Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Marketers Secret Weapon is Web Conferencing

By Brian Farley

Successful web marketers are slaughtering their competitors by using private label branded web conferencing systems in conjunction with PowerPoint presentations. By themselves, web conferencing and PowerPoint Presentations are each web marketing gold, but when they're used in combination with one another, they save marketers exponentially more in time and money, while maximizing the effectiveness of all their marketing campaigns.

The tools web marketers used in the past--Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad campaigns, telephone conference calling, elaborate Help Centers with FAQs, searchable Knowledge Bases, and toll-free telephone numbers--are no longer enough to provide your customers and colleagues (existing and prospective) the kind of services and savings they require in order to do business with you. Suppose the meeting or conference (as most marketing-oriented meetings and conferences do these days) merits inclusion of an audio-visual presentation. A teleconference will do no good then. But (until recently) that only left one other option--quite possibly one of the most significant expenses in any company's budget: travel expenses. And as travel costs continue to rise astronomically in an increasingly uncertain economic climate and in-person conferences become increasingly cost-prohibitive for all parties involved, alternatives to in-person conferences are vital to a modern business's very survival. Teleconferencing, which does at least allow for remote meeting, still is certainly no solution, and not only because of the potential costs incurred by marketer and target market alike. Where teleconferences also fail is in suffering an irreconcilable absence of any visual component.

And here is where PowerPoint presentations come in. Because when your marketing messages are packaged as PowerPoint presentations and presented live, in real-time via web conferencing, then you save money on phone bills and travel expenses (for both you and your colleagues, clients, and customers), as well the costs of all those bulky physical presentation materials (from photo-copies and transparencies to projectors and screens) while still being able to "deliver the good"--the goods being: your expertly packaged and presented marketing message.

Another cost-savings that both web conferencing and PowerPoint presentations provide is in mailing/shipping expenses. Whether you're sending out direct mailings to masses of people or individual marketing packages to select VIP prospects , you're wasting a lot of money unnecessarily when you can offer the same marketing presentation--only live , with you present to guide your prospects every step of the way--by delivering the presentation or pitch as a PowerPoint presentation over live web conferencing. One huge marketing hurdle this helps overcome (beyond just the costs of creating and mailing all those physical marketing materials) is the possibility that prospect won't even read what you send them, but rather throw it in the trash (or, if they do read it, throw it out after they come across a point that needs more explaining).

What's even more incredible is that everything mentioned so far also casts light on another of the key reasons why the most successful internet marketers are crafting PowerPoint Presentations and delivering them via web conferencing as a key component of their marketing campaigns-that being its immense time-saving capacities.

The third and, perhaps most valuable, reason successful marketers use PowerPoint presentations and web conferencing together are their combined effect on any marketing campaigns performance. The sheer breadth of ways that you can use web conferencing to improve and enhance your business is staggering: Automated customer support; Live pre-sales contacts; Promoting big sales; Networking in live chat rooms; Recruiting affiliates, employees; Training new affiliates and employees; Community outreach; Courting venture capital.

And all of these functions can be integrated with PowerPoint Presentation to improve and enhance their quality, performance, and effectiveness. In fact, HotConference, provides desktop sharing, which makes presenting PowerPoint presentations (not to mention collaborating long-distance on their creation and development) even easier. HotConference offers the most versatile feature set in web conferencing, with tools like a Whiteboard on which you can write, draw, and erase at will in real time, and a variety of ways to incorporate that into your presentation, with 5 different 'levels' of Presentation for you, the moderator, to choose from. Another key feature HotConference provides (one alluded to briefly in this article's intro) is brand-ability-the ability to brand your HotConference web conferencing interface with your own company name, logo, banner, colors, and other branding elements. And as your PowerPoint presentations are no doubt similarly branded (and if they're not, they should be), this seamless integration of private label branding with your web conferencing delivery system only magnifies your overall impact.

HotConference not only beats the others on features, but on price as well, starting new users off with a one-month risk free trial. So while the most successful internet marketers are pummeling the competition, the most successful of them are using HotConference to do it.

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