Take Your Video Conferencing To The Next Level (my 2 must-have tools)

Likely have done more video conferencing calls in the last year or two than you maybe have ever done. Cheryl Plouffe here, video strategist and repurposing expert. And today's topic is how you can take your video conferencing, your video calls, and really stand out from your competition and take it to the next level. So I'm going to be focusing on two specific tools today. I'll share and show you what they are. I'll also show my screen and share with you how we integrate them with one another so that you can take your video conferencing calls to the next level. So let's start with the basics. Why? Why is it even important to do that? Why would it even be something to think about to take video conferencing calls Aren't they pretty mundane calls that we're doing? Yeah, they can be. But what I believe is that if you have tools at your disposal that help you to take it to the next level, you stand out from your competition, right? Because things are different in the way that you do things compared to the other maybe 10 other calls that that business owner or collaboration partner or potential prospect or client has had that day. So, it's a way for you to stand out from other people in your field. And we're going to focus on 2 specific tools today. By the way, I am streaming this out to all of my platforms. If you have questions, want to chat with me, I can see the chat on the screen. So, feel free to ask questions as we go along. Or you can also post comments or questions below this video wherever you're watching this from. And I'll go back and can answer them for you later. So, what I'd love for you to do right now, depending on what platform you're on, let me know in the comments or in the chat. Do you do video conferencing on the regular? Is that a part of how you conduct business? And if you are thinking about things like sales calls, how are you conducting those sales calls? Yes, you can do sales calls on a phone. Of course, I have done that. I still use the phone for calls. But with video conferencing and video calls, What happens is now you start to build a closeness, a proximity that a phone really can't replicate. And I think that's the benefit, frankly, of doing video at all, not only for video conferencing or strategy calls or for sales calls. Other use cases might be like networking calls. You go to an event and then you schedule calls with individual people who you found intriguing and want to learn more about and see. Maybe it's a networking call. Could also be a collaborative call. It could be, hey, let's get on a call together and see what kind of synergy we might have from a business perspective and build a relationship or a potential joint venture relationship or referral-based business relationship thereafter. But those relationships typically are built on calls, right? Typically, especially those of you who have high-ticket, uh, thing, products and services that you're selling, you're, you're closing those things on, on calls. You know, those are not things that you're selling, you know, on a Facebook Live. If you have anything in the multiple thousands of dollars of in your offers, you have to get on a call with people. Um, so, you know, why conduct calls of this nature? Sales strategy, networking, collaboration calls, joint venture calls, referral relationships. And then one of the ways that we have been utilizing method, this taking your video conference and calls to the next level, is for our live stream podcast. So, I host a live stream podcast called Cash In On Camera and we bring guests onto the show. Maybe you've seen some of the episodes we've conducted so far. And we bring guests onto the show. And what we'll do then is often, we'll have a call before they come on the show. So, we're having an intro meeting, an intro meeting or a you know, looking at angles, like what angle are we going to use for the interview that I'll conduct with you when you come on the show. So that's how we've been using this. And it's been really helpful because once people come into the system I'm about to show you, they go, oh, this is different. This is nice. I like this. And it also helps to familiarize them with what the process will be once they come on the show and I do interview them. So, we're helping to make them more comfortable. And so, for those of you who are show hosts or aspiring show hosts, this is really important to understand, right? You're going to likely have some calls with your guests in advance of them being a guest on your show so that you can figure out the angle, get to know each other better, make your guests feel comfortable. You know, make them familiar with the process once they're ready to come on and make their appearance. And speak about their subject. So lots of benefits to why you would want to uplevel or next level your video conferencing and calls in general. Right. So we're going to focus on two different tools today. And the tools I'm sharing with you are Restream and Calendly. So the tool that I'm using right now to do this video is Restream. And I also have a Calendly account. Calendly is the scheduling tool that helps to save inordinate amounts of time and energy because it connects to your calendar, your Gmail or whatever calendar. It's a way to send people links. They book on your calendar through the links. Those of you who don't have a scheduling tool right now are— you need a scheduling tool. I've been using Calendly for a long time. And I love it. It integrates seamlessly with other things. And I'm going to show you today how that works in conjunction with Restream, which is what I'm using today to do this broadcast and what we've been using for, again, video conferencing calls and strategy calls, sales calls, collaboration calls. We've been doing this in my company at Sheryl Plouffe Media, and it's been working really well, which is why I wanted to come on and share this with you today, this strategy. So those are the two things that we're going to focus on. What I'm going to do is share my screen with you. This will be a little bit meta because you're going to see me in what is my interface right now and what I'm looking at on my own computer screen. I'm going to share with you. So you're going to