom teaching practices.

“Organizing our training videos by teams or topics — all quickly searchable and on a stunning branded homepage — helps us shorten ramp up time and connect with teams at scale.”

Steve Hamaday, Virtual Training Manager, Axalta

By going virtual and streaming their training sessions, Axalta reached a much larger audience and presented information in a more fun and engaging manner than in the standard classroom setup. Use video to stream training content and help reach your global workforce.

10. Recruiting event

Why not turn your team-building activities into recruiting events? Put together a list of virtual team events to identify the most relevant ones to engage prospective employees. Options can include lunch-and-learns, hackathons, or panel discussions hosted by your team.

When setting up a recruiting event, encourage team members to bring friends or past colleagues. Many companies like to invite prospective employees to a team gathering or two to help everyone get a feel for the company and culture fit.

11. Digital summit

Virtual summits are an effective way to promote your brand and build a greater audience. We’ve seen great examples from Facebook’s F8 Refresh event and Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Loyal fans of brands tune in year after year, so these digital summits can become trending events. However, it’s not just all talking heads and PowerPoints. Look for ways to leverage breakout sessions, group networking, and other activities to excite your streaming audience.

12. TED-inspired Talk

While hosting a virtual event for your audience is a great way to keep them engaged with your brand, it can also be the perfect opportunity to establish yourself as a true subject-matter expert in your relevant field. Perhaps the best way to do this is by hosting your own TED Talk-inspired keynote or webinar presentation.

If you can host a local TEDx Talk, do that — but setting up a TED-style live stream is the next best thing. When a key member of your team can show a strong understanding of your industry, it can help you develop a loyal audience.

13. Online conference

Translating a physical conference into a digital one can be user-friendly — with the right tools. Using Vimeo, ClayShare, a popular online pottery studio, was able to pivot from a physical conference to producing an online event in 10 days. With the right idea, the right conferencing resources, and the right virtual platform, your organization and exhibitors can follow suit.

Team social learning event ideas

When it comes to employee engagement, it’s a good idea to push the social element of your virtual events. As Gallup research shows, those in “highly engaged workplaces” show 41% lower absenteeism and 21% higher profitability. 

Hold a virtual learning event for your team and audience members and provide them with an interesting environment in which to socialize.

14. Mixology class

A typical mixology class involves alcohol, but you can certainly tweak the recipes for non-alcoholic drink options! Invite a trained bartender to teach your team how to make the perfect bespoke cocktail or mocktail.

A mixology class provides a fun activity for attendees while giving them a space to get to know one another. Plus, once they’ve completed the class, you can have everyone hang out virtually and chat about their favorite recipe.

If you’re looking for the perfect mixology experts and pricing information, check out the BIPOC-owned Hella Cocktail Co, which uses Vimeo Create to produce their own recipe videos and content in-house.

15. Book club

If you’re looking for an event series for your staff, a virtual book club is a great option. Book clubs combine individual reading with engaging collective discussions and commentary. A club can meet every week or month, depending on the group’s preference.

16. Fitness class

Just because you’re joining a virtual event from your home office doesn’t mean you can’t break a sweat. Virtual fitness classes inject wellness and fun into your organization’s content programming.

Virtual fitness classes can run the gamut from yoga and pilates to kickboxing. Since many of these virtual fitness classes already exist in the world, consider reaching out to your favorite host to sponsor an employee well-being event tailored for your audience.

17. Wine club

When considering which virtual event idea is right for your brand, it’s important to keep in mind your goals for engagement. Do you want your virtual event to be a one-off gathering to help promote a new product? Or do you want to build consistent engagement with a target audience?

If you’re looking for a good virtual event that can be turned into something that happens consistently throughout the year, consider hosting a virtual wine club. There are plenty to choose from online in which you can have subscribers pick their favorite blends from across the globe. Once they get their choices in the mail, hosting a weekly or monthly virtual wine club where participants connect online to discuss their favorites can be a great way to build consistent engagement.

Team parties and celebration ideas

It’s important to have fun in the workplace. In fact, 81% of employees at companies considered “great” (according to Great Places to Work criteria) described their work environment as “fun.”

Consider the following virtual events when planning your next team party or celebration.

18. Awards ceremony

One of your best bets for a fun and rewarding experience is hosting a virtual employee awards ceremony. Because, let’s face it, who doesn’t like a little love for their hard work?

Have fun with it! If you want to amp up the virtual experience, set a dress code in advance. Try rolling a virtual red carpet with employees dressed to the nines, or stay casual with food and drink pairing suggestions to complement the evening. And for an added level of engagement, consider including prizes like gift cards or other easily deliverable reward items.

19. Wellness party

Digital fatigue and employee burnout are increasing concerns in the remote working world. That’s why wellness and mental health programs are a popular trend for internal teams. It’s important to recognize that digital fatigue is real and that taking breaks to focus on employee wellness is crucial.

One way to keep employees fresh and engaged is by throwing a virtual wellness party. Think lunch-and-learn sessions, yoga or meditation classes, and fitness challenges. They don’t have to be specifically “wellness” themed to focus on refreshing your team, but it never hurts to encourage team members to relax and take some time for themselves.

20. Comedy roast

A word of caution for this idea: only attempt an internal virtual comedy roast if your team feels comfortable! Set ground rules, talk with your leadership, and — if the organization agrees — open the floor to some *appropriate* and *lighthearted* jokes.

You could even go the route of the “honey roast.” During a honey roast, speakers make sugary sweet jokes about their colleagues instead.

21. Happy hour

This is a pretty straightforward icebreaker option that’s always a classic. Hosting a virtual happy hour is one of the tried-and-true ways to let your team virtually relax and hang out. These events should be free-flowing without set agendas. 

However, it never hurts to plan out some fun games to try out while your team is unwinding. Here are some helpful virtual happy hour ideas to try out at your next online gathering. And make sure to let your staff members know to join in with whatever type of drink or snack they enjoy!

22. Holiday party

Holiday parties are a staple of corporate work life. From Halloween and New Year’s to winter and spring holidays, it’s always fun to find an excuse to have a party.

Live stream your event and consider hiring some live entertainment or hosting a costume or decorating contest. Bonus points for sending a swag bag or a set of gifts to your employees the day of the event.

23. Digital gala

If your brand is a nonprofit, association, or public institution, you may want to consider bringing attendees together for a virtual gala. If you’re considering different virtual fundraising ideas, virtual galas are a great way to attract advocates, thought leaders, and donors to support a cause.

Check out an online fundraising platform like Givebutter, integrated with Vimeo. These tools can help you collect donations while broadcasting your live stream.

Team challenge ideas

Remote work can cause your employees’ collaboration to weaken and become more siloed, so it’s critical that you create virtual events that require teamwork and communication. These are some of our favorite options.

24. Gaming tournament

The growing transition to a hybrid lifestyle has taught us a lot of things, especially that there are more ways to engage than IRL — like with video games. Gaming (and gamification) has become more accessible and entertaining with the growth of live streaming.

For your next virtual team-building activity, try hosting a virtual video gaming tournament where staff members can log on and play together. You can also host popular gamer streams, where your audience members and employees can watch along in real time.

25. Social media challenge

Creating and/or participating in a social media challenge is a fun way for teams to bond virtually. 

While it might feel silly to copy the latest TikTok dances from teen influencers, once your employees get out of their heads, they’ll probably have a lot of fun doing it. But there are also plenty of great non-dance social media challenges that don’t require much more than a smartphone to participate in.

26. Digital scavenger hunt

Feeling creative? Invite your employees to a virtual scavenger hunt or virtual escape room style of game.

Write (or aggregate) clues that participants can use to complete virtual tasks and find objects in this online game. Use breakout sessions and breakout rooms to let your teams gather and figure out how to get to the finish line first.

27. Trivia

Another way to engage your employees is with online trivia! Trivia is a classic both in a pub and at home. Plus, a virtual trivia night can be just as easy as hosting one in person. If you want to elevate the experience for your guests, try hosting it as a game show.

Attendees have the option to join virtual trivia games alone, with a small team, or even with groups of people scattered across the globe. If you’d like to find out more about hosting virtual trivia nights for your team members, check out Geeks Who Drink — they offer plenty of options.

28. Photography contest

Gone are the days of lugging around tons of equipment. Smartphones can give anyone the power to shoot stunning photographs. Let your staff members show their skills with a photo contest.

Check Instagram for photo challenge prompts. Or try opening up submissions for a virtual photography contest you create from scratch. You can even host a virtual gallery and have an awards ceremony to top off the event.

Customer nurturing event ideas

Not all virtual events will be created and produced for company employees. You can put the same creativity and effort into customer-nurturing events! Read on for some ideas to get you started.

29. Morning show

Here’s a question: how do you support your customers online? Zendesk answered the call and created a live streaming series called the Zendesk Morning Show that aired biweekly to more than 170,000+ global clients.

Virtual video events can be a great way to level up your customer communication and retention strategy. Think of how to bring the most relevant content to your customers, and use tools like private internal links and review tools in a video library to build out your comms.

“With Vimeo, we launched a bi-weekly live show for global customers, during a pandemic, in just weeks, not months. We managed the whole process on the Vimeo platform, collaborating remotely with our team and agency, and going live multiple times a week, in several languages.”

Alvin Mudun, Senior Web Product Manager, EMEA, Zendesk

30. Cooking class

A virtual cooking class might be just the trick to engage customers while adding a little *spice* to their day.

Send a recipe to your attendees in advance, or ship a box of ingredients to their door (if it makes sense for your budget). Stream the culinary class and leverage Q&A, chats, and polls to engage your amateur chefs. Encourage your guests to share their final results on social media, use an event-specific hashtag, and mention your organization. 

31. Networking events

If your company is looking to project a more professional experience for those in the corporate world, a virtual networking event can be a smart option. Virtual networking is a great way to engage potential clients and introduce yourself to prospective new hires as a recruiting tool.

Use your own team members and in-house SMEs to help plan the content for and host the event.

Virtual events FAQs

Still wondering how you can spice up your virtual event? We’ve got answers to the most frequently asked questions on virtual event ideas. 

What events can be done virtually?

