Good day Darlene,
This is an intersting question.
Generally, businesses be it online or offline particularly service oriented businesses, involves one standing in front of a group of prospects with the opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. This indeed is one of the best lead conversion opportunities. Holding Workshops and seminars live and in person has long been an effective tool.
Having an online seminar to train my affiliate would be a powerful tool and more affordable as it allows one to conduct online versions of seminars that do not require one to rent a room or involving my team members or prospects to leave their homes and offices.
Also, setting up an Online seminar with my team members or prospect will now depend on the mode of communucation for the online seminar to be effective. We can decide we have such seminar on Skype, Whatsapp etc an te tie so that everyone is actively involved . Regardless of the online social media application to be used, it has to be agreed upon you and your team members before planning for the seminar.
Once we have agreed on the form of social media to be used and time, we as Sponsors would organise a short video's educating them on SFI and Tripleclicks products with room for questions to be asked and referral to my personal website if need be. I try as much as possible to make it interactive for each team member to be carried along and further questions channeled via email.
Some tips for successful online seminars are as follows:-
1. Get sponsored:-Before you go too far down the seminar path consider getting your upline involved or your Sponsor to join you. This doesn’t have to be some big names in SFI, give strategic partners the opportunity to join you in promoting your educational sessions for the right to call themselves a sponsor. At the end of the seminar, we can offer some incentives for sign ups. Having this in mind, free stuff drives enrollment.
2. Educate, don’t sell:- Make certain that your “free” session is packed with content so good people would pay for it. That’s the expectation these days.
If you create seminars that are basically veiled sales presentations, you won’t reap the benefits of this expertise play and people won’t come back or tell friends about your great seminars. There’s a time and place for the sales pitch, but only after you’ve established trust through sharing valuable information. People are OK with a “here’s the sales pitch” at the end of a presentation that was time well spent. Consider creating a series of events and promoting them together. This can help build momentum and allow you to build a loyal following.
3. Pick your platform:- There are dozens of online platforms for hosting your web seminars but choose your platform with some considerations in mind.
i) Free may not be the best option if you are using this tactic to demonstrate how professional your business is.
ii) Look for a tool that offers some interaction tools such as polling, questions, chat, even video.
iii) Make sure your chosen tool can handle the numbers you plan to enroll.
iv) Be certain you can easily record your sessions for future marketing use.
v) Look for ease of use and follow-up reminder email automation.
4) Cause interaction:- Use the functionality of your online webinar tool to get the audience involved. Polls are a great way to take the temperature of your audience and the results can make for both interesting discussion during your session and follow-up discussion in another form of content such as a blog post. With small groups you may want to allow video or audio chat, but it’s always a good idea to take questions from the attendees. Most platforms
also allow you to conduct a survey at some point in your presentation. This is a nice way to end a presentation to get feedback from the audience and even let them vote on other topics they would like to hear in the future.
5) Create a backchannel:- Lots of people attend webinars these days and share information they hear with their followers on Twitter. It’s become common practice to create a hashtag for your events so people who attend
or those that don’t have an easy way to collect all of the comments made by listeners. Some presenters go as far as having an assistant monitor and tweet during the presentation to keep the conversation lively and accurate. This free PowerPoint Twitter Tool allows you to create tweets and have them posted automatically during your presentation.
6) Have bonus content:- Because there is so much free information out there online the expectations for what you provide as free package have grown. In
addition to the event itself consider creating a PDF workbook or collection of blog posts from yourself, related bloggers or strategic partners and delivering that document along with your follow-up. This gives you another reason to reach out and remind your attendees about the great content and gently about the products and services you offer.
7) Promote the archive:- Use your chosen platform to record your presentation. Upload your recorded session to a video host such as Vimeo or YouTube and embed the video in a web page surrounded by additional
resources and further reading links related to the topic. This is a great way to use the session for future marketing efforts and create the kind of page and content that search engines love. Consider using a service like CastingWords to transcribe the session, combine three or four session with video, transcript, resources and your collection of blog post PDF and you’ve just
created a product that you can sell. Handling all the moving parts of setting up, promoting, running and archiving live events can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but the long term payoff in terms of expertise, content, and trust building is worth every bit of it.
Hope this information is useful.
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