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eztalksvideoconferencing-blog · 5 years

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What is a Webinar?

Webinar is generally interpreted as a seminar or other presentation that takes place on the Internet. The webinar definition is true, but actually, a webinar is more than that. Webinars provide a dynamic and interactive space for the participants to ask questions, respond to polls & surveys and get to know their webinar hosts on a personal level. They give the ability to interact, discuss, send and receive information in real time. When done correctly, it's a powerful tactic that can position you as an expert in your field, allow you to connect with your target audience, train new employees, as well as fuel business growth. Webinar seems to be a strategy to tick all the boxes.

1. Four Main Types of Webinars to Boost Your Business

It can be said that every field does webinars these days. But that does not mean the world is too saturated with them. Instead, webinars have become an essential ingredient in today's world. You've probably been hearing a lot about webinar while have you ever heard that you can get twice the result with half the effort if you can use the right webinar type. Just at this moment, you may come up with a question- how many webinar types are there? Generally, webinars are divided into four types, including Live Webinar, Automated Webinar, On-demand Webinar and Paid Webinar.

Before we jump right into things, let's make sure everyone is on the same page about the definition of each webinar type.

1) Live Webinar

A live webinar is a live seminar conducted online that is hosted by the organizer with attendees to join in a virtual room to watch and listen to the presentation. Live Webinar means real-time interaction. It allows participants in different locations to see and hear what information the presenter is delivering and interact by sending instant messages, answering polls and voting, sharing a screen or whiteboard and so on. A live webinar is more than a webinar, but the way to engage others with various video conferencing tools simultaneously.

2) Automated Webinar

Simply put, an automated webinar is a webinar that is prerecorded and live simulated so that you can host anytime with minimal resources. It means that you can be more leveraged and free as the webinar you uploaded will start at the scheduled time automatically that you set in advance. Then you are in a position to take all the time you need to create the perfect webinar before you decide to upload it for the mass. It is possible to edit the best shots from multiple versions so you get the most impressive version. Obviously, this would be impossible to do live.

3) On-Demand Webinar

What if some of your audience couldn't attend on time? What if they missed it because of their work hours, or because they live in a different time zone? No worries! On-demand webinars unlock a fast & easy way to ensure that your valuable webinars can be seen at any time, anywhere. Never again lose viewers because of timing issues. The same content can be used over and over again, even with new viewers.

4) Free/Paid Webinar

Free webinars offers you opportunity to let the audience join the event at no cost, particularly great for leading generation and building brand awareness. Till now, webinar is not only a free channel to reach, educate and engage your audience, but also proves to be extremely profitable ventures and even work as part of a larger sales funnel. Paid webinars, on the other hand, are webinars where your audience pays to participate. They're not primarily for sales but to actually teach a valuable skill or provide in-depth information that you usually fail to get from free webinars.

As time goes by, people's needs constantly keep growing. Then, Webinar Series feature has been adopted in some webinar software and supported by plenty of users who want to host a series of webinars but reduce the complicity of registration process.

Webinar Series

Webinar Series can run on pre-recorded webinars or live ones. Have you ever met with the situation that you need to host a webinar containing several parts which are coherent? Fortunately, a series webinar can be compose of multiple webinars. Basically, it is a set of multiple live webinars, multiple automated webinars, or a combination of both. It is able to create a webinar series for no matter online courses, marketing events or other activities, which can be scheduled at multiple dates and times. But only a one-time registration is needed for all webinars in the series. The simplicity appeals to more hosts as well as the audiences.

All the webinar formats are interconnected. For example, the live webinar that has been recorded can be edited to the best and transformed into an automated webinar or on-demand webinar. For another example, the combination of paid webinar and automated webinar makes you get revenue around the clock even you're absent when the webinar is running. You can test and see which formula works the best for you. Luckily, currently, some webinar platforms like ezTalks Webinar, supports all the webinar types mentioned above.