Well, to begin, all the 31 events listed in this article can be created and produced virtually. With the right idea and virtual event platform, you can turn almost any in-person event into an online *event*. 

How do you make a virtual event fun?

The best way to add some fun to your virtual event is with engaging activities. Even if you’re presenting a straightforward webinar or training module, take advantage of the engagement tools you have at your fingertips: chat and messaging, reactions, surveys, polls, and more. 

How do you attract people to virtual events?

If you don’t already have a built-in audience — like employees or clients — for your virtual event marketing efforts, there are four ways to get them in the “door”:

• Optimize your promotional content for search to boost inbound traffic (and hopefully sign-ups).
• Use email marketing to reach potential leads.
• Build interest with a “sneak peek” of the virtual event. 
• Work with your presenting sponsors (if you have them) to cross-promote the event.

Virtual events are here to stay

Virtual events are engaging and powerful mediums to connect people across your company and around the world. We hope these 31 fun virtual event ideas help spark your imagination for your next virtual event.

As more and more brands look to the best virtual events as effective ways to reach internal and external audiences, consider what professional video tools, tricks, and resources you can leverage to take your content to the next level.

Download the virtual events handbook

Published July 2021, updated May 2023

An unfocused, long-winded presentation introduction could chase someone off before you’ve even gotten the webinar started. When an attendee leaves a webinar early, it puts a dent in the presenter’s confidence. 

To make an immediate splash and connect with your audience, presenters need strong but short opening remarks. You should hook the audience with compelling storytelling and set expectations from the get-go — and a succinct, engaging webinar welcome speech can help them do just that.

But what exactly makes a perfect webinar welcome speech? Here’s where to start: 

• It’s short: We recommend a webinar “welcome” between 60 seconds and three minutes.  
• It’s approachable: Find the line between being prepared and keeping things loose enough to engage your audience naturally.
• It gamifies your webinar experience: Share why attendees should stick through to the end.
  • Do they get exclusive access to information or content? 
  • A free trial of your product? 
  • A credit for a service that’s only unlocked by staying to the end?

In this guide, we’ll break down how to write a welcome speech and walk you through the essential parts of creating the perfect webinar script.

5 elements of the perfect webinar welcome speech

Before writing a welcome address for a webinar, you’ll need to divide your intro into a few important sections.

We’ve broken down the steps below to help guide you through the process.

1. Start with a greeting and thank attendees for their time

When greeting your webinar attendees, remember that your team members work across regions, time zones, and even countries. Make sure to use a greeting that isn’t time-sensitive (e.g., “good morning”) and keep it succinct. “Hello and welcome” is always a safe choice. 

After greeting them, thank attendees for their time upfront – don’t wait until the end. Make sure they feel valued by sharing some appreciation, but keep it simple and sincere. And set initial expectations by sharing how long your webinar presentation will last.

Example:

“Hello and welcome to our [type of event]. In this 45-minute webinar, we hope you learn [list a few key takeaways]. Thank you for taking the time to join us today.”

Pro tip: Include the “how” in your webinar introduction

German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus says people forget most of what they learn within an hour. And according to Ebbinghaus’s “Forgetting Curve,” humans typically forget around 75% of what they’ve learned within two days. 

One way to improve attendees’ memory is to explain how what they’re going to learn will benefit them. If the reason is clear, their brains will prioritize the information.

2. Preview the topic

After thanking your audience, give a brief overview of the topic so you can continue explaining to them why the webinar is worth their time (even more on this later).

Sharing a cheat sheet, workbook, or template at the end of the event? Now’s the time you share that, as well. Nothing hooks people like free goodies. Be clear about what your audience can expect and any takeaways they’ll receive:

“We’ll cover X, so you can learn Y. We’ve also got a free cheat sheet for you at the end of the session, so stay tuned to learn more.”

Example:

“In this masterclass, we’ll share six secret copywriting tips to write better ads with higher conversion rates. Whether you’re a blogger, entrepreneur, business owner, or another digital marketing professional, you’ll leave feeling ridiculously confident about making money from online business advertising. And with our free copywriting cheat sheet at the end — stay tuned for that one — you can start moving customers through your sales funnel today.”

When previewing your topic, keep the focus on attendee benefits and don’t go into too much detail about the webinar content or host yet.

Pro tip: Use power words to stir emotion

Some examples of power words include:

• Free
• Secret
• High-converting
• Ridiculously
• Surprise

You can boost your audience’s interest further by calling your webinar a “masterclass” or “seminar.” The word “presentation” sounds too formal, and “webinar” is used often, so consider a different distinction.

3. Handle housekeeping thoroughly but briefly

You’ve shared the topic and have set some expectations — now it’s time to let people know how they can participate in your webinar. 

A recent HubSpot survey asked participants which element they’d most like to see covered in a webinar, and the most popular response — at 22% — is “A host or presenter that takes questions from the audience.” Talk to your attendees about polls, chat, and other features you’ve planned for audience engagement.

Example:

“To make sure we’re helping you as best as we can on [topic], we have a chat box to collect your questions. We’ll also have [share engagement tactics, such as polls or social media tags].”

It’s better to show, not tell, at this point, though. Some ways to do so:

• Explain exactly where they can find the chat box in the webinar software tools (e.g., “On the right of your screen is a …”).
• Show an annotated screenshot with the chat box circled in red, so people can spot it on their own screens.

Then spell out how people can engage and when you’ll be responding to them:

“Feel free to drop questions on the topic or share your struggles and experiences. We’ll answer your questions by the end of each guest session.”

“The moderator will collect the most upvoted questions so we can answer them for you at the end of the presentation.”

Go on to extend help: “If you have any questions at this point, feel free to drop them in the chat box below.”

Pro tip: Where/how will you share the webinar?

This is also an important time to share whether the webinar recording will be available later. If you also plan to share the presentation deck or any other materials, be sure to communicate that as well so attendees know how to access and use them.

4. Introduce your speakers

Ideally, it makes sense to tell people who they’re watching on their screens as you welcome them in the beginning.

But you don’t want to go into the details of your experience if you’re also the speaker. The reason? Attendees will forget about your expertise if you dig into housekeeping after introducing yourself. So you’ll need to reintroduce yourself and other guests or topical mentors (if there are any), which will stretch your webinar welcome speech.

So a good, natural move is to throw in your one-line introduction at the start and share more about your expertise later on. However, it does depend on your role (moderator vs. host vs. speaker).

When sharing your experience as a speaker, add a pinch of storytelling to your introduction. But remember to keep it short. Try this three-step storytelling formula:

• Hook attendees by asking a question or sharing unexpected challenges.
• Appeal to attendees’ emotions by building on the struggle.
• Close with how you solved the problem (including the results you delivered) or some quick, memorable insights.

Now let’s talk about how to introduce guests. Aim to keep it natural. Rehearse so you don’t have to read it from your script.

Share each guest’s name, background, and experience. It’s best to include guests’ expertise by sharing the results they’ve driven.

Example: 

“Shane has written ads that have driven $6 million in revenue for their clients.” This shows why a guest is the best person they can learn from on the topic.

Pro tip: Keep it brief

Don’t take long with guest introductions and thanking sponsors. Instead of orating their entire history, choose specifics from their experience that are relevant to the webinar topic.

5. Reiterate the value of the event and get started

Note that throughout the introduction, you’ve shared reasons for attendees to stay. The topic, guest list, and takeaway all do this job.

The last step in creating the best webinar welcome speech is to reiterate the topic for a quick refresh and to capture the attention of those joining in late.

Again, keep it short and try not to repeat yourself, even though you’ve discussed the topic. At this point, talk about the agenda. According to HubSpot, 30% of webinar participants want to attend a presentation that teaches them how to do a specific task — so make sure you’re letting them know what they can expect to learn.

Example: 

“Our guests today will teach you how to live stream like a pro. So next time you run your live session, you’ll be a lot more confident.” Then mention the areas you’ll cover.

Pro tip: Summarize in 3 main points

In your closing technique, when you talk about the areas you’ll cover, keep it to three points, so attendees don’t forget what the session will include.

Your webinar welcome speech template

If you’re looking to craft the perfect webinar welcome speech, save time with a template. But remember to write it out step-by-step, practice, and put your own spin on it before going live!

Webinar speech element: Welcome

“Hello and welcome. I’m your host and speaker/moderator, [name]. Thank you for taking the time to join us today as we talk about [topic].

Webinar speech element: Benefits

You’ll leave with [share benefits of learning topic — best limited to three benefits]. We’ve also got a free [takeaway type] for you at the end of the session, so stay tuned to learn more about it.

Webinar speech element: Engagement tools explanation

And, to make sure we’re helping you as best as we can on [topic], we have a chat box where you can submit your questions. We’ll also have [engagement tools, such as polls] to share with you.

Webinar speech element: Q&A

Feel free to drop questions on the topic or share your struggles and experiences. We’ll answer your questions by the end of each guest session (or, “The moderator will collect the most upvoted questions so we can answer them for you at the end of the presentation”).

Webinar speech element: Recording access 

Also, don’t worry about taking notes — we will send the session’s recording and training video via email within [specify time].

Webinar speech element: Intro guest speakers

So without further ado, let me introduce you to the pros who will talk about [reiterate topic].

• Our first speaker is [name] from [topical credentials] (then two to three lines about topical results the speaker has driven).
• Our second speaker is … (repeat the speaker intros as needed).

Webinar speech element: Agenda items

Today, these guests will teach you how to [topic] so [benefit]. 

• One thing we’ll dive into is [agenda item #1]. (1 line)
• Then, [agenda item #2]. (1 line)
• And finally, [agenda item #3]. (1 line)

Webinar speech element: Wrap-up

Ready? Let’s get started! Here’s [first speaker].

Webinar script FAQs

And to wrap things up, let’s answer some final questions on successful webinar introductions:

Go live with your next webinar

Originally published on November 1, 2021. Updated on May 5, 2023.

Over the last few years, virtual events have ballooned in popularity — with many customers experiencing event fatigue as invites pop up weekly within their inboxes, LinkedIn, and Instagram ads.

The world has clearly recognized the benefits of virtual events, and marketers everywhere are hopping on the bandwagon. However, this makes it harder than ever for your own events to stand out in a sea of invites.

