Webinars are powerful tools with unique opportunities for businesses to connect with their audience in ways that other online content formats simply can’t match. This blog is the first in the series to take you from webinar ideation through planning and execution. But first, let’s see why webinars are such a powerful tool.

What Sets Webinars Apart

Unlike traditional videos or podcasts, webinars allow real-time engagement between presenters and participants. Through features like live chat, polls, and Q&A sessions, webinars create an immersive, two-way communication channel, fostering active participation and learning.

Why Webinars are Effective for Small to Medium Businesses

Webinars are not isolated events; they are integral components of your broader business and marketing strategies. They can seamlessly align with your business objectives, whether you’re aiming to increase revenue, launch a new product, enhance customer loyalty, or establish thought leadership within your industry.

1. Increased Sales: Webinars offer a platform to showcase products or services in a detailed, interactive manner. Demonstrations, case studies, and expert insights presented during webinars can influence purchasing decisions, leading to increased sales and revenue.
2. Brand Exposure: Hosting webinars establishes your brand as an authority in your industry. By sharing valuable knowledge and expertise, businesses can enhance their credibility, gaining the trust of potential customers. Consistent webinar events also contribute to brand visibility and recognition.
3. Audience Connection: Webinars provide a personalized experience, allowing businesses to directly engage with their audience. Attendees can ask questions, share experiences, and receive immediate responses, fostering a sense of connection and community. This emotional connection can lead to loyal customers and brand advocates.

Getting Started with Webinars

Setting Clear Goals for Your Webinars

Setting clear objectives is the cornerstone of a successful webinar strategy. It’s not merely about hosting a webinar; it’s about aligning your efforts with specific, achievable goals that drive your business forward.

Measurable goals allow you to track your success, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of your webinar campaigns. Achievable goals ensure that your efforts are realistic and attainable, preventing frustration and fostering motivation among your team.

Aligning your webinar goals with different stages of the sales funnel is a strategic approach that ensures your efforts are targeted and impactful. Here’s how you can map your webinar goals to various stages of the sales funnel:

1. Awareness Stage:

• Webinar Goal: Increase Brand Awareness
• Strategy: Create a webinar that addresses industry challenges or trends, positioning your brand as a thought leader. Focus on reaching a wide audience and providing valuable, introductory information about your industry or niche.

2. Interest/Consideration Stage:

• Webinar Goal: Generate Leads and Nurture Prospects
• Strategy: Offer in-depth, educational content that dives deeper into specific topics related to your products or services. Showcase customer success stories, conduct product demonstrations, and provide exclusive insights. Collect attendee information for lead nurturing campaigns.

3. Desire Stage:

• Webinar Goal: Influence Purchase Decisions
• Strategy: Create a webinar focused on product/service benefits and unique selling points. Offer exclusive discounts or limited-time offers to attendees. Provide detailed demonstrations, case studies, and testimonials to showcase the value your offerings bring.

4. Action Stage:

• Webinar Goal: Drive Conversions and Sales
• Strategy: Host webinars centered around product launches, exclusive deals, or limited-time promotions. Implement strong calls to action (CTAs) throughout the webinar, directing attendees to make a purchase or sign up for a trial. Provide incentives for immediate action, such as time-sensitive discounts.

5. Post-Purchase Stage:

• Webinar Goal: Enhance Customer Loyalty and Retention
• Strategy: Organize webinars that focus on customer success stories, advanced product usage tips, and loyalty programs. Engage existing customers with exclusive webinars offering insider insights, sneak peeks, or advanced training. Encourage participation, feedback, and referrals.

6. Advocacy Stage:

• Webinar Goal: Foster Brand Advocacy and Referrals
• Strategy: Host interactive webinars where satisfied customers share their experiences. Encourage attendees to invite friends or colleagues, rewarding both the advocate and the new referral. Highlight community success stories and create a sense of belonging and pride among your customer base.