2. Elements of a Webinar

There are certain elements that you should map out in your webinar that you may want to start from scratch. Regardless of what kind of webinar you are going to conduct, it must have the following vital elements:

1) Equipment

a) Device. Any webinar should run with the help of a device like a PC, a Mac or an Android/iOS mobile device. Nowadays, you can also do it with one of the video conferencing devices launched by some brands like ezTalks. It proudly published some all-in-one devices integrated with everything you need for webinar hosting.

b) Headsets. The organizer and all presenters will need headsets- telephone headsets if your webinar tool supports a phone bridge, or computer headsets if your tool supports integrated web audio.

c) Microphone. You can rely on the built-in microphones in your laptop or desktop computer or use external mics. To achieve the best audio performance, you should equip yourself with a high-quality speakerphone.

d) A power cord. No matter what device you're using for a webinar, you need to ensure that the meeting won't be interrupted owing to being out of power.

e) Network connection. The network connection plays a critical role in hosting/joining a webinar. The more stable and faster network connection you get, the more seamless communication can be achieved and guaranteed.

2) Roles

There are multiple roles available for a webinar: host, panelist, presenters and attendees.

a) The host. The host of the webinar is the user who the webinar is scheduled under. The host has the complete permissions to manage the webinar, panelists, presenters and attendees and all of its settings.

b) The panelists. The panelist is like a guest speaker of a webinar who can view and turn on video/audio. What other features are available to the panelists depend on the webinar platforms that you choose.

c) The presenters. The presenter is a person who introduces the contents and conveys the information in a particular virtual event.

d) The participants. The participants are view-only attendees. They can interact with the host and the panelists through the text chat or Q&A as long as the chosen webinar platform supports.

3) Webinar Solutions

A webinar solution must be an indispensable element in a webinar. Whether you're a business, an organization, a start-up, or an individual- you want to find the right webinar solution that can cover your needs. The tools like screen sharing, whiteboard, polls & survey and etc. provided by the webinar solutions contribute to a successful and coherent webinar. Only with the right webinar tools, can you engage your audience and create a meaningful connection with webinar participants. So, it's important to choose carefully. But how to find the best for your own needs? Click here for further reading.

4) Content

Every webinar definitely contains content. It is totally impossible that no content is available in an online presentation. Actually, what content you will present depends on your ideas. No matter how good the webinar software you use, if the content you prepare is dryasdust, it still fails to make for a successful webinar. This is a branch of learning- you should know who would attend, and then deliver information that they want. It's nice if you can be entertaining along the way, but what's really vital is to deliver valuable information that people want and make it woven into your webinar content.

3. Status Quo of Webinar Hosting

Webinar has been around for years- but, far from being yesterday's news, it seems its popularity is still on the rise. A quick search on Google Trends reveals that the search term ‘webinar’ has steadily and inexorably grown from 2004 to the present day.

According to the overwhelming majority of the reports, when it comes to captivating your audience, professionals find videos, webinars and interactive content come to be the most engaging content types. These types of content are entertaining and created with the aim to keep the audience's interest. Instead, the least engaging forms of content are merely static and text-based- ebooks/white papers, blogs and press releases. As can be seen, webinars that can embed the videos and interactive content must enjoy a promising market prospect.

As we know, webinars work across industries. But what industries produce the most webinars? ezTalks has run the webinar services for quite a long time. Webinar data below are from the most recent 1000 among thousands of webinars hosted with ezTalks. According to the data we have gotten from ezTalks Webinar's users since its webinar service is launched, 43% of users host webinars to improve training and online learning retention, covering the largest portion. The following is that 29% of the users regard webinars as the way to engage a large remote audience for corporate communication. It is equally important that 28% of the users interviewed use webinars for marketing. Additionally, a survey by MarketingProfs found that 70% of marketers view webinars as effective or very effective at generating qualified leads.

For further analysis, there are three use cases that come up the most frequently- marketing, training and continuing education- and many organizations carry out all three. The vast majority of respondents using webinars for marketing run more than 100 webinars in the last year, with up to 86%. While 80% of the organizations, institutions or individuals providing training webinars produce up to 100 webinars in the last year. All these present the great popularity of webinar hosting, especially in the marketing, training/online education and communication sectors.