So, how can you make your virtual event stand out in today’s crowded event space?

Many event companies will try to convince you that the answer lies in landing big-name celebrity speakers or throwing flashy giveaways. However, after running events for over 17 years for companies like Vimeo, the American Red Cross, HubSpot, and Bizzabo, I think the answer is actually much simpler than that.

The key to running successful, resonant events today — regardless of what your competitors are doing — is to foster a fear of missing out (FOMO) among potential attendees. Below, we explore why FOMO works in event marketing, as well as a few ways that you can use it before, during, and after your event to increase registrations, boost anticipation, and maximize your event’s ROE.

Fostering FOMO to drive event registrations

The need for belonging is a basic human instinct. People have an innate need to connect and to belong to a community. The recent shift to remote and hybrid work over the last three years has only underscored that need for many, with over a third of remote workers today saying they feel lonely at work.

Events — both virtual and in person — are an invaluable opportunity to foster community. But let’s be real: fostering FOMO doesn’t mean that you’re making people feel excluded from your programming. Instead, FOMO in your event marketing follows a three-part formula, where you: 

• Position your event as exclusive, timely, and limited
• Make your event’s value proposition crystal clear
• Stoke attendees’ competitive spirits

Let’s explore why each of these actions work, and how you can implement them practically for your next event.

Create a sense of community

If your favorite musician were coming to town and you didn’t have tickets, you might feel a sense of FOMO. 

But if your favorite musician was coming to town, you didn’t have tickets, and all of your friends did? Then that FOMO would reach a fever pitch.

Similarly, the best business-to-business (B2B) events don’t exist in a vacuum — instead, they act as tentpole events that bring together existing and established communities. When potential attendees hear about your event, they should see it as an opportunity to connect in real-time with a group of people they feel they already know (even if they’ve never actually met).

So how do you achieve this? I call this the FOMO funnel: 

• Level 1: On your landing pages, social content, and email sequences, include social proof and highlight brands that’ll be in attendance. This establishes your event as credible and relevant to potential attendees. 
• Level 2: Feature unique humans and real people who are coming to your event. With attendee spotlights, you’ll create a sense of anticipation of “Who’s coming? What are their pain points? What can you learn from them once you’re all in the same room?” 

Fortune serves as a great example of this. An established business publication, Fortune also hosts over 50 conferences a year. But Fortune isn’t marketing these events to a fresh audience each time — because they’ve already cultivated their ideal audience as members of their Fortune Connect community. 

Within the Fortune Connect app, members access premium news, join livestreams routinely hosted by business leaders, message and connect with other members, and take part in learning sprints. 

Members say they feel they are “part of [the] community” and that they can “establish real connections” with peers in Connect. For these community members, Fortune’s events aren’t just an opportunity to learn and step away from their desks for a couple of days — they act as a chance to solidify their belonging to a network of peers.

Of course, creating a sense of community doesn’t mean you have to build your own trademarked app. Instead, you can:

• Create a Slack group for those in your industry (like Superpath’s group for content marketers)
• Engage with product users in a Facebook or Reddit group (like OpenPhone does with its users)
• Create community forums to encourage interaction between users (like Atlassian’s community for product users)
• Host invite-only events, discussions, and roundtables (like Superside does for its community of marketers and designers)

Position your event as timely, exclusive, and limited

In the past, “Register now” served as a sufficient call-to-action in event marketing — but today, that’s no longer the case.

Thanks to the abundance of events available, educated buyers are now only making purchasing decisions when they’re fully informed and committed to buying. Before registering for an event, they’re asking themselves: 

• Is this worth the investment?
• How much time will I need to invest? 
• Am I going to advocate for my company to allow me to go to this program?
• Is this urgent?

To get potential attendees to answer “yes” to those questions, you need to position your event as a timely, exclusive, and limited affair. You can do this by:

• Limiting the number of available tickets to create a sense of scarcity
• Having potential attendees sign up for a waitlist or limited-entry giveaway prior to opening up ticket sales
• Adding a timer countdown to your event registration page, so that potential attendees know that they’ll lose their spot in line (and their ticket) if they don’t complete their purchase quickly
• Offering a limited VIP tier ticket that gets access to exclusive offerings at the event

For inspiration, look no further than Web Summit’s roundtables, which require attendees to sign up for limited seats that are filled on a “first come, first served” basis. Web Summit asks participants if they’d like to “make it to the top table at Web Summit” and warn attendees to choose their roundtable selections wisely, as they can only attend a maximum of three.

SparkToro also does a great job of fostering FOMO with its SparkTogether summit. Unlike most virtual events, SparkTogether sessions aren’t recorded to be re-shared later — because speakers’ presentations are treated as confidential outside of the event itself.

If attendees don’t join for the live virtual event, then they’ll never know the juicy, unfiltered secrets shared by speakers. Attend it or lose it.

Make the value of your event crystal-clear

“Make your event’s value proposition clear” might seem like the most obvious advice in the world — but you’d be surprised at how often event marketers will focus on the details of their events in their marketing materials, rather than highlighting the event’s benefit to attendees.

One way that you can break out of this habit is by ensuring your marketing materials consistently answer the question: “Who will attendees become if they attend this event?”

Collision is a four-day conference that covers 20 diverse tech content tracks. But on their homepage, rather than focus on the session topics they’ll cover, they focus on telling the story of who you’ll become if you attend Collision.

Not only does Collision promise attendees that they’ll be part of the “people and companies redefining the global tech industry,” but they also highlight a string of prominent past attendees and make it clear what you’ll get out of the conference — namely, networking, learning, lead generation, and exposure.

Show and tell attendees exactly how your event will transform them. You can do this by:

• Highlighting glowing testimonials from past attendees
• Inviting industry influencers to join as speakers, attendees, or media
• Bundling event tickets with limited-time offers, like access to a course or resource, that will increase the value to participants
• Making sure your session titles focus on what attendees will learn or tangibly take away from sessions
• Answer the question: “Who are you going to become after attending this event?” Share the hard or soft skills they can expect to strengthen, learn or develop 
• In your post-event survey, ask folks what they upskilled on because they attended your event 

When it comes to social proof, make sure that you’re highlighting testimonials from two types of attendees: those that are relatable to your audience (and have similar titles, jobs, and company sizes to them) and those that are most aspirational, revered, and influential to them. That way, attendees can see themselves as attendees among peers, while also seeing themselves transforming into the influencers they respect and aspire to.

FOMO in events means taking a “you had to be there” approach, one that emphasizes the quality of connections that can happen when you’re in community with one another. That’s why Vimeo partnered with The Vendry to create an intimate supper club for global event leaders in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. 

As event experience leaders, we rarely invest in our own development. We’re serving our attendees and hosting stellar events, but find ourselves craving a community of like-minded people who can validate strategy, measurement, and experience design. We built a safe space to have authentic, vulnerable conversations with their peers about the future trends of the event industry. 

Stoke attendees’ competitive spirits

At most events, attendees expect to mainly be consumers of content: they attend sessions, listen to speakers, and receive swag bags. They network, sure, and they may ask a speaker a question or two during a designated Q&A period. But they generally don’t see themselves as participants or contributors to an event.

Getting attendees involved, however, can ramp up attendees’ excitement for your event. Shining a spotlight on attendees through awards or recognition from peers can also bring a fun and dynamic twist to your event.

What might that look like in practice? Every year, Webflow hosts its Webflow Conf, where Webflow users come together to learn about new products, share their expertise with one another, and network. But Webflow stays away from simply sharing news about their new features and keeps attendees engaged and participating with their Webflow Awards and their annual Speed Build Challenge during the conference.

The Speed Build Challenge also builds anticipation for the conference a month before it starts, with 16 challengers competing in a virtual, qualifying round on YouTube. Four finalists are then flown out to the conference for the final competition, which takes place live.

And of course, Webflow highlights attendees’ excitement about the challenge front and center in their conference testimonials:

To tap into attendees’ competitive spirits, get them involved by:

• Hosting a challenge during the event
• Asking registrants to nominate a colleague or industry leader for an award, which is then presented during the conference
• Adding interactive elements into your virtual event so that you can call out strong answers or gift participants with swag

Build FOMO into every stage of the marketing life cycle

Finally, keep in mind that increasing potential attendees’ FOMO isn’t a one-time task that ends when your event begins. It should be a part of the entire marketing life cycle, and you should be finding unique ways to increase attendees’ FOMO before, during, and after the event — because that will all build the FOMO for your next event.

During your event, build FOMO in real-time by:

• Sending attendees sneak-peeks and highlights of the sessions they didn’t attend (put those virtual event analytics to work!)
• Letting them see the extra benefits that VIP or higher-tier attendees received, so that they want to spring for an even better pass next year
• Capturing and sharing live footage of the event on social media

Building FOMO for your next event should also take place immediately after your event wraps. Don’t wait for six months after the event ends to restart the promotional cycle for your next event. Re-engage attendees immediately and stay top of mind by:

• Offering your attendees early registration for your next event (you can even offer them an exclusive benefit, such as a mentoring or matchmaking session, if they sign up early)
• Sending out additional resources, toolkits, and event highlights post-event
• Teasing out your next event’s speakers, sessions, and offerings over time

The wrap up

Ready to start planning your next FOMO-packed virtual event? Vimeo’s virtual event platform makes it easy to build custom landing pages, registration forms, and event reminder emails to maximize FOMO and attendee excitement before your event. 

Try Vimeo’s virtual event platform.

Town halls — whether quarterly, semi-annually, or whatever the cadence — have mostly followed the same format since their inception . Think slides with crammed text, one-way dialogues only heard by those in the room, and a tome-like recap email.

But this stiff format isn’t inclusive or engaging in today’s flexible work landscape.

You need town halls that are accessible to everyone, company-wide — no matter where they’re working from. An interactive and live streamed virtual town hall is your solution. 

Take Rite Aid, for example. The drug store giant took to Vimeo in 2020 to host their first-ever virtual town hall meeting for 3,000 attendees. More employees joined this single meeting than the total number of participants in the last ten years of in-person Rite Aid meetings.

