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Webinar Recording: How Cisco Webex Improves Workplace Collaboration

AV Everywhere

During this webinar, Chris Hyslop of Scansource covers the many features of the new Cisco Webex platform, and how it provides an intuitive way to work through calling, meeting and team collaboration.  Chris goes through the collaboration suite and explains how they provide a consistent, feature-rich experience no matter what device you work on. His discussion covers:

  • Cisco Webex Meetings and its video-centric focus and improved interface
    • Stream events through Facebook Live
    • Virtual reality and augmented reality in medical care
  • Cisco Webex Teams and how it enables people to work from anywhere at anytime
    • Collaborate from a single platform through messaging, whiteboarding, calling and file sharing
    • Anyone can schedule, start, record, and mute others
    • New user interface
  • Cisco Webex board and its adaptability to different meeting spaces
    • Intelligent connectivity with personal devices
  • Cisco Webex Share for wireless content sharing

Get the recording for “How Cisco Webex Improves Workplace Collaboration” >

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Webinar Recording: The Right LED Video Technology for Your Applications

AV Everywhere

This webinar, presented by Commercial Integrator and TechDecisions with AVI-SPL and Christie Digital, includes an overview of Christie’s LED products and features, including:

  • Apex Generation 2 enhancements
  • CorePlus
  • Ease of install
  • Planning for power and HVAC
  • System-level certifications
  • Scan rates, refresh rates, brightness, contrast ratio
  • How Christie video walls and Christie Terra work together
  • Compositing, windowing, configuration, video switching
  • Which Christie product is right for your application

Experts from Christie and AVI-SPL also cover the history of the LED, and what end users want from their video walls.

Get the recording for “Understand the LED Video Technology That is Right for Your Applications” >

To view our Partner blog, click here

Webinar: Total Economic Impact of AVI-SPL’s Digital Workplace Solutions

AV Everywhere

During this event on Sept. 12, 2018 at 11 a.m. EST, guest speaker Jonathan Lipsitz of Forrester Consulting will discuss findings from a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of AVI-SPL of four companies and the measurable benefits they experienced working with AVI-SPL as their integrator and services provider. Those measured benefits include:

  • Productivity capture
  • Lower TCO
  • Greater meeting room use

Register for “The Total Economic Impact of AVI-SPL’s Digital Workplace Solutions” >

About the presenter
Jonathan Lipsitz is a consultant with Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) consulting practice. The TEI methodology focuses on measuring and communicating the value of IT and business decisions and solutions, as well as providing an ROI business case based on the costs, benefits, risk, and flexibility of investments.

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How to use webinars to drive engagement and increase pipeline

Best Practices

This Questions and Answers interview was originally published on b2bmarketing.net.

What are the common mistakes businesses make with webinars?

Mark: Companies tend to think of webinars simply as a top of funnel, lead generation tool. Their goal is to get as many names as possible. Many marketers don’t even care what happens during the live webinar, once they’ve acquired the leads they simply send them to sales and claim victory. That’s just outdated thinking.

The modern webinar is all about engagement. They’re multi-media, interactive experiences, where the goal is to get your audience members to take as many actions as possible which then provides you with actionable information about your prospects.

And this engagement model works across the entire buying cycle. Today, we see companies replacing static content like white papers, case studies and demo videos with interactive webinars. Just imagine letting your prospects hear directly from your best customers on a webinar? Now that’s an effective case study. Or replacing that canned demo with an interactive tour of your product? There are so many ways that webinar engagement can supercharge your marketing.

Do you think people underestimate the power of webinars?

Oh absolutely! In a time when we measure engagement by the click or mere seconds spent on a landing page or in an email, we have very few opportunities to have real human moments with our prospects. That used to be the role of sales but the modern buyer doesn’t want to engage with a salesperson. So what replaces that experience? That’s where webinars come in. What other chance do you get to be in front of your prospects for up to an hour at a time? An hour where you can not only present content to them but where you can also interact with them in meaningful ways. And this interaction is going to give you the insights you need to find and convert your best leads.

What do webinars mean for sales teams’ engagement with prospects?

Well, I feel for salespeople these days, their job isn’t getting any easier. Buyers are inundated with sales and marketing emails and prospecting calls which has resulted in them being numb to most sales methodologies.