4. Webinar Trends

2018 saw the continued growth of webinars as an integral part especially in the B2B marketing mix and a regular online communication tool for the modern business. 2019 promises to be an even bigger year with trends already sprouting up amongst leading webinar platforms. From an increased focus on personalization to emphasis on data and experience, there will be a wide range of trends to keep an eye on. Here are the major trends that require your attention:

a) Webinars as part of a larger marketing funnel.

Marketers commonly regard webinars as an extremely effective piece of top-of-funnel content, and a great way to generate lists of highly motivated and engaged prospects. The webinars are designed to move people through the entire customer lifecycle – from unaware prospect to a loyal customer. It is predicted that we'll continue to see marketers incorporating webinars into larger marketing efforts across more and more multiple platforms.

b) Inbound marketing to attract targets.

Attracting an audience is often a big challenge for webinar creators. More audiences mean more opportunities. We predict that new creators will become savvier about this in 2019, utilizing inbound marketing techniques that include email, webinar content marketing, social media and more to generate buzz around your own webinar hosting.

c) Webinars as an internal training tool.

According to the famous Webinar Benchmarks Report 2019, 89% of those offering webinar-based training say they can easily grow their programs. 96% of those who have been investigated and used webinars for training plan to increase the number of webinars they produce in the next 12 months. More and more people have been catching on for some time to the fact that using webinars for online training is both effectively and efficiently- and for less money, too. As online learning grows in acceptability, it is possible that even more conservative industries will start implementing webinars to train large groups of employees around the world or more organizations and institutions use them for online education to improve their skills.

d) On-demand is a must.

With the faster and faster pace of modern life, people may be quite busy with their task at hand. Consequently, though they are eager to join the webinar and get access to the information they need, they still fail to do that for having no time. There is no doubt that your audience decides what they view, but especially when they view something. Then, by making your presentation available on-demand, you can use webinar elements to continue to collect valuable data and satisfy those audiences.

e) Simple but safe.

Registering for each webinar must be as simple as possible, but safe and compliant with the GDPR law, a piece of EU legislation. What the people still strive to do is make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Besides, according to the study conducted by Blue Research, four out of five, or 86% of users feel bothered when they’re prompted to create new accounts on each website, and this percentage is growing over the years. That is to say, the easier the webinar registration process is, the more audiences will join the event.

Most of all, it can be predicted that webinars will still thrive and continue to be a preferred method of connecting with audiences well into 2019 and beyond.

5. Brief Summary

In an extremely noisy and fast-paced world, people pursue efficiency and effectiveness, so only the best way to achieve your goal will stand out. However, webinars should act as both the tip of the spear in breaking through such noise, and as a medium that keeps your goal going, no matter in the past, at present or in the future. Hope you can better know about the webinar meaning after reading “what is a webinar” and put the theory into practice to achieve your goals!

#eztalks webinar #what is a webinar #webinar software #webinar online free

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julianrphotography · 6 years

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Anatomy of a Viral Picture and how it can help Client's ROI

In today’s world being famous on Social Media can imply swimming in a pool of cash. As incredible as this could sound, having a keen sense of how the Social Media world works can translate to business success and an increase in sales.

As Photographer I have a very interesting position, because I have to create very artistic images that at the same time drive sales for my clients. It is not an easy task and surely it doesn’t have a straightforward recipe to follow.

In this post, I want to give you a few tips and a very specific case as example on how to make your images have incredible traction on Instagram which will translate into benefits for your clients.

The case is my latest image on Instagram.

I created this image for my client Red Carter Swimwear. The brief is clear, create images that sell a lifestyle of Caribbean feel; we want the potential buyers to feel jealous of this girl who is probably in a remote island having tons of fun in the most beautiful bikini, “living the life” you would say. All those ideas are what we try to convey.

Let’s relate that to the viral situation.

Virality is a little more systematic nowadays, it’s not necessarily related to an incredible feat that no-one has done before (although it helps), but rather several elements that, when used together, they generate buzz.