see some behind the scenes action here of how things work on the back end in Live Studio where I'm producing this video and where I would produce, essentially produce the video conferencing calls, those strategy calls, those sales calls. You can produce those calls to a large degree and give people a real different experience than what might be otherwise experienced on other more boring video conferencing platforms. Okay, so let me share my screen and you're going to be able to see what I'm talking about here. Okay, so let me just move my own self to the side. Um, actually, I'll put it over on this side. There you go. So you can still see me, and this is the, uh, the, the interface, right? I know we're doing sort of like an infinity thing here, but look over to this side, the right-hand side of the inset box, and that's the part that I really want you to look at from the perspective of Graphics, overlays and graphics. So really, how do you uplevel and how do you go to the next level with conferencing calls? Bring in some graphics, you know, bring in some branding on the screen. So this could be, and you can even see some examples like, so the graphic that I just showed you is this one. Right. So I just upload that image into the system and I bring that up on the screen. So if you are doing, let's say, let's use sales calls as an example, and you're actually going to be doing a presentation. Now you can bring in graphics, photos, examples, case studies in order to close the sale. Not only that, but you're able to have video clips. So let's say you create a video presentation. Of any length. It doesn't really matter how long it is. You can upload that video clip into this tool, into, into Restream, and play that video for your prospect. So I'll give you an example here. This one here is a little video that I produced that I'll play it and you can watch it. Stream to 30+ sites at once with Restream. Increase audience engagement, boost your views, and cash Crashing on Camera. Sign up for free at restream.io/join/cioc. So, just as a little example of a short— I mean, that's not a sales presentation per se. You could have a 10-minute, it could be an 8-minute long video sales letter that you create and upload into the system and play that for the prospect in a sales call situation. That would play. And what's interesting about it is that it's playing as an overlay, like it's going on top of and playing in real time. It's not really necessarily a screen share thing. So with this video clip example of this video, this short little video that I just showed you, I'm just playing it right into the system. I'm not having to share my screen and bring out another Chrome window. And then play it from someplace where the audio is going to be messed up. It works seamlessly. So that's a great example too of another reason or way that you can bring in video clips and that presentation style into a call. The overlay graphics again, I used an example here of the one that I've shown you today, but also other branding. So let me show you another example. So here, I have my logo, you see on the top right-hand side here. I'll take it off and on so you can see which part I'm talking about. You can import your logo in here as well. Right. So you could have a logo if you wanted to. You could also do lower thirds. So this would be an example of lower thirds on the bottom of the screen. Right. So the title of this video that I'm doing today. Yeah, maybe there's some cases where you might want to do something like that or create some type of graphic that you overlay on top. Corner elements. So, you know, these type of things. So, these little elements, these little pink bars at the bottom. It's really only limited to your own imagination. So, you can do so much to uplevel a call by overlaying graphics and bringing your own custom branding onto the screen so that people have a very different experience using Restream and Calendly, which I'm going to get to in a moment, to conduct those calls. The other thing that you're going to notice here, see on the background of this video you're watching right now, see how this purple wavy type of dynamic background. When you use this platform, there are a whole host. You can see them here on the screen. So the green, these ones here with the little video icons are backgrounds that are dynamic and moving. So let me share. I'll change it so you can see. A different version. See, this one's moving and it's like these sort of angular angles. This one here is more of a black and white type of gray dynamic background. You better believe that if you do a call and you have a dynamic background like this on a call where it's a you and one other person, or possibly if maybe if you're doing a collaboration call or a networking call, it's multiple people because you can have up to 9 people on the call with you. And you have a dynamic background like that, it takes it to the next level because that's not what other people are doing. Other people are not doing that. They're using more, you know, different types of platforms that are more basic. So it's just a way, and you can customize this if you have your own background that you want to bring in. It doesn't have to be dynamic. It can just be an image like this. Obviously, Restream is providing a whole bunch of different colored backgrounds here, but you can also upload your own, right? So do whatever feels best for you. But it's a really great way of bringing in a dynamic background. Another thing I've talked about, the overlay photos, video clips, and you don't have to screen share. So that's awesome. Play that video presentation in a sales call, especially. I don't think you'd play a video, you know, a video sales letter unless you were really just on a sales call. But there could be some other use cases where you might want to play a short little intro like I showed you earlier. These are just very— they're elements that can take things to the next level for you. And another thing that you can do, and this is over in this section here, let me go to the top here. You can show your participants' names on the screen or not. So I was thinking about collaboration calls, networking calls, how, you know, if you wanted to have maybe multiple people on the screen, and I'll just stop