By aligning your webinar goals with specific stages of the sales funnel, you ensure that your content is highly relevant and compelling to your audience’s current needs and interests. This strategic approach maximizes the impact of your webinars, guiding potential customers seamlessly through their buying journey while fostering customer loyalty and advocacy in the long run.

Identifying Target Audience and Niche

Understanding your audience is fundamental to webinar success. Identifying your target market involves researching demographics, preferences, behaviors, and pain points. A deep understanding of your audience enables you to tailor your webinar content to their specific needs, ensuring relevance and engagement.

Effective market research involves surveys, interviews, social media analytics, and studying industry trends. By analyzing this data, you gain insights into what your audience is looking for. This knowledge informs your webinar content, making it valuable and appealing to your target demographic.

Using Your Objectives to Guide Your Webinar

Setting clear objectives for your webinars is not just a strategic step; it’s a crucial investment that yields a multitude of benefits for your business. Knowing what your goals are allows you to streamline everything that comes next.

Effective Use of Resources

By knowing precisely what you aim to achieve, you can focus your time, budget, and manpower on activities that directly contribute to your goals. This focus ensures that every resource you invest is utilized effectively, maximizing the impact of your efforts.

When objectives are vague or undefined, there’s a risk of misdirected efforts. Clear goals prevent you from wasting resources on activities that don’t align with your desired outcomes.

Enhanced Audience Engagement

Clear objectives enable you to tailor your webinar content to meet the specific needs and interests of your audience. When your content resonates with the attendees, they are more likely to actively engage with the material. A focused approach ensures that your webinar addresses the pain points, questions, and desires of your audience, leading to higher engagement rates and meaningful interactions.

Interactive elements are the heartbeat of engaging webinars. By understanding your objectives, you can incorporate tailored interactive features like polls, quizzes, live Q&A sessions, and breakout discussions.  Knowing your audience and where you want to lead them allows you to create content that resonates and helps move them along the path you’ve laid out.

Here are just a few ways that you can align your content with your goals:

1. Increasing Brand Awareness:

• Engagement Type: Interactive Polls and Quizzes
• Strategy: Use polls and quizzes to gauge attendees’ current knowledge about your industry or brand. Educate them about key facts, trends, or unique aspects of your business. This engagement fosters brand recognition and awareness among participants.

2. Generating Leads and Nurturing Prospects:

• Engagement Type: Live Q&A Sessions and Breakout Discussions
• Strategy: Host live Q&A sessions where attendees can ask specific questions related to your products or services. Create breakout discussion groups based on attendee interests, allowing prospects to engage deeply with your team and each other. This engagement encourages relationship building and lead nurturing.

3. Influencing Purchase Decisions:

• Engagement Type: Case Study Presentations and Product Demonstrations
• Strategy: Showcase real-life case studies during your webinar, demonstrating how your offer solved specific problems for customers. Conduct live product demonstrations, highlighting features, benefits, and use cases. These engagements provide tangible proof of the value you provide, influencing attendees’ purchasing decisions.

4. Driving Conversions and Sales:

• Engagement Type: Limited-Time Offers and Interactive Workshops
• Strategy: Create a sense of urgency by offering exclusive discounts or time-sensitive deals during the webinar. Host interactive workshops where attendees actively participate in solving challenges using your products or services. These engagements motivate attendees to take immediate action, driving conversions and sales.

5. Enhancing Customer Loyalty and Retention:

• Engagement Type: Customer Success Story Sessions and Advanced Training Webinars
• Strategy: Feature customer success stories during your webinar, allowing satisfied customers to share their experiences. Offer advanced training sessions exclusively for existing customers, showcasing advanced features and techniques. These engagements reinforce loyalty and provide added value, enhancing customer retention.

6. Fostering Brand Advocacy and Referrals:

• Engagement Type: Interactive Customer Panels and Community Building Activities
• Strategy: Host interactive customer panels where advocates share their success stories and experiences. Facilitate community-building activities, encouraging attendees to invite friends or colleagues and share their own insights. These engagements create a sense of belonging, fostering brand advocacy and encouraging referrals.