Further, and I’m going to say something bold here, most salespeople are used to getting weak leads from their marketing teams. And I say that as a marketer. Let’s be honest, it’s true. Webinars however are the one marketing technology that can change that reality. Now you can capture every action that a prospect took in a webinar (questions asked, poll responses, survey data, content downloaded, etc.) and put that data into Salesforce, or other CRMs, for the salesperson to view before making contact. This enables them to continue a conversation as opposed to starting one. And that is a game changer.

How can you optimise interactivity in a webinar?

Well, I believe that webinar interactivity should be scripted right into your presentation. Just like you script your story and your slides, you should plan how you are going to interact with your audience. When I build a webinar, I always plan out a few polls to help fuel a good conversation with my audience. I will often script a few different spots in the webinar to take questions, not just wait till the end. Sometimes I build in gamification too. I also encourage the audience to live tweet, download content and click on CTAs. The point is, you should optimise your webinar to ensure your audience is involved and interacting with you and each other as much as possible. Increased engagement will lead to higher content retention and more importantly, it will provide you with more data for effective follow-up later.

Where is the ROI in webinars? What’s the business case?

Webinars have such a high ROI for such a small investment. The business case for webinars is that they enable you to quickly and cost-effectively engage with large numbers of your prospects in a real human way. Webinars are now where the selling happens. It’s where we find our best leads and how we convince them to become customers.

It kills me every time I talk to a company that is using a meeting or conferencing tool for their webinars because their IT department already had a contract in place. Don’t get me wrong, meeting tools are great… for meetings, but that are not optimised for webinars. The investment in true webinar marketing platform will likely have the highest return of anything in your marketing tech stack.

Webinars have clearly developed over the years. What do you think is the future of webinars?

There are two ways that I think webinars are evolving. The first is that the live experience is no longer the only goal. We’re now living in the on-demand economy, meaning people want to consume content on their own time, in their own way. Content needs to be always available and easily binge-able – and this goes for webinars too. We’re seeing many companies moving to the Netflix model, where they’re building on demand gateways or hubs where valuable webinars are made available for immediate viewing. These gateways are where you can archive webinars after the live event is over, to extend the life of that content. We also see companies building webinar content that’s produced straight for on demand without a live component. Webinar gateways are an effective way to get more people to the right content.

The other area I see the role of webinars changing is in personalisation. Account-based marketing programmes have become an incredibly important part of modern marketing strategies. We all want to be more targeted and we do that by offering a more personalised experience. But most ABM strategies focus on the targeting and not what happens once you make contact. We’re now seeing companies creating customised webinars that are created for specific accounts, industries or use cases, to add a higher level of engagement to their ABM programmes. That includes custom landing pages with targeted webinars as the primary content.

What do you think webinars do for brand image?

So much. In many cases, webinars are where your prospects first experience your brand – and not for a few seconds but for a long period of time. You have to think about your webinar console as if it’s a virtual lobby to your company. As I mentioned above, you should always customise your webinar consoles so when your prospects attend your events they feel enveloped by your brand. You can create a lot of stickiness to your brand imagery with such a long exposure if you do it right.

Can webinars allow you to understand your customers better?

Well, here lies the true magic of webinar engagement. The more you interact with your audience, the more you can learn about them. Webinars are where your prospects actually tell you what’s on their mind: their challenges, needs and interests. Their interactions with you (through polls, surveys, Q&A, chat, social, downloads etc) provide a much better picture of your prospects and customers than you can get with any other marketing technology. Marketers all want to be data driven and engagement is the only way to get the data that really matters. It’s simple maths: webinar engagement gives you the insights you need to convert prospects into customers.