sharing here so I can share this with you. But if you wanted to have multiple people on a call and each of them, and maybe they don't know each other, you can set it up so everyone's name appears, or you can make it so that their name doesn't appear. Totally up to you. But you get to be able to define what that experience is really like for them. So you can see now that the background has changed because I changed it in the settings. So those are some ways that you can really uplevel that experience on a call. So now let's move into what— how do we, how do we bring Calendly, the scheduler, into play? So I'm going to share my screen again and I'll show you my Calendly so you can see, you know, these are some of the calls that I have set up in my account and I've been using for some time. I'm going to just focus on this middle one here called Book Your podcast interview. This is, this is the page that people would go to when they, um, are going to be a guest and they're booking their time on my calendar. So we don't do any of that manually. It's all preset because you can imagine, you know, I'm at a point now where I'm ramping up to interview anywhere from 3 to 5 people per week. That's really where I'm going with this. And so I have to have my systems very much dialed in. So a tool like Calendly is amazing, and how we integrate that in with Zoom— with, um, whether with Restream is in this manner. So if we go up here, you'll see here, okay, what event is this? This is the Book Your Podcast Interview. You'll see here you have the name of the event, and then here I have it set right now to send them a custom live URL that will be emailed to them. And I'm choosing to display the location only after they confirm. You could choose to display the location while they're booking, it's up to you. But what happens a lot of times is people, you know, in here you may have seen, if you're familiar with Calendly, you'd see Zoom, you'd see GoToMeeting. So these are more native integrations with Calendly, right? So you would choose and you may be familiar with those ones. So you go in here and you put Zoom. But if you want to use Restream to have the ability to uplevel your calls, you're going to need to use the custom live, the custom function here. See this one here? Custom. So that's closer to the bottom. You have to scroll down a little bit, right? So scroll to the bottom, choose custom, and then, you know, you can write something like this. I think it I don't know if it defaults to this or if I wrote this text in there, but it reads, custom live studio URL will be emailed to you. I believe I said that myself. I think I wrote that myself. So you say great. And then what we do is we add a little description and instruction about our lives, our booking your podcast interview. And then we put a little description in here about what to expect. And then the rest of it is just like any Calendly meeting that you're going to create, and then you save and close that. So now when we send this out, right, we're able to, um, here I'll show you the live page, and this is what the booking page looks like. And then we can send people the link to this, and they're going to be able to go in here, and just like a normal calendar scheduling tool, they choose the date, they choose the time. But the only thing that's different is that the instructions that they get are going to be to come to the, to the, um, to the Restream studio. And what we do is we set that up so that we send them that link. You know, say they book it and then we send up an automation so that they are sent that link to Restream. So coming back into Restream, what link do we send? We send this link here at the bottom, this one right here, right? This link right here Invite guests, copy this, and that's the link that we set up in Calendly to send to them when they book themselves on the show. And that's it. And then once that's set up, you really don't have to do much more. So it's a little bit of— it's more the setup, the automation that you're setting up in the early stages through Calendly Choosing custom, creating the meeting, choosing custom, putting in maybe a little description, and then setting up so that once, once that person books the interview, you're sending them an email, an automated email with that URL, this URL, the URL for your Restream live studio. And that's it. So from that point forward, every time that they book, it's going to send them the link to this call with you using this platform. So that's how you can set all of this up to work seamlessly together using Restream and using Calendly. It's a powerful combination. It's been working really well for us. And you can, of course, go to calendly.com to start an account. I believe you can get a free account with Calendly. Obviously, with these platforms too, you know, you get so much free and then there's other just levels that you have to look into. With Calendly, I know I'm on the Pro account with Calendly, but with Restream, you can start a free account. And if you aren't already using Restream, not only for calls of this nature, but also for, you know, actually doing livestream broadcasts, it's a no-brainer. It's an amazing platform. I am a huge advocate. And would encourage you to get your free account. So you can go to restream.io/join/cioc and get your free Restream account so that you can take advantage of this powerful platform to not only next level and stand out with your video conferencing calls, but you can do so much more with this platform. So I hope that that has opened your eyes to some possibilities, some potential for you to uplevel your calls, no matter what kind of calls it is that you're conducting. We've been doing it in our business and it's been working really, really well. And I know and confident that it will work for you as well. So again, just go to restream.io/join/cioc to start your free account. And if you have any questions, you know, if you just want to kind of bat around some ideas, what have you, by all means, you can certainly join me on Facebook. And I'm on all platforms @SherylPlouffe. I do have a Facebook group called Cash In On Camera. Always happy to answer questions in that group. Thank you so much for being here today, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.