By strategically aligning your webinar goals with specific types of engagement, you create a purposeful and cohesive experience for your attendees. Each interactive element serves as a steppingstone, guiding participants toward the intended goal and maximizing the impact of your webinar.

Measurable Results and Analytics

Clear objectives provide a benchmark against which you can measure the success of your webinars. Metrics such as attendance rates, conversion rates, and audience feedback offer quantitative and qualitative insights into your webinar performance. These metrics serve as tangible indicators, showcasing how well your webinar aligned with its objectives and how effectively it engaged the audience.

By understanding attendee behavior, preferences, and feedback, you gain valuable insights. These insights guide your future webinar initiatives, helping you refine your content, interactive elements, and promotional strategies. Continuous analysis and improvement based on these metrics ensure that your webinars evolve, becoming increasingly effective and impactful over time.

Setting clear objectives for your webinars is the compass that directs your efforts, optimizes resources, enhances audience engagement, and provides valuable data for continuous improvement. As we progress through this blog series, we will explore advanced techniques and strategies to help you harness these benefits to their fullest potential, ensuring your webinars become a driving force behind your business success.

If you want expert guidance, schedule a free strategy session with Six Degrees Digital Media. Our team is dedicated to helping businesses leverage webinars effectively, transforming objectives into powerful, results-driven experiences. With clear goals and strategic planning, webinars can be the catalysts that propel your business towards unprecedented growth and success. Don’t just host webinars; craft experiences that resonate, engage, and drive your business forward.

The post How to Start Growing Your Business with Webinars appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

The speed at which today’s business world moves is full tilt. Human resource departments and management looking for ways to streamline their ever-growing list of action items are forced to learn how to work smarter, not harder. This is a driving factor in why the digital learning industry has grown by 900% since 2000, and is projected to be worth $325 billion by 2025.

In fact, 82% of companies use e-learning to conduct at least some of their compliance training. It’s easy to see how e-learning has become so popular for this task, especially in a post-pandemic world that still encourages online interaction versus in-person meetings. Additionally, besides offering learning opportunities that can be accessed anytime and anywhere, e-learning also allows collaboration with other team members working across remote locations.

What is e-learning?

E-learning involves the use of electronic media to train employees, vendors, and contractors working for and with your business. Bulky manuals and expensive print material are a thing of the past, as learners can now access the information, they need to do their jobs via their smartphones, tablets or laptops through e-learning modules and videos. Access can also happen via the company’s in-office computers. 

You don’t even have to put together full courses to benefit from adding e-learning to your training process. Even microlearning via electronic media allows employees to consume two to three-minute videos at regular intervals to make learning unobtrusive and continuous, making it seem less like “work” and more like personal growth.

E-Learning is consistent

Providing consistent instruction on company processes and methods will reduce the risk of your employees making a mistake. It will also clarify expectations and allow employees to return to the needed information whenever they desire to do so.

A company that trains home cleaners, for instance, can use video training modules to show their specific process for how a home should be cleaned. The training can be completed before they go out with a seasoned employee to see the process live. And they can refer back to it anytime. As an added benefit, training is consistent and standard across the board for all employees, regardless of where they’re located and when they take the training. A perfect scenario for franchisors who want to ensure consistency with franchisees.

E-Learning saves money

Training is expensive. In fact, the average amount required for employee learning and development is around $1,308. Smaller companies with limited HR budgets, often don’t have the resources to spend this amount on each employee, and larger companies with high turnover don’t want the expense either.

With e-learning, you won’t be paying the costs associated with hiring a trainer, such as per-hour fees, overnight stays, and travel expenses. And once the initial expense of creating the instructional media is over, you won’t have significant recurring costs associated with keeping your employees informed of expectations and compliant with all state and federal regulations.