We won’t return to how it was. Video isn’t a COVID-19 solution, it’s a modern solution for the new workplace.

Peter Strella, Director, Communications & Creative Media Services at Rite Aid

Boost your own employee engagement by learning how to host interactive virtual town halls with the right internal communications tools. These meetings will give your employees a chance to learn about your company’s strategies, voice concerns, and ask questions.

Ready? Let’s get into the details of how to effectively plan, host, and replicate a successful town hall from start to finish.  

What is a virtual town hall?

A virtual town hall is a live-streamed forum where  leaders can share context, decision-making thought processes, and relevant environmental factors to both in-person and remote teams. It’s also an opportunity for an audience to get company alignment, provide feedback and pose questions. 

This meeting is most effective when leaders genuinely seek to share objective information and hear authentic feedback.

When it comes to all-hands and town hall meetings, some leadership teams take a more “state of a union” approach, where business leaders give a high-level overview of key business messages and updates. Others prefer a more traditional structure  that focuses on engaging the audience with a live Q&A. No matter your organization’s format preferences or needs, your presentation needs to be designed for a virtual platform.

Five benefits of a virtual town hall

It’s clear that today’s workforce wants to work remotely—which means they want town halls to be virtual: 46% of workers say they’d be willing to take a 5% pay cut to work out-of-office for at least a portion of their workweek, according to Owl Labs. What’s more, one in three employees say they’d quit their job if they were no longer able to work remotely.

Remote employment isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it’s critical that leadership teams tailor presentations not only for the audience, but for the virtual town hall meeting platform they’re using.

The popularity of remote work is just one of the reasons to switch to virtual town halls. Here are some of the best reasons to start producing a virtual presentation for your next town hall event.

1. Foster transparency

Ideally, your virtual town hall content is structured to be relevant to everyone in the audience, regardless of department, business, unit, or location. It also allows for all team members to have the opportunity to ask questions and probe deeper into meeting topics.

Most employees experience remote conflict at some point in their careers — 19% say they have experienced it with their leader, and 65% say they’ve experienced it with teammates, according to research from MyPerfectResume. And although stress and personality clashes contribute to workplace conflicts, workers say that “lack of transparency” and “lack of honesty about something important” account for 18% of workplace conflicts. 

Virtual town halls are a chance to break down those barriers. Participants can see presenters and attendees, ask questions openly, and pick up on verbal and non-verbal cues. This visibility helps keep employees engaged and build trust — improving the flow of information across departments, teams, and individual roles.

2. Showcase teams and employees

Virtual town halls are a great venue to shed light on different departments and individuals doing great work. The benefits here are two-fold: first, teammates may be recognized and can take pride in their contributions; and second, teams who don’t normally interact are exposed to the priorities and successes of others.

In a remote workforce, it can be difficult to celebrate teams’ or individuals’ wins across the whole organization — but virtual town halls can make it easier to share these successes. And small efforts can go far: a company-wide shoutout for an individual’s job well-done can often make more of an impact than private, individual recognition via phone or email. 

Staff members who receive largely public recognition are up to three times as likely to feel confident they “belong” in their position.

Source: Gallup

If you’re making a company-wide announcement celebrating an individual, be mindful of the employee’s personal preferences and cultural norms. Some employees may not be comfortable with public praise.

3. Reinforce company culture

Company culture can be tough to maintain remotely, but leadership teams can help bolster a sense of belonging in employees by expressing care for them. The Harvard Business Review polled nearly 13,000 people across the world about their organization’s “culture style,” or “the shared, pervasive, enduring, and implicit behaviors and norms” that exist throughout a company. The top attribute reported was “caring,” which reflects a collaborative environment in the workplace.

One way to show employees you care about them and the company’s culture is by keeping communication channels open. Leadership teams can boost staff confidence by:

• Sharing high-level updates, even when the news is hard.
• Emphasizing company values through personal and professional success (and failure) stories.
• Reminding employees about available benefits and initiatives.

In turn, this type of open communication can reinforce important organizational values and foster trust within the company.

4. Strengthen executive and team communications

An employee may not regularly see or interact with executives on a day-to-day basis — especially in a remote setting. Virtual town halls offer a window into the dialogue and mindset of the organization’s leadership team. They also allow for real-time staff participation, as you get them to share their input via online chat, live polls, quizzes, and Q&As.

This can help humanize a leadership team by providing faces, voices, and personalities with their names. And, in challenging times, it can remind employees that leaders are people, too. Michael Weinstein, the Video Studio Lead at Deloitte Global says, “when it’s live, you hear that person, you can communicate with them, and it really humanizes them as well.”

Live streaming virtual town halls also facilitates more engagement, collaboration, and peer-to-peer connections at work. A recent report from GlobalWebIndex and Vimeo found that video had a positive impact on employee engagement:

5. Align teams and address important concerns

One of the values of a virtual town hall Q&A is that executives can hear feedback directly from those whom they lead. The spontaneity of real-time Q&As and employee engagement allows executives to proactively address feedback before it’s fraught over or distorted.

Communication isn’t only about saying one thing in one place. The most effective communication is reinforced over time, across channels, and in different formats so that it is accessible to all and available in any individual’s preferred channel.

How to run a virtual town hall meeting

From planning your meeting’s flow to prepping the live stream setup, we’ve laid out the nitty-gritty details for hosting a virtual town hall meeting that’s a smashing hit.

Step #1: Figure out the logistics to set your agenda 

Start with the meeting agenda—which will include topics, speakers, the meeting date, and the venue.  

Ask yourself: what topic(s) would you cover? Try to limit these to 2-3 so you can go deep, not broad, into each topic. And take a look at our sample virtual town hall meeting agenda at the end of this section to help you craft your own series of events.

Settle on who’ll be speaking next. This should include your CEO, but also department heads or team leaders so they can update everyone on the progress each area of the company is making.

Pro tip: Be inclusive in selecting speakers by getting camera-shy people on board as Ampersand does in their meetings.

“Some of the best people who are good at explaining an application aren’t necessarily the best people who are great in front of a live camera, so why take them out of the picture? We’re finding that the more that we pre-record our trainings, people are happier and less nervous about it.”

Seth Weingarten, VP of Network Operations at Ampersand.

Once done, work out a date for the meeting that suits everyone’s schedules and iron out the meeting’s structure and flow. For instance, settle on how long the CEO will speak, who’ll pass the mic to whom, and so on. This increases your chances of the virtual meeting running smoothly.

Lastly, decide your venue. Make sure to choose a location that will accommodate all your live streaming hardware during your virtual town hall. 

If you happen to be conducting an in-person meeting, look for a place that’ll accommodate everyone. Pay special attention to seating. A theater-like arrangement sends the message that employees are just going to be listening. A roundtable arrangement with all attendees in close proximity, in contrast, indicates attendees are welcome for participation.

Once you’ve locked in your location, it’s time to lock in your meeting agenda, too. Use our sample agenda template as a foundation to help you build out your own plan:

Virtual Town Hall Meeting: Agenda Example

Once you’ve checked off all these tasks from your list, start sending out invites. Make sure you send out the agenda beforehand and include the topics so employees can come prepared with their questions.

Step #2: Set up your live stream

Live streaming your virtual town hall or hybrid event is important in today’s world of remote work. Live streaming allows for more reach and connectivity across different time zones, as employees can join from their remote workspaces anywhere in the world.

We have a detailed guide on how to stream your town hall meeting, but here’s a quick 3-step blueprint to get your started.

• Ready your hardware: You’ll need a professional grade camera, microphone for the audio, and an AV cable to bring in the audio stream. Don’t forget an encoder to convert raw data into a viewable live stream and a switcher to go back and forth between various audio and video sources.
• Get your software rolling: The right live streaming platform turns your computer into a live production studio. If you’re still in the market for a solution, we’ve got a few tips below on how to choose the right one for your business.
• Test drive before your stream: Lastly, preview your stream to see everything’s in place. Make sure you check your internet speed to prevent your stream from buffering. Don’t forget to arrange a power backup — you won’t want an outage to disrupt your meeting’s flow.

Once your software and hardware are in place, it’s time to create your virtual town hall “script.”

Step #3: Draft your content

Here’s where you decide what to say. A successful virtual town hall meeting packs in concise and intentional content. So a good starting point is creating an outline detailing what you want to cover.

With the key pointers in a document, flesh out each section by asking yourself: “How can I deliver this information in a manner that motivates employees?”

Here are four tips for better attendee engagement:

• Use data and customer case studies to tell stories. Instead of regurgitating a laundry list of numbers, be selective with the statistics you share. Use the problem-agitate-solve (PAS) technique: highlight the problem, rub it a bit, share results backed with 1-2 impactful numbers.
• Leverage user-generated content (in this case, customer- or employee-generated). Axalta Coating Systems, for example, shares content their users submit in the form of videos in their live town halls. “Because we have to certify our users, we have them submit videos to us as part of their certification,” says Steve Hamaday, Virtual Training Manager at Axalta.

• Tap into employees’ emotions to engage them. As an example, the team at Buffer has a 10-min session on celebrations in their town halls where they cover company, as well as employee, achievements like new pets, marriages, new homes, and more.
• Shake up your content’s format. Instead of running slide after slide in your presentation, add tutorials and recorded presentation clips. This way, you’ll be talking less and showing more – for example, you could demonstrate a new feature.

Now that you have an idea about what you’ll say, let’s figure out how you’ll say it.

Step #4: Prepare your presentation

Now it’s time to add some movement to your words and package all the information in an engaging presentation.

It may sound easy, but creating engaging slides takes some effort. But we’re here to help make it simple for you. Consider these tips when creating your presentation:

• Aim to use no more than 10 slides to cover your topic in 20 minutes.
• Write easy-to-read slides with minimal text. Use a legible font at 30-point size.
• Diversify your slides’ format. Aim to position only 5 text-heavy slides at a time. 
• Break slides up with video tutorials, GIFs, and slides with graphs. 
• Wherever possible, arrange content in six bullet points per slide containing six words per point.

Feeling prepared? Good. Now let’s think more about attendee engagement.

Step #5: Work out your engagement plan

Since the objective of a virtual town hall meeting is to facilitate two-way conversations, it’s essential you don’t miss out on engagement opportunities.