Timing. The timing is crucial to generate a conversation about my image. If I share my latest work on a Friday at 9pm, probably not many people will see it; my audience is probably out having fun, or doing something that’s not related with what I do. However, if you are a night club, by all means this would be a fantastic time to try and attract your target audience. CURIOUS FACT: When I posted this image, I was already a little late for my audience’s schedule. I thought it wouldn’t have that much traction because at mid morning my clients are working and just starting to think about lunch. Lunch will be a better time for them to see my post. In this case it actually worked, so randomness plays in our favor sometimes.

Engagement. Getting a million likes sure it’s a phenomenal thing, but to be honest, clicking the heart button is much easier than thinking about a comment and posting it. Having comments in your post, means that your audience really see an extra value to what you are doing and they are going the extra mile to let you know. Engagement is an element that the algorithm will evaluate to give your post a boost.

Hashtags. Not any hashtags but meaningful hashtags. Yes, instacool, fun, sun and beach work; however, go beyond and think where your target audience is, what kind of clients do you want to attract and how are they searching to find you. Swimwear Photographer is one that I used, but also Wilhelmina Artists because they represent me, Miami because that’s where Swim Show is taking place. This last one is crucial, because at this time of the year, there will be lots of people/brands attending the Swim Show and being at the top of the hashtag trend could translate into many potential clients seeing your work, or potential buyers seeing your merchandise.

Piggyback on National/Local events. Along with timing of the day or day of the week, this is an aspect I thought about when planning my posts for the week. This year, Swim Show is from July 14th through the 17th. Many brands will attend, many people will create images for those brands and many people will be seeing all of that and buying their merchandise. If you are careful, you can use that to boost your work. In my case I have clients who come during this time of the year and hire me to shoot their Advertising Campaign or Cookbook for their new collection. Also, by posting during this week, I will post images from previous jobs so that those clients who haven’t worked with me can see what I’ve done for other people and realize they should work with me.

Finally a little bit of luck. As I mentioned before, there is no straightforward formula that you can use to make each post go viral. There are many things that have to align in order for it to happen and luck helps a little bit. I know I’m posting curated content, quality content, content that is relevant to my potential clients and existing clients; but in the end, after using every single trick will not assure me virality.

How can this lucky moment help my business and my existing clients?

Some of the benefits that such a situation will bring is the expansion of my name and my work; this is a dream for any content creator because that means I will earn followers, my work will be shown to a lot of new people, some of which are potential clients and most will be a new audience.

My name will establish even more as a leader in my niche and will get stronger when I present myself to a potential client.

My actual client will get indirect benefits because I did the job for them, I am sharing it to my own audience which is comprised of people who are not necessarily buyers of the brand. They will see who my client is and they will check their profile, this can translate into new purchases to them, so the increases the ROI of hiring me to do their jobs.

To Potential Clients it will impress them to learn that hiring me means:

They are dealing with a Traditional Professional who knows what he’s doing and how needs to be done. Someone who understands their business needs and how to solve those needs through imagery.

An artist who is represented by one of the Top Agencies in the USA. That will give them peace of mind in regards to the quality they will be getting and that each dollar will be an investment to the brand rather than an expense.

The possibility to reach a greater audience since I will publish some of the work in my feed. In my own end I have a large following and a diverse audience who are indirectly, potential clients to the brand.

The fact that my images have some kind of vitality, that means the possibility of reaching an unknown number of potential clients.

The fact that I’m posting my client’s work in my own feed and having my following see it and interact with it, is something that clients are looking for nowadays.

Numbers

* At the time of this article’s publication, the image had 1,795 likes and 21 comments. and it keeps growing.

It is number 1 in the #swimshow, which has 12.1k posts

It is number 1 in the #wilhelminaartists, which has 1,450 posts

It is number 4 in the #redcarter, which has 3,457 posts

It is in the top 20 in the #photoproduction, which has 40k posts

#viral #ROI #Clients

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iat313allaroundyou-blog · 8 years

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Project Deliverable #2 Bible

1.Premise and purpose

The premise of the project is about telling audiences don’t judge a book by its cover as well as don’t judge a person by his/her looking, sometimes the really horror, bad person is covered by another person that he/she may has some weird actions. But this weird guy may be a kind person, people always considered things with stereotype so that ignore other details. For example, in our comic, is about a young male student Allan moves into a house with his crush, Rose together. The house is located at remote place. However, Allen starts to notice some weird things happened in the house such as other roommates suddenly disappear. Moreover, Allan wants to investigate all the incidents happened in the house. The landlord George stars misunderstood by Allan because of his weird actions and this strange conditions to rent his house. The purpose of our project is for dark entertain—horror comic, also have some meaningful points for people to learn through this comic.