E-Learning maintains compliance

Whether it’s a daycare that needs to train staff for compliance with standards, or a retail lumberyard required to teach employees about on-the-job safety around dangerous equipment, e-learning gets it done. The ability to streamline required training modules based on staff role or certification makes it doubly efficient, taking these complicated and time-consuming tasks out of the hands of management.

Even better, individual scores and completed modules are accessible for managers to see which employees need additional training or haven’t completed important compliance requirements. Since compliance regulations and requirements change often, e-learning modules allow quick updates to keep the training relevant and timely, as well.

E-learning streamlines operations

If you work with vendors or contractors who need to be updated regularly regarding job progress or new products, e-learning is a great way to streamline the process. For example, a winery can share with vendors new wines they are rolling out that can help them with sommeliers. Or your sales team can use e-learning to build the knowledge base they need before meeting face-to-face with clients.

Imagine how much easier hiring and training new employees could be if all the necessary information they need to perform their job successfully is available on their smartphones or laptop. Then add to that the ease of having digital records consistently available for real-time progress and notifications to keep you in the loop.

E-learning engages

Approximately 74% of workers say they can’t unlock their full potential at work because they aren’t adequately trained. Getting the most out of your employees involves making sure they are excited about their work and want to learn more about it.

With advances in gamification software, e-learning can include games that are fun, competitive, and an easy way to learn. These types of modules are great for a younger workforce who grew up in a digital era and are accustomed to learning through shorter media clips. These training modules can also be accessed across devices at a time and place that is convenient for the employee, encouraging more commitment to the learning process.

Working smarter, not harder

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to streamline your hiring and compliance training needs. Even better – once your training modules and media are in place, you’ll no longer have to hire people to do the training for you. It will be readily available online, and available to help build a knowledgeable staff.

Whether you need a robust e-learning course, or any online course created, we can help. Scheduled a free strategy session today.

The post 5 Brilliant Ways E-Learning Can Benefit Your Business appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

I want to put your mind to rest right away by saying “You don’t have to be on camera.” Whew, we got that out of the way. That said, you can be on camera if you want to. There are more styles of video than you probably knew about. First, let’s talk about why and how it can help you increase sales. 

YouTube

Did you know that YouTube is the #2 search engine? Surprising, right? People spend a lot of time on YouTube every single day. I won’t bore you with the statistics. Okay, maybe just a couple:

• Over 1 billion people are on YouTube
• There are over 4 billion video views a day
• 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute

There is so much more I could share, but the point I’m trying to make is that people love video and you need to take advantage of this now.

Why Video?

Did you know video is the number one type of post that is shared on social media? Imagine if you had a virtual tour of your business on YouTube and Facebook. You could send potential customers to your video tour while you are on the phone with them. Other customer testimonials are great too. Or send them links to your videos and they can watch them later. This will entice them to stop by and talk to someone in person.

In just a minute or two of their time they can see what you are trying to tell them over the phone. You can also have the videos posted to your website. Why not feature a couple of your products, services, or staff members? By adding video on your site, you also keep visitors on your site for longer periods of time. Having people on your site longer helps you with search rankings overall. Sites with video also convert better.

Remember our tip on local search and Google My Business? Your YouTube channel will be tied to this listing. This happens when you create your business page first and then create a YouTube channel for this Google My Business page.  Then, when you upload a video, it automatically shows up on your Google page!

Here’s another little nugget of information: Videos get displayed in the search results just like any other web page on the Internet. Video also helps you build trust and credibility with your audience. 

Video Length

Generally, you want your video to be 0:30 – 3:00 long. The length depends on the goal of the video. If you are running an ad on YouTube — those videos that play before the video you actually want to see — then 0:30 is good. For a video on your website, 1:00 to 1:30 is great.  For a virtual tour, you want to split that up into a series that showcases the different areas of your business.

Video Keywords

If you want to try and get your video on page one of the search results, then you need to add keywords to your script. Google actually came out with speech-to-text a few years back so that they can tell what your video is about. If you do some research for what can potentially rank on page one and write your script to include those keywords, you have a shot at getting your video ranked. Many times a video will rank even before your website does. 