Here are a few ways to spark engagement:

• Open the ground for questions early. You can start sourcing questions as early as you start sending out invites. It’s also a good idea to pause after every session as HelpScout does in their town hall meetings to let questions pour in before moving forward.
• Use a variety of polling formats. Engage your audience with live chat throughout the meeting and a dedicated live Q&A session at the end. It will be even better if you can make it anonymous. After reviewing nearly 10,000 entries, we found that 78% of employees prefer questioning anonymously. 
• Have icebreakers ready to go. Anything fun and light-hearted can help thaw any awkwardness that may arise. For example, the Buffer team has experimented with getting attendees to meditate and stretch together (a fun pose can get everyone laughing for sure!). Similarly, at Vimeo, we’ve had success with video get-togethers where everyone introduces their pets.

Again, the goal of your virtual town hall event is to start a dialogue with your staff members and attendees, not to perform a monologue! So two-way communication is key.

Step #6: Plan for feedback

Without sourcing feedback, you can’t really tell how well you are bridging the communication gap with employees. 

Three helpful ways to gather feedback include:

• Conduct anonymous polls and follow-up surveys. The former can pose questions like, “Was this session helpful?” And the latter can dig deep, asking open-ended questions like, “What did you enjoy the most?” and “How do you think we can make this meeting better for you?” You can also leverage surveys to have employees rate their experience on a scale of one to ten.
• Solicit feedback from newbies. Ask new employees for their thoughts on your virtual town hall meeting. Gauge how they liked the event and ask if the information was clear.
• Look at your livestream analytics. Vimeo’s analytics dashboard helps you pull stats on watch times and total live viewers to understand who tuned in and how long the meeting engaged your staff.

Seven tips for a successful virtual town hall

Now that you know the benefits of hosting a virtual town hall — and you’ve planned and scheduled it — it’s time to execute your vision. Don’t forget these six tips when you’re preparing to present.

Tip 1: Choose a live streaming platform you can count on

When it’s time to choose a virtual town hall platform, there are certain things you should consider if you want to provide an efficient and effective streaming experience. Here are four things to look for in your live streaming platform:

• Technology that provides a high quality stream: A spotty stream can be really disruptive (and annoying). Look for a solution that provides professional live streaming tools to help you minimize technical hiccups. Pro tip: Build company credibility by customizing your live town hall meetings and hosting them in a video library.

• Security with single sign-on (SSO): This critical feature lets you control who in your company has access to the live event. Be sure to consider options that allow control with the SSO feature and domain whitelisting.

• Automatic archiving: A key benefit of live events is that global teams can access the content remotely. It’s important to pick a service that makes it easy for employees to access the event long after it’s finished.

• Ease of use: Live streaming is hard enough, so plan to use a platform that has an intuitive user interface (UI), branding options, and interactive tools to help you deliver an engaging live experience without the headache.

Tip 2: Create internal alignment early

Work with leadership and the “frequent flyers” (those who typically present in these meetings) to align on the agenda, content, and outstanding speaker list as early as possible.

The agenda should be decided at least 10 days in advance so that folks have enough time – at least five business days – to source or develop content, rehearse talking points, and add finishing touches before show time.

Tip 3: Operate with your attendees in mind

Based on pulse checks, feedback, employee commentary, and FAQs, plan an agenda around what employees need and want to know.

Prioritize your agenda based on topics that are most relevant to your high-level business objectives, as well as topics that employees resurface over time. For example, you may want to talk about quarterly or yearly goals and employees may want more context in executive changes or decisions.

Remember that people have short attention spans. A meeting longer than 75 minutes can risk people dropping at the hour mark. 

Similarly, a meeting packed with content can disengage employees for two reasons. First, the attendees may only get the surface details of each topic. Second, they may not be able to discern what information to prioritize or what actions to take away from the meeting.

Strike a balance of providing the most relevant content, reiterating priorities, and providing clear next steps within the time frame you’ve allowed for your town hall.

Tip 4: Develop an event checklist

Between the agenda, the necessary hardware and software, the internet, the speaker, and the attendees, virtual town halls can have a lot of moving parts. To make things easier, develop an event timeline and checklist. 

A timeline will help you stay on top of planning and scheduling timely outreach to the right people. Use a digital tool like Google Calendar to add reminders, due dates, and alerts for your timeline to-do items. A checklist helps you cover your technological, logistical, content, and communications bases. Your virtual event checklist may contain:

• Name of producer
• Name of tech support professional
• Attendee invite details
• Speaker prep details
• Employee reminders and notifications
• Slides or other event content

By preparing for all the tasks you have to complete, and planning your time leading up to (and including) your presentation, you’ll be able to control what you can and let go of the rest easier.

Download our Virtual Events Checklist

Tip 5: Be consistent but not monotonous

As a best practice, strive to have a consistent cadence for your virtual town hall meetings. This helps set expectations by allowing attendees to not only plan around it — which increases their likelihood of attending — but also builds trust, as employees know executives will provide important news on a regular basis.

And it’s especially important in remote work environments to maintain consistent communication. McKinsey reports that workers who feel they’re included in detailed organizational communications are “nearly five times more likely” to claim increased productivity than those who don’t feel included.

As far as format goes, recurring meeting segments help build interest, trust, and reliability. For example at Vimeo, folks know that there will always be an update on the business of the business, and there will always be a product spotlight. Recurring agenda items help build some level of interest and anticipation, as these are things (most) employees hear about on a regular basis.

It’s equally important to surprise and delight employees. Give attendees a peek into something totally out of the ordinary, something that will excite and inspire them.

Tip 6: Strive for accessibility and simplicity

Make it easy for employees to tune into the meeting itself. Generate one link and share it universally.

In addition:

• Check that the audio is working
• Turn on automatic closed captioning 
• Make sure the speakers’ names are visible
• If you hold the meeting on Vimeo, chapter key sections or movements to help attendees jump to segments relevant to them.

Tip 7: Recap and record your event video for later viewing

Some of your staff members won’t be able to log on for your live stream, so make sure you record and summarize your virtual town hall event. You should also send the video out on the same day so absent employees can watch it on-demand at their convenience.

When you send out the email or newsletter that contains the recorded video link, include an event recap and any meeting notes that would be helpful to your employees. Have them jot down any questions, comments, or concerns they may have about the information that was presented.

You can also repurpose your live stream content. Rite Aid, for example, reuses their live streams in their onboarding and training modules for new employees.

Finally, let’s move onto some frequently asked questions about virtual town halls.

Virtual town hall FAQs

Virtual town hall meetings are still a relatively new practice for today’s companies, so there’s still a lot to learn. Check out these virtual town hall FAQs to help you gain a better understanding of the process.

What is the purpose of a virtual town hall meeting? 

The main purpose of a virtual town hall meeting is to encourage and support two-way communication and conversations between leadership teams and employees through an event live stream. Leadership is updating the  entire company about projects, business results, upcoming events and campaigns, and any other pressing work-related information through the virtual town hall.

What is the best platform to use for my company’s virtual town hall event? 

You can start pre-building your entire event right now with Vimeo’s virtual event platform — no developing chops needed. It’s easy to use and provides both presenters and attendees with a great experience. Using built-in video editing, hosting, and management tools, you can also turn your event recording into powerful evergreen content.

How do I troubleshoot town hall live stream errors? 

First, make sure to check your equipment’s functionality, like screen sharing permissions. Secondly, designate an individual who is present at your town hall live stream event as the “tech admin” (preferably someone in IT!). Lastly, go into the event  anticipating what could go wrong and preparing for these scenarios. For example, if you know the location in which you’re holding the event has a weak Wi-Fi signal, bring the proper equipment to hard-wire your internet connection.

How do you make virtual town halls fun? 

Make sure to include at least one “non-work” element in your event, like a silly icebreaker. And don’t skimp on the celebrations! As mentioned earlier, when you’re planning your virtual event agenda, make sure you leave space to recognize team members’ accomplishments and achievements. And shout-out any upcoming employee milestones and team celebrations. A little recognition can go a long way.

Wrap up: Reinventing virtual town halls 

Hosting an engaging virtual town hall event presents a great opportunity for leadership teams to connect with employees. Remote and hybrid jobs have offered many benefits for the workforce, but some people can start to feel isolated without regular check-ins with colleagues and management. Virtual town hall meetings allow your organization to align on goals and get employee questions answered.

With Vimeo’s new event platform, you can live stream your virtual town hall with no tech experience necessary. Vimeo’s native editing, hosting, and management tools make it simple to plan an engaging virtual event and execute it from start to finish. You’re not hosting your grandfather’s town hall presentation, but Vimeo makes it so user friendly that even he could understand.

Choose the right tools for your virtual event and see how live streaming can help transform your organization’s town halls today.

Learn how to create transformational town halls for your company.

Originally published on December 5, 2019 by Emily Gover, edited May 19, 2022, and updated in April 2023 for relevancy.

In 2022, live shopping contributed an estimated $17 billion in sales in 2022. But by 2026, that figure is forecasted to account for $55 billion in sales. McKinsey estimates live commerce could account to 20% of all ecommerce in just a few short years.

(And no — we’re not talking QVC or cheesy 24-hour shop-a-thons.)

Instead, live shopping is a hybrid event that captures attention with limited drops and timed offers while entertaining and immersing customers in your brand. In China, live shopping has dominated the landscape since Alibaba pioneered Taobao Live in 2016, but Western ecomm darlings are slower to adopt.

Our take? Live shopping is about to blow up. It’s time for your brand to start thinking about your live shopping strategy now — before everyone else hops on the bandwagon — to grow your engagement and boost sales.

However, you can’t just go live and expect the sales to start rolling in. There’s more to hosting a successful livestream beyond showcasing your products. Instead, it takes lots of creativity paired with a conversational, playful (read: not salesy) style.

What is live shopping?

Live shopping or livestream shopping refers to using live video to feature your products in real-time to encourage viewers to buy from you.

You can either go live on social channels like YouTube or Facebook or host livestreams on your website.

What are the benefits of live selling?