Mark’s tips to achieving best practice in webinars

  1. When promoting your webinars, don’t keep sending the same email repeatedly. Mix up the message and mix up the email type. The same goes with social media, don’t tweet the same thing over and over again. If it didn’t work the first time, it probably won’t the second or third.
  2. Make sure your webinar console looks and feels like your brand. You have people staring at a fixed location for up to an hour, give them something to look at. Integrate your logo, top-line messaging, corporate imagery and colours. Make sure your webinars are a great reflection of your company.
  3. Dial up the engagement. As I said earlier, the more interactive your webinars are, the more actionable data you’ll get to qualify your leads and convert them into pipeline. Literally script engagement into your presentations by integrated polls, Q&A, gamification, etc. Your audience will appreciate it too.
  4. Play with the formats. Don’t treat all webinars as talking powerpoint presentations. Some of the best webinars I’ve seen lately didn’t even have slides, they were simply great discussions with interesting people. Try panels, interviews, chat shows, and other formats to change the tone of your events. It will also take the pressure of your presenters. Instead of giving a ‘formal’ presentation, they can have conversations with each other and the audience, which is a better experience for everybody.
  5. Have an on-demand strategy. According to our recent Webinar Benchmarks Report, 35% of people who view webinars will watch on demand – not live. If your webinars only exist as a moment in time, then you’re losing up to a third or more of your potential audience.

 

The post How to use webinars to drive engagement and increase pipeline appeared first on ON24.

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How Webinars are Reshaping Continuing Education

Best Practices

According to a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, 92 million adults in the United States are enrolled in some type of educational program and nearly two-thirds of them are taking a work-related course.  As so many things are in today’s society, many of these courses are available online, which means attending lessons and meeting the demands of your career without leaving the comfort of your home.

And that is a good thing — continuing education is a requirement and a necessity for professional development as well as to remain at the top of the field.

As an Early Learning Multimedia Manager for the Southwestern Child Development Commission Inc., I’m tasked with facilitating high-quality learning experiences in a variety of formats to the men and women who aspire to teach and renew credits. Thanks to webinars, the majority of our courses alleviate the need to be in a specific place at a set time and date.

Utilization of webinars in our continuing education program has removed many of the traditional barriers seen in the past, such as challenging work schedules, traffic and difficulty traveling, family obligations and other commitments. Webinars also may be more economical for some learners because they do not incur any travel, meal, babysitting or other expenses on the day of the class. They also help us offset the travel costs for our instructors, such as mileage and any overnight accommodations, if necessary, as well as providing copies and other materials used during face-to-face learning events.

We strive to keep our webinars engaging for our customers as we would a face-to-face event through a variety of different activities embedded into the event and utilization of adult learning techniques.  We strongly believe customers should be active participants in the learning process. We aim to create events that fully engage all types of learning styles through the use of audio, visual, kinesthetic, and social interactions.

For distance learning, we follow a particular process. Each distance learning event is peer-reviewed and offers continuing education credit.  We complete a series of forms and each has a syllabus and outline that is kept on file.  We also document the relevance of each topic for the field through a needs assessment — this is based on request — survey results, end of course evaluations, or through local/state/federal requirements.  All of our learning events are designed to meet best practices, impart practical, useful knowledge which can be applied immediately.

If your organization uses webinars for continuing education, or even internal training, it helps to follow a proven formula. To that end, here is a brief checklist to keep in mind when establishing and maintaining a continuing education curriculum:

  • Specify an overarching goal for your lessons (e.g., earned credits or certificates) and break down what professionals will need to know to earn that goal
  • Draft each of your lessons
  • Send your lessons for peer-review (this can be a peer or superior from your company or a consultant)
  • Refine based on feedback and publish your series
  • Within your series, incorporate polls and surveys on topic relevancy
  • Include an end-of-course evaluation
  • Assess feedback and incorporate for your next course iteration

The post How Webinars are Reshaping Continuing Education appeared first on ON24.

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Webinar: How Cisco Webex Teams Improves Workplace Collaboration

AV Everywhere

Teamwork isn’t just about meetings. It’s also about the ability to provide a more intuitive collaboration experience. Join AVI-SPL and Cisco on Wed., August 22 at 1 p.m. EST for the webinar “How Webex Teams Improves Workplace Collaboration.” Chris Hyslop of Cisco will explain how Cisco Webex Teams can enable customers to achieve their business outcomes by providing a superior experience that allows workers to collaborate more effectively.

You’ll learn how to have meaningful face-to-face connections with your teammates; work from anywhere, anytime, on any device; integrate with other workflow business tools to connect to the apps you use; and share files and content to be accessed anytime. And you’ll understand why Cisco Webex teams is the all-in-one space where you can message, create, share and get work done together.

Register for “How Webex Teams Improves Workplace Collaboration” >

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