Video elements

One thing that will distract your viewers and have them clicking away from your video is poor sound quality. If you are filming, make sure to use an external mic as opposed to what is built into your camera or smartphone. You’ll thank me later.

Lighting also plays a role. If you are near windows, you’ll end up with shadows from cloud movement. If you don’t have professional lights, that’s okay. You should be able to get by with the fluorescent lighting in your rooms.

Music is a really strong branding tool. Find a royalty-free music track that works well with your message, and use that in the background for every video you make. Some videos may have no narration at all, and you may want to change up the music track to fit the style of the video.

Make sure to have an intro with your business name or logo. Also, and this is really important, have a call to action at the end of every video. Make sure to include your website address and your phone number. 

Video Benefits

You will want to distribute your video to many video-sharing sites; don’t just stop at YouTube. Remember when we spoke about good backlinks, citations, and NAPs earlier? This is an opportunity to get more of these links and citations. Other video-sharing sites include Vimeo, Daily Motion, and even Photobucket and Flickr allow you to upload video.

One thing to note is that you want to optimize your videos within each site. Fill out all the requested info. Add good descriptions and always always always have your URL start off with https://. If you leave that off on YouTube, your link will not be clickable.

Don’t forget to share your videos on your social media sites! Ask your followers and connections to like, share, and comment as well.

Recap

• People love video – embrace it
• You do not have to be on camera
• Video is shared more than anything else on social media
• Video can rank in the search results
• Video keeps visitors on your website longer
• Make quality video – consider your length, audio, lighting
• Videos provide backlinks and you can add citations in your descriptions

Schedule a complimentary strategy session with us today to talk about a video campaign

The post Video – The Powerful Tool You Should be Using appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.

Have you been asked the same question over and over and over again?

Have you been asked the same question over and over and over again?

I bet there are things you could spout off in your sleep, right?

Although why people are talking to you while you’re sleeping is a whole different problem.

If you would like to save some time answering the same question, repeatedly, the answer is…

Use video!

Just imagine the next time someone asks you that thing, you know the one that you almost want to roll your eyes at, that you could say, let me send you a link. 

I’ll bet you can come up with at least ten things this could work with right now.

Sure, this won’t work in every situation. I don’t recommend you do this with a prospect when you’re trying to get new business.

But here are some scenarios that would work for you:

Product training for employees, vendors, and customers

Job training for employees

Explaining a process to a vendor of how to submit a bid

Now, how many can you come up with?

Here are some ways we incorporate video:

I frequently screencast how I want my team to work on something. Websites, graphics, etc.

When I am doing some in-depth research for a client, I’ll screencast and explanation of the results. This way they can refer back to it at any time or share it with someone else on their team who may be able to join a call.

When we hand off a website to a client, I send them tutorials on how to handle website maintenance. Those videos are on our YouTube channel so it’s easy peasy to go grab the links.

I’ve been asked about how to buy a domain name, how to set up Google Ads, and all kinds of other stuff. I generally screencast instructions for them.

Here’s the thing I want you to think about. Is there something you can film or screencast that you can use somewhat generically to explain something?

Companies use video all the time to help employees understand their procedures and policies and even certain training. Sure beats reading a 3-inch manual.

It’s not that difficult to do. If you want to film, you don’t need a big production company. You can even use your cell phone. We’ve got a course on that too if you need it. How to make Professional Video with Your Phone.

If you’re training someone how to do something on a computer, you can screencast the steps using software such as Snagit which costs less than $50 a year. Loom is another tool you can use and they offer a free version.

Then as far as where to put your videos, you can always upload them to YouTube and keep them unlisted if you like. You can also embed them on a website to a private page. Or you could put them in something more formal such as a learning management system for employee training. There are other options as well and if you want, we can chat about that. Just schedule a free strategy session today.

The post How to Train Your Employees, Vendors and Customers with Video appeared first on Six Degrees Digital Media.