Introducing Webinars: An Effective Low-Cost Marketing Solution to Your Business

WEBINARS 

A webinar is also referred to as the term teleseminar, which is a seminar that is conducted live over the world wide web and is designed to be interactive. If you didn't know the term "webinar" was coined from the phrase "web-based seminar." Most webinars contain a visual aspect for example a live- stream video or slide show presentation. Although these visual tools require scheduling prior in advance to ensure people can make time to participate. To attend a webinar, the listener can call a phone number that will be given or have a choice to listen live on a computer's speakers by getting access to the webinar through the internet. Overall, the details and specifics all depend on how the webinar is set up and organized by the host. All webinars are live experiences, therefore, its important to post and promote the date and time that the webinar will take place. The duration of a webinar is one to two hours. Quite often webinars will be free but some companies may charge a fee to attend.

Overall webinars software was recently very costly and not very reliable with the large number of participants involved. Although, now companies offer different webinar services like Connect Pro, WebEx and ILinc. Webinars has evolved drastically over the past years. More businesses are utilizing this type of social media technology.Its an effective low cost marketing solution to get people engaged and to promote interaction. 

Four Steps on How to Set Up a Free to Low-Cost Webinar Site: 

1. Firstly, select the right free to low-cost webinar service site to best cater to your business. 
2. Secondly, decide where to host the webinar and consider number attendees, visual content, and the frequency with which the webinar is held. 
3. Thirdly, decide if your going to have visual content and if it will be necessary to have a website host the webinar rather than using a conference call system. 
4.  Fourthly, establish the frequency with which the webinar will be held. This will help determine if its better to pay a monthly subscription fee or a one-time webinar fee.

List of Technical Details to Pay Attention to: 

• Include multiple choice questions (polls) for attendees to answer during webinar. 
• Create an outline for the webinar which includes, host name, email, company, webinar tittle, date, time re occurrence information and category. 
• Promote the webinar on other social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram just to name a few.

Companies Who Use Webinars: 

1. LUMEDX

"The accessibility of these webcasts has made a significant difference in our ability to engage with high-level management at healthcare facilities." 

                                              - Randy Lasnick, Director of Marketing

This company uses the webinar site called WebEx, to help build awareness of their cardiovascular information and imaging system products. Lumedx uses Cisco WebEx event center to help deliver webcasts that drive lead generation campaigns. By using this webinar software, the company gained a competitive edge with larger companies and increased their contacts with over 500 clients. 

Click Link to Read About LUMEDX

2. The Food Group 

"We can now offer webcast production services to our customers.. By turning to WebEx, we've established a completely new business channel."

                                             - Kyle Kraus, Managing Director 

The food group company also uses the webinar service called WebEx, to meet diverse needs for web-based meetings and events. WebEx allowed this company to deliver rich-media presentations, increase capacity to produce customer web events and facilitate staff. By using WebEx as one of their social media technology tools they tripled their number of webcasts produced for customers. Created a profitable web event production and cut travel costs while improving productivity and responsiveness. 

Click Link to Read About The Food Group

My Evaluation of Using Webinars for Marketing Purposes 

Overall, Webinars from my perspective is a low-cost marketing tool that can be used for any company to create a format for training sessions and to share information. Companies have created webinar tools like WebEx and Connect Pro to help make it convenient and cost effective to do webinars. Its a great tool because this platform has the ability to gather an audience in a seminar-type format without anyone needing to travel. Another benefit would be that the audience can ask questions any time during the webinar and get answers immediately. It aligns with marketing objectives because companies use webinars as a strategy to build a audience and to be niche and specific. This  can also be an effective measurable tool, especially if the webinar is popular; it can accumulate a large amount of data to reach the target audience. In conclusion, webinars are a useful tool to use because it has an interactive approach for learning and collaboration. 

What Are Your thoughts? 

After reading this post, what do you think? Are webinars an effective digital technology tool for companies to use? Are webinars too costly and require a lot of planning and collaboration beforehand? Should companies use podcasts as their tool because it can be accessed many months after its been recorded and participants can listen to the file at their leisure. In conclusion, to wrap up this post, I'm going to leave the comment section open for discussion. Please stay tuned for my next blog post! 

Thanks !