From offering you a way to standout in the noise to connecting with your customers in real-time and growing sales, live shopping offers a ton of benefits. Let’s explore them below: 

Engage your target audience 

Livestream shopping lets you have two-way conversations with your target audience in real-time.

“Live shopping gives retailers the opportunity to create an engaging environment where customers can get familiar with the brand and its products without having to physically visit a store,” shares Robert Hoffmann, the Marketing Manager at CashbackHero. 

Grow your community

By regularly hosting live sessions, you can tap into live shopping as not only a reliable channel for customer acquisition and retention but also community building and gathering customer feedback.

To this end, make sure your live sessions focus on entertaining and providing value alongside offering attendee-only discount codes to make viewers feel like a part of something special. 

Increase sales

By showcasing your products and educating your viewers about them in ways that text-based format alone can’t, live shopping offers you a close alternative to physical shopping. In turn, this encourages sales.

Walmart’s Senior Director and Head of Brand Experiences and Partnerships, Kim Tunick, notes livestream shopping helps them build brand trust and grow sales.  

“[Livestreaming] allows us to have valuable, fun two-way conversations with our customers and remove friction in their shopping experience. We approach it as: sell first, entertain second, but in some instances, depending on the product or host or theme, that might even flip.” 

Offer a memorable brand experience

By allowing you to show your brand’s human side and connecting with customers, live shopping lets you improve customer experience.

As Arpan Podduturi, the Director of Product Retail and Messaging at Shopify points out,

“The more we can connect online and offline, the better the customer experience. And that ultimately gives retailers and main-street brands a chance to survive and thrive going forward.”

Arpan Podduturi, the Director of Product Retail and Messaging at Shopify

Thankfully, livestream shopping gives you a unique way to connect with and build deeper, more lasting relationships with customers. 

Why you might want to try a live shopping campaign

On top of leveraging the benefits that it offers, you can launch a live shopping campaign or make it a regular part of your marketing strategy for the following reasons:

• You’re not afraid to try something new
• You have extra inventory you want to promote
• You have a loyal audience on at least one social channel
• You want to build brand awareness and break through the noise

Remember: Although most believe that live shopping is ideal for products that lend themselves to impulse buying, the full truth is: live selling is a helpful way to connect and sell in different industries.

It’s why you’ll see everyone from solo creators like @kimmiebbags to brands like Benefits Cosmetics using live shopping.

In fact, businesses like BankingGeek in the finance industry plan to tap into live shopping too. “During each livestream, we’ll review different financial products like credit cards, insurance policies and investment plans so that our customers can get an overview of what’s available in the market,” shares the Founder and CEO, Max Benz.

How to create a live shopping strategy in 5 steps

Planning your live shopping events helps you set your audience’s expectations, create hype around them, and get the eyeballs you deserve. But you shouldn’t script everything down to the tee to maintain your authenticity.

Put simply, plan enough so you know what content you want to share and how you want to increase audience engagement while keeping things conversational.

With that, here’s how to begin with livestreaming ecommerce in five easy steps: 

Step 1: Work out a format for your livestream shopping session

A format prepares you for how you’ll host your livestream and sets your audience’s expectations.

You can always shake things up in each episode to maintain an element of surprise but be sure to pick a dedicated time for your sessions so attendees know when to join.

For the format itself, ask yourself whether you want to take an educational approach or entertaining one. Or if you want to take a product-first approach. The answer depends on what you’re selling.

Aldo’s live shopping pilot, for example, followed a product educational format where Los Angeles-based entertainer, Nate Wyatt and celebrity stylist Mimi Cuttrell paired to share their style tips for wearing various Aldo accessories and shoes.

You can try any creative approach though. Petro, for example, hosted a live dog show to encourage pet adoptions. 

Step 2: Select a friendly host for your show

You can always collaborate with influencers and brand ambassadors to co-host the live show. The upside to this is that you can tap into their influence to drive viewers to your stream.

One idea is to bring interested customers on your live show to grow your social proof. Tommy Hilfiger used this tactic — inviting customers to share their favorite pieces from its 2021 spring collection.

However, these folks know only so much about your products, which brings us to another option for hosts: your store associates who have a strong grip on product details. It’s why JCPenny uses them in their JCP Live shopping series where associates talk about the products.

Have a founder with a loyal following? Ask them to host the live session as Bobbi Brown does for her brand, Jones Road Beauty:

Whether you invite customers, influencers, stylists, or artists as your co-host, remember to pick one, friendly face for a host who presents all your livestreams so viewers become familiar with him/her. This is an essential ingredient for breeding brand familiarity and creating community using live shopping. 

Step 3: Choose a live streaming platform

You can always use Facebook live shopping or use Instagram or Amazon Live. It’s even a good idea for brands to start with social media live streaming as it lets you go live on channels your audience is already using.

As your attendee count grows, move to livestreaming on your site using live shopping platforms like Bambuster. This comes with multiple perks such as:

• Better control over your branding, helping grow your brand memorability.
• Access to detailed data on who is attending, what they’re buying from you, and how they’re engaging in your live event.
• More opportunity to host replays on your site given 70% of sales from live shopping happen after the event.

Most of all, you can use your site as a central library featuring replays and upcoming events as Nordstorm does:

Step 4: Create your livestreaming set up

Authenticity goes a long way so you don’t need everything to be picture perfect. But you do need to pick a place with sufficient lighting and a soundproof environment to prevent echo during the livestream.

Before you go live for each session, it’s also a good idea to write a rough video script. Again, nothing detailed but a rough outline for you to use to guide the conversation. 

Read more:

Step 5: Create a marketing plan for your live shopping events

Now is when you ask yourself questions like:

• How will we invite customers to the live shopping event?
• How will we create hype around the livestreams?

One idea is to use social media to promote your live event. Take it from e-comm giant Shein, which uses Instagram Stories to promote its live events:

You can also send a personalized invite to your email list and ask co-hosts to share the event’s live venue with their audience.

Or take a page from Bloomingdales — they sent macarons and cocktails to viewers who signed up in advance so they could enjoy them during the live event. The department store also enrolled those who watched the livestream until the end into a gift card and basket giveaway.

You can also offer limited-time promos to encourage sales during the event.

Ready to host a live shopping event?

To recap, live shopping offers a close alternative to physical shopping, making it an effective channel to drive sales.

Make sure to pick a friendly face as your host, work out a format for the livestream shopping event, and create a set up with lots of lighting and crisp audio quality. Then, after you host your first live shopping sessions, study what products drove the most engagement and sales.

Going live takes moxie, willpower, and plenty of planning — plus tech checks galore. That’s why we’ve created dozens of resources to cover your bases.

Learn the ropes of going live with Vimeo.

Imagine you’re about to broadcast a live stream for an internal team. It could be a training session for new hires, a lunch and learn with a customer, or an all hands meeting with executives. No matter the reason to go live, the experience has to be stellar.

That’s where an enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) comes in. For businesses that are new to live streaming video content, the right CDN configuration can positively impact your stream and help get your message across.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• What a content delivery network (CDN) is and how it works
• What an eCDN is and how it works
• The difference between a CDN and an eCDN
• 3 reasons to use an eCDN for your your internal comms video

Buckle up! You’re about to become an expert in content delivery.

What is a CDN?

A CDN is simply a network that delivers content — like video — at a user’s request. It makes it faster and easier to load content and promotes a great experience. “Content” might be HTML, images, or (our favorite) video.

To understand how a CDN works, we’ll need to look at two key components:

1. Edge server. A CDN includes many edge servers distributed across the globe. This ensures users anywhere in the world can experience fast download speeds whether they’re located in Paris, France or Paris, Texas. When users request content, an edge server that is geographically proximal to them delivers the content. Talk about going local!
   
2. Cache mechanism. When appropriate, the cache mechanism creates a copy of the original data anytime content is created or updated and pushes the copy to the edge servers. When a user in Paris, France or Paris, Texas requests to view content such as video, the edge server will return the cached content.
   
   The benefits of a cache mechanism are twofold: they reduce the bandwidth throughput for a better end user experience and reduce the amount of load on the network infrastructure.

So what is an eCDN, then?

Think about your work laptop for a moment. It has pre-configured settings and administrative rules applied. Similarly, the edge servers of your CDN should have the same rules apply for internal communications. Enter: the enterprise content delivery network (eCDN).

An eCDN, like the one used for Vimeo Enterprise, reduces the amount of bandwidth required to stream video by up to 95% on the local area network. This provides employees who are connected to the same network with a quality viewing experience without any interruptions, while driving cost savings from lower bandwidth consumption. 

Vimeo partners with eCDN market-leader Kollective to scale enterprise video communications. Not only does Kollective offset 95% of corporate bandwidth, but customers receive robust analytics on how their network capacity has improved.

How does an eCDN work?

The goal of an eCDN is to maintain the benefits of low latency and fast downloads that are integral to a public CDN. Rather than using dedicated servers like a public CDN, a webRTC-based peer-to-peer protocol uses untapped bandwidth on trusted machines. 

When live streaming, every millisecond counts. That’s why an eCDN leverages the benefit of subnet matching rather than incurring the costly, round-trip time of querying a public DNS. 

eCDNs thrive in fast-paced work environments. No installations, deployments, reconfigurations, or physical infrastructure changes are needed to use an eCDN. For example, Vimeo’s eCDN is unique in that up to 95% of chunks are served by peers, allowing stream delivery to scale in proportion to both the number and geographic diversity of consumers.

Why can’t enterprises use standard CDNs for internal content delivery?

Let’s jump back to something like live streaming a town hall. How you deliver that content is important.

While a CDN (like the one you use to load websites like the New York Times or YouTube) is most suitable for serving public content to end users across the globe, serving internal content to corporate users is a job better suited for an eCDN.

When said users are all trying to access the same network at the same time — and are subject to security and access control measures — standard CDNs do not make the cut. They cause problems for a company because each user is downloading the same stream from an external CDN, resulting in extended buffering of the content employees want to consume.

So how do you create a scalable and secure delivery system for all your awesome video content? Use an eCDN!

3 benefits of using eCDNs for your internal video

So why should you care about peer-to-peer protocols and eCDNs? Let’s check out the most important things businesses should keep in mind when scaling up their internal comms.