2.Audience and market :

Our target audiences’ ages are between 18 to 25 year-old, we are aiming to younger age who are interested in horror and suspense topic. Our audiences’ age limit is 14A – 14 Accompaniment, which means that persons under 14 years of age must accompanied by an adult. Since there has a huge group of people who like to watch horror movie but sometimes the ending is anticlimactic or unsatisfactory. Our project can let the audiences standing as a character’s point of view to make a decision which will affect the ending. The ending is not having only one but have different endings due to what the audiences have chosen. Nowadays, people using a lot of technology, such as iPad, iPhone or laptop, our project also included some interactions so when the audiences are reading our comic can also get participation to it. However, the attraction of our comic is that the audiences can engage into the story deeper since they can decides how the story will end.

3.Medium, platform and genre :

Our work is a storyline comic, which is being made for the interactive comic, and technological devices such as smartphone, ipad, or ipod...etc. We will use image of drawing to present the content of the story. The limitation of this medium are the users can only using mouse click or tapping on the touchscreen to interact with our comic. The advantages of this is very easy to understand and quickly to operate. Due to the easy-understanding, users will focus on the story more and won’t take too much time on how to interact with the comic. The main platform of our comic will be on PC or smartphone or ipad. The game genre is role-playing which the user will being the main character through the whole game.

4.Narrative / gaming elements

Our project contains narrative elements. The plot of the comic is the protagonist Allan moves into a house with his crush, Rose together. The house is located at remote place where However, Allen starts to notice some weird things happened in the house such as other roommates suddenly disappear. Moreover, Allan wants to investigate all the incidents happened in the house. while his investigation Allan discover that both Ben and George have weird behaviour and the terrible truth is waited to be discovered. We may have 2 different endings, one is everyone dies no one discovers the truth, the landlord keeps renting his house to other people to be the next victims. And the other one is the protagonist is the survivor and both Ben and George are found guilty. It can be a surprise reverse ending for the readers. Our tone of the comic is about dark, scary, horror and mysterious.

5. User’s role and POV:

Allan, a male student, is the main character in this interactive setting. There are 2 different outcomes at the end based on user’s choice for Allan. The POV will be based on the first person’s view. We will provide sufficient information for the audience to determine who is the murder in the story. The story will two different endings, both good and bad. For the good, the actual murder will be found and arrested. The protagonist is the survivor and both Ben and George are found guilty. However, for the bad ending, it is still a mystery of who is the real murder. Everyone dies no one discovers the truth, the landlord keeps renting his house to other people to be the next victims. The user will be in his or her own nature to choose the outcomes.

6. Characters:

There are 5 nonplayer characters in this project. Ben, the murder, has terrible burns on his body (60%) and a little not obvious burns on his face in an accident. He is a makeup artist, he is trying to kill people to get their beautiful skin as a kind of collection (use as makeup products or make a mat in his room). George, the landlord with weird actions would be misunderstood by others. He has some strange restrictions of renting his house such as age limit, no more than 25, etc. Regardless of these creepy conditions, there are still some students willing to rent here because of the cheap rent. The character of George is actually used to build confusion or disturbance for audience. Rose, Jessica and Monica, three tenants in the house are in fact the victims, who got murdered by Ben. For better clarification, we did build up a character bible to explain the role, background (function) and result of each of them.

