Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Marketers Secret Weapon is Web Conferencing

By John Fillmore

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.

At no point in history more than now, perhaps, has the concept that "saving money is making money" more importance. Businesses in a struggling economy must do everything in their power to maximize every last marketing dollar if they are to stay alive. As a global marketplace, "features" of yesteryear-like toll-free telephone numbers-are no longer enough to keep a business competitive in the eyes of clients, associates, and customers (past, present, and future). For example, what about those meetings where telephoning just won't do because an audio/visual presentation (a hallmark of all successful web marketing) is in order? Whether it's the marketers traveling to deliver presentations or the target audience travelling to a meeting or conference in a specific location, the travel expenses saved by web conferencing alone is enormous.

And while web conferencing precludes travel costs, using PowerPoint presentations in conjunction with web conferencing precludes travel, materials (think of the savings on photocopying alone), and physical labor costs. Instead of lugging around a heavy easel, projector, screen, transparencies, and other supporting materials to all of those in-person meetings, they can instead plug their entire marketing message into a clean, compelling, and classy PowerPoint presentation they can take conference members through remotely, any time of day or night. PowerPoint presentations can help you deliver your message with maximum effectiveness for a minimum of costs no matter what type of "gathering of minds" you are coordinating-whether business meetings or seminars, product unveilings or creative collaborations, PowerPoint presentations can replace many expensive and unwieldy, more "traditional" methods of delivering your marketing message. And web conferencing is the ideal medium for their delivery.

Web conferencing and PowerPoint Presentations both also save companies money in mailing costs. Now a marketer can deliver important documents, specs, software, and the like electronically, saving a ton not only on money but also on time. Sure, you can send your marketing materials to your leads and let them sort through it all if and when they can, or you can take them through it, step by step, pitch by pitch, when you deliver a live presentation using PowerPoint and web conferencing. That puts you in direct contact with your leads, able to read and respond to their reactions instantaneously, to answer their questions, manage their feedback, and-in the best of cases-close the deal! You can't do that in an envelope (even if that envelope does contain a disk with your presentation on it).

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 excels in all the areas that matter most-features, customer support, and price (to name just a few). As far as features go, HotConference allows you several levels of presentations you can give, catering the visible attributes and permissions each individual participant has enabled to the specific conference and the needs/desires/objectives of the moderator, presumably you. One of these attributes that HotConference offers is a Whiteboard that-much like real, physical, "Dry-Erase" board-you (and, if you choose, some or all of your participants) can draw and write on, then erase, and continue using anew as much as needed. Perhaps the most promising of HotConference's features, however, is private label branding, with which you can match the look and feel of your presentations and your web conferencing interface to match your existing corporate image, including logos, banners, slogans, color scheme, and more. Put all of this together and what you've got with web conferencing using PowerPoint presentations through HotConference is a powerful web marketing solution that is unmatched in affordability, convenience, and effectiveness. - 15431

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