1. Quality viewing experience at scale

The peer-to-peer nature of an eCDN reduces the strain on an enterprise’s internal network. This means internal content delivery for your live streamed video can scale on demand, without sacrificing performance or risking unexpected side effects like poor connectivity or high latency.

2. Provides cost-savings from bandwidth consumption

Procurement and budget teams rejoice! Peer-to-peer content delivery reduces the bandwidth required to deliver internal content by routing the majority of connections over the public internet. This helps to reduce your bandwidth costs.

3. Deploys quickly and effortlessly

You don’t need to invest in physical infrastructure. You can leverage what you have — namely the network of trusted machines — to enable the peer-to-peer function.

Wrap up: why content delivery networks matter

The right experience helps users consume and engage with your content. While it might seem scary at first, CDNs are pretty straightforward. They efficiently deliver content to geographically distributed users. eCDNs leverage the principles of a CDN to bring the same user experience with the added benefit of enterprise security and cost-savings.

Next time you’re looking to broadcast an internal meeting, consider all the ways an eCDN can help you deliver video content quickly, efficiently, and with the best user experience in mind.

Download our data-backed tips for better town halls

A lot of us are familiar with the time delay in video data transfer.

You may have experienced it on video calls and live streams, too. For instance, that one time when you cracked a joke and burst into laughter only to realize it’s a few seconds before there’s laughter on the other side.

However, you can’t afford this type of lag or latency issue when you’re interacting with a live audience, broadcasting a town hall, or hosting a virtual event. That’s where low latency comes into the picture.

So what exactly is low latency? Do you need to reduce latency for all your live events? Let’s answer all this and more in this guide.

An introduction to low latency

Low latency is the minimal delay in video data transfer from your player to your viewers’ screens.

The reduced data transmission time makes for an excellent viewing experience and facilitates interaction. But here’s the catch: for low latency, you need to compromise with reduced video resolution or quality.

Fortunately, not every live event demands low latency.

You need it when you live stream events for real-time interaction or viewing experience. In these cases, your audience expects to see what’s going on and/or participate live as the event unfolds. So you can’t afford high latency and will have to stream in lower than 4K video resolutions.

While this is low latency streaming in a nutshell, let’s dig into the details of when and how to achieve it.

What is low latency

When translated, latency literally means ‘a delay in transfer.’

In the context of video latency, this means the delay in the time it takes from the video captured from your camera to it playing in your viewers’ players.

Hence, low latency means less time in transferring video data from point A (your streaming headquarter) to point B (your audience’s players).

Similarly, a high latency means more time in video data transfer from the live streamer to their audience.

But why do you need low latency in video streaming? You don’t need low latency for every live stream that you host. But you do need it for every interactive live stream.

The key here is how much interaction your live event demands.

So if your event involves, for example a live auction, you’ll need low latency for your stream. Why? To ensure all interactions show in real-time – not with delays as that can give some participants an unfair advantage.

Let’s look at more of these use cases next.

When do you need low latency streaming?

The more live participation your event requires, the shorter transmission time you need. This way, attendees can enjoy the experience in real-time without delay.

Here are instances when you’ll need low latency streaming:

• Two-way communication such as live chatting. This includes live events where Q&As are involved.
• Real-time viewing experience is essential such as with online video games.
• Required audience participation. For instance, in cases of online casinos, sports betting, and live auctions.  
• Real-time monitoring. For example, search and rescue missions, military-level bodycams, and child and pet monitors.
• Remote operations that require consistent connectivity between a distant operator and machinery they control. Example: endoscopy cameras.

When should you use low latency streaming

Summarizing the use cases we explored above, you need low latency streaming when you’re streaming either:

• Time-sensitive content
• Content that requires real-time audience interaction and engagement

But why not use low latency for all your video streams? After all, the lower the delay in your content reaching your viewers the better, isn’t it? Well, not exactly. Low latency does comes with drawbacks.

These drawbacks are:

• Low latency compromises video quality. The reason: high video quality slows the transmission workflow due to its high file size.
• There’s little buffered (or pre-loaded) content in line. This leaves little room for error should there be a network issue.

When you go live, a streaming service like Vimeo quickly pre-loads some content before streaming to viewers. This way, when there’s a network problem, Vimeo plays the buffered content, allowing the network-caused slowdown to catch up.

As soon as the network issue is resolved, the player downloads the highest possible video quality. All this, however, happens in the background.

Translation: viewers get an uninterrupted, high-quality playback experience unless, of course, a major network mishap occurs.

When you opt for low latency, however, there’s less playback video that the player prepares. This leaves you with minimal room for error when a network issue strikes out of the blue.

That said, high latency comes handy in certain instances. For example, the increased time lag gives producers the time to censor inappropriate content and profanity.

Similarly, in cases where you can’t compromise with video broadcast quality, increase the latency ever so slightly so you can offer a high-quality viewing experience and have some room for error correction.

How is latency measured

With the definition of low latency streaming and its use cases out of the way, let’s see how you can measure it.

Technically, low latency is measured with a unit called the round-trip time (RTT). It denotes the time it takes a data packet to travel from point A to point B and for a response to reach back the source.

Now to calculate this, an effective way is to add video timestamps and ask a teammate to watch the live stream.

Ask them to look out for an exact time stamp frame to appear on their screen. Now, subtract the timestamp’s time from the time the viewer saw the exact frame. This will give you your latency.

Alternatively, ask a teammate to watch your live stream and record a particular cue when it comes. Now take the time you performed the cue on the live stream and when your assigned viewer saw it. This will give you latency albeit not as accurately as the method above. But it’s still good enough for a rough idea.

How to reduce video latency

So your live event is dependent on offering a real-time viewing experience without time lag. Or, you’ve planned participation to grow your audience engagement. Awesome!

Now how do you achieve low latency?

The fact of the matter is that there are several factors that impact video latency. From encoder settings to the streaming protocol you’re using, several factors have a role to play.

So let’s look at these factors and how you can optimize them for reducing streaming latency while making sure your video quality doesn’t take a significant hit:

• Internet connection type. The internet connection determines your data transmission rates and speed. It’s why ethernet connections are better for live streaming than WiFi and cellular data (it’s better to have those as your backups though).

• Bandwidth. A high bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transferred at a time) means less congestion and faster internet.

• Video file size. Larger sizes take up more bandwidth in transferring from point A to point B, which increases latency and vice versa.

• Distance. This is how far away you’re from your internet source. The closer you are, the faster your video stream will transfer.

• Encoder. Select an encoder that helps you keep low latency by sending signals from your device to the receiving device in as short a time as possible. But make sure the encoder you pick is compatible with your streaming service. 
• Streaming protocol or the protocol that delivers your data packets (including video and audio) from your workstation to viewers’ screens. For achieving low latency, you’ll need to select a streaming protocol that reduces data loss while introducing less latency.

Now, let’s review the streaming protocols you can choose from:

• RTMP: RTMP is a high-quality, widely used streaming protocol that helps accomplish low latency. However, it’s slowly disappearing from most workflows and is expected to be replaced by another alternative such as SRT.

• SRT: This protocol effectively transfers high-quality video over long distances with low latency. However, since it’s relatively new, it’s still being adopted by tech including encoders. The solution? Use it in combination with another protocol.

• WebRTC: WebRTC is great for video conferencing with a bit of compromise on video quality since it focuses on speed mainly. The problem, however, is that most players aren’t compatible with it as it requires a complex set up for deployment.
• Low-latency HLS: It’s great for low latencies of up to 2 seconds. This makes it suitable for interactive live streaming. However, it’s still an emerging spec so implementation support is in the works.
  

Live stream with low latency

Low latency streaming is entirely possible with a fast internet connection, a high bandwidth, the best-fit streaming protocol available, and an optimized encoder.

What’s more, closing the distance between yourself and the internet connection and using smaller video formats help.

Go live with low latency streaming

There are two key factors fueling the need to stream. First, video technology has made it easier for anyone to pick up a camera and live stream. Second, the streaming audience has grown, with an impressive 1.1 billion hours of live video consumed in 2019 alone. If you were thinking about live streaming content, now is the time.

But taking that first step is always the hardest. How do you start? Thankfully, there are resources to help you hit the ground running. We’ll break down the ins and outs of what you need to go live for the first time.

This article will break down how to live stream, gear for every budget, and the different live streaming platforms so you can find the right destination for your video content.

Getting started with live streaming

Before jumping into a streaming setup, let’s talk about content.

There are plenty of highly produced, multi-cam broadcasts in the world, but it doesn’t mean everyone needs to break the bank to start. Remember: your gear and setup can only get you so far — what really matters is your content.

Think of your last video call with friends and family. Maybe you were catching up or sharing an impromptu meal. Just like your last video call, live streaming has a simple purpose: to connect in an authentic and conversational way.

Live streaming terms you should know before you get started

Before we go further, there are few terms you’ll want to know. These are just the tip of the ice berg to help you dive into streaming lingo for the first time.

• Bitrate: the rate at which data is transported from point A to point B. It’s typically measured in kilobytes per second, and can vary based on a variety of factors, including: source and receiver network connections, video compression, resolution, and more.
• Compression: in the context of live streaming, compression increases processing efficiency by decreasing the overall size of the streaming video. The industry standard is H.264 (better known as MPEG-4). Vimeo uses this compression for both our uploaded and live videos.
• Encoding / transcoding: when video is first recorded, it exists in one of a variety of formats depending on your equipment. Encoding — sometimes called transcoding — is the process of converting raw, analog, or broadcast video files to digital video files.
• Frames: the series of still images that make up your video. Think of these like the pages of a flip book. The less motion per frame and the more frames per second, the smoother the video. They’re measured in frames per second (FPS), aka the number of frames displayed per second of video.
• Redundancy: a variety of backup techniques during a live stream. A fully redundant live set includes backup camera feeds, backup data source streams coming out of the mixer, backup RTMP streams, backup signal types, backup encoders for each master feed, backup streams or profiles for playback, and backup CDNs that each set of streams are being served from.
• Simulcast: any live event that’s streamed on multiple platforms simultaneously. Simulcasted live streams include content that’s airing live on television, in addition to digital platforms. They can be exclusive to digital platforms, like Vimeo.
• Switcher: also known as a “video mixer” or “vision mixer,” a switcher is a device used to select between several different video sources. In some cases, switchers can be used for compositing (mixing) video sources together to create special effects.