7. Structure and interface:

As the audiences start to experience our story the character in the story will first appear in a house. Audiences will then use website to read our story by clicking on a specific area on the comic, which will lead the audience to different end points. There are two possible endings in the story. The first one would be everyone dies and no one discover the truth behind the story. The other ending would be the protagonist survive and both Ben and George are found guilty. The structure of the project is focusing on interactive linear storytelling, however, some memories and flashback might also be plugged into the story as well. The story allows audiences to have different options to choose from. When it comes to the time that audiences have to make decisions the comic will clearly shows options that audience can choose from in first person P.O.V. view. The entire story is made out of levels that audiences have to make a choice in order to read the content on next page and find out the ending. There are 3 modules that audience will experience throughout the story, which are “first appear in the house”, “discover the mystery in the house”, and finally “the truth behind all the incidents”. Moreover, we will use some words to indicate the area to navigate the audiences to click on to make the project more fluent.

8. Storyworld and sub-settings:

The main storyworld of the project is set in a house where everything starts. There will only few sub-setting when character has the flashback or memory in the scene and the school might also be the sub-setting because there might be school scene plugged in when characters are not at home. The environment of the school might look like the surrey campus and the lecture room as well. The people in the main storyworld will be neighbours to each other, and mostly students, however, the landlord(George) and one of the tenant(Ben), which will be the murderer in the story have weird actions and behaviors. The setting will be at the time of 2017, the house will be looked like an ordinary house that contains furniture, and rooms.

9.User Engagement:

Our project is trying to keep the user/audience engaged by creating a mysterious and horror environment and story plot.In our project for the most of time audiences know as much as the actors know. So that they will be curious about the situation or the plot that is about to happen. By creating such a tense atmosphere and curiosity, our project could keep getting their tension. The most important goal that user is trying to accomplish is figuring out who is the real killer and the aim that behinds she/he kills so many people. Watching a thriller story, audience always wants to know the ending. The part that will add tension to the experience is that the project we created provides with two possible criminal suspects, a weird landlord and a guy with burned skin. When user/audience feel both of them have possibility to kill people, they would pay attention to more detailed clues rather than having one obvious people who have intention and motivation to kill. Although we do not provide user with a reward or penalty, but they do have accomplishment when the ending is same as they inferred as they story goes on.

10.Overall Look and Sound

We will present our project on the form of animation by hand-drawing. As the final version is towards to comics, the project will be more in a fantasy environment comparing with filming in a realistic environment. Our project does not have any audio since it will be present on paper, but we will use shades, colors in contrast if necessary, facial expressions and different points of view etc to express character’s emotion and personal traits. Sounds sometimes help to create a more tense atmosphere, but black and white comics, which has no sound, could enable user to have more space to imagine and provide details that we as creators want to show.

#IATSFUIAT313siatproject

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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How to keep your marketing teams productive, remotely

30-second summary:

Digital marketing is hard to organize, even in perfect conditions. There are hundreds of micro-tasks involved which are hard to report and account for. It is incredibly hard to handle it all from home, where there are dozens of distractions to deal with.

Working from home will take some time adjusting. So take some time. It is a stressful time for everyone, don’t take extra stress by trying to be as productive as you used to be when working from home. Accepting change makes it easier to create a new normal.

With all of us having moved to working from home, we now have more meetings than we used to in the office. Those meetings can be very fast (10-15 minutes) but they are incredibly helpful for fighting loneliness and keeping the team in the loop.

With your marketing teams operating from home, you need to make sure news gets timely to them. And not just big company news. Your marketing teams needs to be aware of new leads coming in, clients leaving, unhappy customers, new partnerships, etc.

Coming up with new ways to measure quality and new goals may help you solve the dilemma of productivity. Make these metrics tangible enough, yet avoid setting too simplistic or basic goals.

With the global quarantine upon us, more and more marketing teams have found themselves working from home, away from a well-structured office working environment.

Digital marketing is hard to organize, even in perfect conditions. There are hundreds of micro-tasks involved which are hard to report and account for.

It is incredibly hard to handle it all from home, where there are dozens of distractions to deal with.

How to keep your marketing teams productive in the remote working environment? Here’s what we are doing:

1. Things are going to change

Your team’s working routine is going to be different. Many of your co-workers are locked at home with kids. There’s no way they will be able to work 3-4 hours straight, without an interruption.

Try not to force your office working routine on them, or yourself for that matter.

Accepting change makes it easier to create a new normal.

