When enough is enough
When staging a Zoom meeting, how many audience members do I need?
To figure out the answer, let’s work out some other stuff first.
While many clients book me to capture actual events - keynote presentations, webinars, masterminds, community calls, etc. - others opt to stage them, instead.
Regardless of the reason why a speaker or trainer would prefer to stage it, the one consistent question that I receive from all of them revolves around audience size.
That is, how many people should I ask to sit in the audience for my virtual presentation?
I let them know that it’s impossible to answer without an answer to two simple questions first:
What service(s) are you looking to promote?
How many people do you usually serve with these offers?
If you’re looking to promote your coaching call or mastermind services, the target number of faces you’d want to sit in your virtual photo season is quite different than if you were looking to showcase your virtual keynote speaker offer to trade organizations and associations.
So here’s the rule of thumb I offer my clients:
If you offer a service that has an EXACT amount of slots, represent those slots exactly.
If you talk about having 5 slots per quarter or year and you only show 3 faces in the Gallery view throughout your image content, this visual incongruence sets up trust issues from potential clients from the start.
If you’re offering a service that generally serves 5-50 people at a time, shoot for AT LEAST HALF that to show up for your virtual photo session.
If you’re promoting offerings that generally serve anywhere from 50-1000’s of people at a time, aim to simply fill the Gallery VIEW page, which, depending on the viewer screen size, is up to 49 people.
You don’t need to go any more than that since having multiple pages of random faces is irrelevant for a photo. They get the point with one filled-up page full of a sea of faces.
The ultimate goal with audience sizes displayed in the Gallery VIEW on Zoom is to give potential clients an impression of what it would look like if they were taking part in that particular service with you.
By approximating the audiences you serve with each service, that’s exactly what your offering through your image content.
So before you ask your colleagues and friends to sit in to help you out, figure out what service you want to promote and then tailor the headcount from there.
It’ll help streamline and focus your efforts when curating a group of folks to help make your virtual photos ore magical.
And when it comes to wrangling people, any time you can streamline and focus, you’re putting yourself in a good spot, :)
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