Don’t feel the need to memorize everything at once! Feel free to go back and refer to our comprehensive guide of live streaming terms.

How to live stream for the first time

Once you have an idea of what to stream, we can jump into the nuts and bolts of your live streaming setup.

Here’s a checklist of equipment you’ll need before you start live streaming:

• Audio input
• Camera input
• Switcher and encoder 
• Internet bandwidth
• Live streaming platform

1. Pick your audio and camera

Let’s dig into some of the best options for your streaming setup for beginners. If you want to stream without the hassle, you can always use a smartphone or built-in webcam to start.

Whatever video and audio setup you choose, make sure your broadcast looks great by using the following tips:

• Use a clean, interesting background
• Make sure you speaker/presenter is set up in the center of the frame
• Set up lights or try to use natural light in front of you, not behind you
• Find a quiet place and remove background noises
• Try to keep things static and minimize movements

If streaming with equipment seems a bit intimidating to start, don’t fret! You can easily pull out your mobile phone and live stream like a pro. Apps like Vimeo for iOS and Android allow creators to quickly simulcast to social destinations to reach followers.

If you want to increase your image and audio quality to a professional standard, we’ve got some great ideas you can explore for your cameras, audio and lighting setup.

Entry-level recommendations:

• Camera: Mevo Start ($399)
• Microphone: Rode VideoMic ($150)
• Lighting: Aputure MC ($90)

Intermediate-level recommendations:

• Camera: Canon XA15 ($1,800)
• Microphone: Rode ProCaster ($229) 
• Lighting: Neewer’s ring light kits ($19-$110)

Professional-level recommendations:

• Camera: PMW 300 ($7,500)
• Microphone: Shure SM7B ($399)
• Audio Mixer: RodeCaster Pro audio mixer ($599)
• Lighting: Aputure 300dii ($1,100)

These are just some basic recommendations for each level. We encourage every content maker to explore other cameras, audio recorders, lights to find the right look and styles for your productions. 

If you’re looking for a deep dive on live streaming gear options, check out our recommendations for the best live streaming equipment for every budget

2. Choose a switcher and encoder

Once you have your audio and video sources locked in, you’ll need to look at switchers and encoders. Let’s break down exactly what encoders and switchers do and why you need one when you stream.

What is an encoder?

Broadly speaking, an encoder is a device — it can be physical hardware or software — that converts a signal from one format to another.

What does an encoder do for live streaming?

In the world of live streaming, an encoder takes a raw video and audio signal and converts it over to a format that can be transmitted over the internet and played on Vimeo.

The most common live streaming encoder will take video and audio signals and convert them to RTMP (real time messaging protocol), which is the most widely used streaming format, or RTMPS. 

Encoding vs. transcoding

Encoding takes a raw signal like your camera feed or video switcher feed and compresses it into a different format. 

Transcoding takes an already existing video or video stream in a computer format and transcodes it into a different format. 

Software encoder vs. hardware encoder

We’ve laid out the differences between software encoders and hardware encoders that you should consider before going live.

Software encoders are an application or computer program for encoding. Often, software encoders need additional tools like a capture card to get video and audio signals into your computer. 

A hardware encoder is a dedicated piece of hardware designed for encoding. 

Three tips when using software encoders for a live stream

1. Make sure your computer or hardware is powerful enough to run your live streaming/ encoding software. Live streaming from a software encoder is CPU intensive so make sure your memory is up to standard.
    
2. Don’t forget a capture card! Your software encoder will need a capture card to get the audio and video inputs into your computer.
   
3. We strongly recommend using a dedicated, hardwired internet connection with enough upload speed to push out your stream. 

How to choose a software encoder

An encoder is critical for video distribution. It’s the device that processes and transforms video data into a format that is more compatible with different platforms like Vimeo, Facebook, Youtube, Twitch, etc, so your viewers can watch your content.

While some cameras have built-in encoders, you may need to work with a hardware encoder (more on that in the next section) or a software encoder.

When looking into how to choose a software encoder, we focus on three key factors.

• Ease-of-use
• Accessibility
• Evergreen software

These three factors will ensure you have an encoder that’s easy to use with the technical support needed.

Gear recommendations for hardware encoders

Hardware encoders are best used when pushing high quality video, audio, and multiple camera and video sources into your stream.

And for those looking for some great gear recommendations for your hardware encoding kit, Vimeo has you covered. Here are some basic pieces of gear that you’ll need centered around one (or multiple) Studio HD550 switcher as your workhorse encoder.

• AJA HD5DA HD-SDI Distribution Amplifiers 
• Datavideo DAC70 Up/Down/Cross Converter
• AJA HD10AMA Audio Embedder
• Netgear GS105 5-Port Network Switch
• 100’ BNC and Cat 6 cables
• 3′ Cat 6 and HD-SDI cables

These recommendations should cover everything you need to handle encoding on an on-site live stream production. It also includes all the extra bits and pieces that should cover any additional streaming needs that might pop up when working with a brand or client for working with multiple cameras and in some of the highest quality streams. If you’d like to read more, here’s the full list for all the essential gear for your live streaming equipment setup.

Switchers

A switcher does exactly what the name suggests. It allows producers to switch between audio and video sources. They’re commonly used for multi-camera setups so that you can switch between shots during your stream.

Similar to encoders, you do have different options for both hardware and software switchers. However, for those first starting out, We recommend looking for a software option that combines all the elements that you’d need for both encoding and switching.

Livestream Studio, which is Vimeo’s native switcher/encoder software, gives users the power of a live production control room to tell compelling stories.

3. Check your internet bandwidth for live streaming

Now, we can address the elephant in the room: connectivity. 

No matter how nice or professional the setup — your live stream is only as good as your connection.

Before we go over how to get the best upload speeds for your streams, there are two terms you should know.

The first term is bitrate. This is the rate that your data will upload through your encoder and out to the various streaming services or platforms that you’ve picked. Generally speaking, the higher the bitrate the higher the stream quality. However, higher bitrates also mean large data size which can slow down a stream.

The trick is to find the right balance for your bitrate and your connection. One way to do this is by considering aspects like your frame rate and resolution.

Secondly, your resolution reflects the size of the frame of your video. Just because everyone wants 4K video for their cameras, televisions and content doesn’t mean it’s the best option for live streaming. Unless you have the capacities for the huge file sizes, instead consider more practical resolutions like 1080p or 720p which are much more manageable for streaming and keeping your bitrate reasonable.

4. Choose the right platform for live streaming

Once you’ve considered all the different aspects of live streaming from cameras to encoders to bitrates, you’re ready to choose your live streaming platform. 

To begin this process, you’ll want to make sure everything is synced and your encoder is properly connected with the stream key (or RTMP URL or stream address) for each platform. Most of these options will outline all the steps you’ll need to follow before broadcasting or simulcasting to multiple platforms.

• Vimeo Live: with Advanced and Enterprise plans, streamers have access to a suite of live streaming tools for your videos and events. In addition to live streaming features, Enterprise includes all the video hosting and collaboration tools to support your entire workflow. Explore plan options
• YouTube Live: YouTube’s live streaming service is a standard, free-to-use offering for affordable streaming.
• Facebook Live: Facebook Live might be best for those looking to add live streaming content to their brand’s Facebook page.
• Twitch: one of the biggest names in video game live streaming, Twitch is one of the most popular platforms for its community and niche styles of content.
• Mixer: Microsoft’s live streaming platform attracts video game streamers and competes with Twitch’s audience.
• LinkedIn Live: recently launched, LinkedIn now offers its own live streaming platform tailored for the business and networking community.

The best platform should compliment the type of video content you plan to stream, as well the audience you want to engage.

For small businesses, influencers, marketers, and brands that are looking into how to set up a live stream for the first time, Vimeo offers robust support and features to help you get started on the right foot.

5 tips to optimize your internet bandwidth for live streaming

Plan to test out your stream on your smartphone, web cam, or external camera before your go-live date. For example, if you’re used to video chatting on zoom calls all day from your laptop on the couch, you might expect your live stream to look about the same under those same conditions.

1. Connect directly to the router when possible

Once you’re ready to maximize your stream quality, one easy step is connecting directly whenever possible. This means going directly from your router or modem to your computer with an ethernet cable. If you’re working with a webcam or digital camera, connect to your computer rather than relying on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. In general, it’s preferable to work with physically connected devices over wireless connections. This will help you maximize your streams.

2. Close and remove other sources

Similar to the advice above, when you’re first starting out it’s perfectly fine to try out streaming under your normal home or office conditions. Another trick that you might want to try though is to close and remove all other sources that might be occupying your connectivity and internet speed. This includes all other Wi-Fi connected devices, computers and any and all background programs that might be automatically synced and using up bandwidth.

3. Max your upload speed and bandwidth

No matter where you’ve chosen to stream, remember to check internet speed and bandwidth caps outlined by your internet service provider (ISP). If you plan to go live on a regular basis, consider upgrading your plan or finding an ISP that can give you a higher upload speed and bandwidth.

4. Set up a buffer

Set a buffer to ensure you’re operating at a safe bitrate. This helps minimize speed changes throughout your stream. A good rule of thumb is to keep your upload speed at least around 30 percent higher than your bitrate speed to ensure a seamless and issue free broadcast.

5. Test extensively

When in doubt, test it out. 

Testing your live stream will help you find that sweet spot that maximizes elements like resolution, frame rate and bitrate without the risk of having an audience in attendance. Also be sure to do several dress rehearsals or practice runs to make sure everything is to your liking.

Wrap up: start your live stream today

Live streaming can be surprisingly simple. By investing the time to get the right equipment up front, you can focus on the big picture. This includes honing in on your live streaming content and perfecting your own style and sensibilities before going live.

Now that you’ve covered the basics, it’s time to take the plunge and broadcast your content with reliable, professional video. If you need a refresh, check out our tips and tricks to get the components of your stream in order.

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Originally published on March 1, 2021 and updated on August 10, 2022.