2. Daily micro-meetings help fight social isolation

One of the biggest challenges of remote working is social isolation which is also reinforced by the perceived absence of management. Your team may feel isolated and lost, so we made solving this issue a priority from the very start.

I used to treat meetings differently. I’d always make sure to have an agenda and keep things timed.

Nowadays, we make those meetings as relaxed and quick as possible. They are more for emotional sanity than productivity. Emails and tools help get things organized. But those quick meetings are for keeping the team together.

We keep a separate virtual room created for each team where we hold daily meetings, every day at the same time. I find that this daily schedule helps me personally to keep my day organized. At least I know that I have to wake up, dress up and be ready for my meeting every day at the same time.

This is my new normal, something to build my day around.

We would occasionally use UberConference for informal meetings and virtual parties to celebrate each other’s birthdays, get together for live game nights, etc.

Obviously, Uberconference is not your only option. There are several great platforms that are building enhanced remote working features to help businesses through the pandemic.

These include Nextiva’s “Cospace” and ClickMeeting’s 90-day trial extension. You will need to pick your own solution based on your budget and needs.

3. Internal communication should be more streamlined

From experience, in-house teams are operational even if there’s no effective communication channels in place. Somehow information gets through around one office making news and opportunities known across the teams.

When most or all team members move to work from home, communication becomes a real issue. This is especially crucial for marketing teams which should be deeply integrated into other departments.

Your marketing teams should be aware of cross-team operations and teams to be able to timely publicize the news or prepare for a looming reputation crisis. They need to have time to create content assets, schedule social media updates, prepare blogger outreach, etc.

With your marketing team operating from home, you need to make sure news gets timely to them. And not just big company news. Your marketing teams needs to be aware of new leads coming in, clients leaving, unhappy customers, new partnerships, etc.

A single tool may not be enough. You may want to create several communication channels making it harder to miss anything:

Set up a private blog and encourage different department managers to post updates from each department at least on a weekly basis. You can use a WordPress blog which can be made private (here’s how)

Set up an email list to send updates to all your employees (here’s an easy way to do that without involving your technical team)

Include your marketing teams into your project management platform you are using to monitor site development

Use Slack to organize cross-team communication (here’s a good tutorial on that)

That’s a lot to handle but if you make your whole company aware of the need to help your marketing efforts, you’ll find that it is quite doable.

4. New success metrics should be created

Here we are facing an interesting dilemma. You do want to make sure your marketing teams will continue working hard once they are free from your micro-management routine. But you also don’t want them to waste time creating detailed reports explaining what it is they were doing the whole day or week.

Coming up with new ways to measure quality and new goals may help you solve the dilemma. Make these metrics tangible enough, yet avoid setting too simplistic or basic goals. For example, word or follower count as the measures of content creation or social media marketing success won’t do.

Instead, try to set smarter goals.

For content creation, this could be TextOptimizer’s score that reflects semantic relevance and depth of content:

[Text Optimizer score combines lots of metrics, from word count to vocabulary diversity and semantic relevance of content to the target topic.]

For reputation management, this could be a notable daily brand mention. For a long time now we have been encouraging meaningful outbound marketing tactics by rewarding mentions and interactions instead of clicks or follower numbers.

Did your reputation or community team manage to hear back from a niche influencer or got a retweet from a micro-celebrity? This is enough of a success for us to celebrate.

For social media marketing, daily interactions are a good goal to set. Agorapulse is the social media management tool that makes tracking and reporting on interactions much easier with their Social Inbox tool:

[Agorapulse’s Social Inbox feature combines messages and mentions from across many brand-owned channels allowing you to interact back, label any mentions for further action and assign to different team members. Striving social inbox zero is a worthy daily goal for your team too!]

Conclusion

We are all going through weird and tough times now. Keeping sanity is key to surviving this global crisis and keeping your business afloat. The above tips come from personal experience. I am sure you have some advice to share too! Please post your tips in the comments or tweet them to @seosmarty.

The post How to keep your marketing teams productive, remotely appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/04/20/how-to-keep-your-marketing-teams-productive-remotely/

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