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Webinars are a content marketing channel that many small and mid-sized businesses fail to consider. It often seems as if the “big guys” – the Gartners, Accentures, and Forresters of this world – are the ones hosting webinars. However, any company of any size can host a successful webinar.

If the idea of hosting a webinar for your customers appeals to you, we’ve provided you with several best practices and ideas, which are below. We can also provide support, guidance, and marketing assistance to promote your webinar.

Webinars Are an Effective Lead Generation Tactic

Webinar is a term that combines “web” with “seminar.” Essentially, it’s a virtual seminar. It can be by invitation-only or open to the public. Companies typically require pre-registration for webinars and use the registration information they obtain for future marketing.

Webinars can be valuable lead-generation activities. According to The Content Marketing Institute, 64% of companies hosted at least one webinar last year. And 77% of marketers believe that webinars are an effective or highly effective lead generation channel.

Technology Needed to Host a Successful Webinar

Most business owners already have the technology needed to run a successful webinar. At a minimum, you will need:

• A stable internet connection
• A video conferencing platform, such as Zoom, Google Meet, or the many others available
• A landing page to promote your webinar
• An email system to automatically email attendees with information on how to join the event
• Presentation software, such as PowerPoint or Google Slides

Of course, you will need some added tools to promote your webinar, such as social media accounts, email marketing platforms, and possibly paid ads. But this is enough to get started.

Successful Webinars Begin With A Topic Closely Aligned With Customer Needs

Successful webinars take time to plan. Give yourself plenty of time to plan the topics, select and invite guest speakers, and promote the event. Look at your calendar now and select possible webinar dates at least 8 to 12 weeks in the future. Choose several dates and times in case the desired speakers are unavailable. Avoid scheduling a webinar close to major holidays or prime vacation time, such as the end of August. Businesspeople are less likely to attend online professional development events during such periods.

Once you’ve found a date, it’s time to consider the topic. This is where research pays off. Think about key questions your customers ask about your products, service, or industry. Search online to see what your competitors are talking about in this area, too. Talk to Dashboard about possible search engine optimization keyword phrases, which also correspond to what people search for online.

Determine your target audience. Who do you want to attract to your webinar? What do they want to learn?

From the confluence of audience pain points and customer needs, your unique area of expertise, and search engine data, you’ll be able to develop a great topic.

Craft a Compelling Headline

Since the headline is often the first (and only) item people glance at when looking at webinar information, spend considerable time crafting the best headline you can for your topic. Address the problem and promise a solution. Make it all about your customers and what they will learn from you!

Webinar Formats

Webinars do not have to be static presentations with PowerPoint on screen. They can take a wide variety of formats, including:

• Presentation
• Panel discussion
• Guest speaker (customer or expert in the industry)
• Success stories and case studies shared by customers
• Demonstrations of how to do something
• “Ask Me Anything” in which you answer customer questions
• Conference or live event streaming

Don’t be afraid to mix things up and add variety to the format. There are no hard and fast rules about how to structure a webinar. In fact, the more engaging you can make it for the audience, the better! But be sure to let the audience know what to expect in your marketing materials and promotional materials. If you are running an “Ask Me Anything,” for example, you’ll want to gather audience questions in advance or come up with ‘seed questions’ yourself in case audience participation is minimal.

Planning the Webinar

The hard work comes in the early stages of webinar planning. You will determine if a guest speaker or customer should be part of the panel, extend the invitation, and plan your presentation.

Even if you have several speakers, a presentation on the screen is always a good idea. Make sure you aren’t giving them a “Death By PowerPoint” experience; use your slides as if they were graphics, licensing eye-catching images or using the images you took yourself and adding only bullet points to capture key takeaways.

Promoting the Webinar

A full promotional plan for a webinar should consider that people need both frequent and timely updates to remind them to register as well as attend the webinar. Common tactical channels used for this include email marketing, especially automation set up from your email marketing tool that sends links to the webinar and reminders on a pre-set scheduled up to the day or even hour of the webinar. Both paid and organic social media promotions are also a great way to promote your webinar and generate signups for the events.

A good landing page can help you convert visitors from paid and organic promotions into attendees. We can help you create an effective landing page that shares just the right information and converts casual visitors into leads and signups for the event.

Practice Makes Perfect

Even if you are quite comfortable presenting to an audience, the presenters should conduct several practice sessions using the technology they plan to use on the day of the webinar. You’d be amazed at how many glitches pop up during practice sessions that you cannot anticipate. These “dry runs” will help you ensure smooth handoffs of the presentation among the speakers, easy transitions to demos, and ensure that everyone helping with the webinar knows their role and how to use the chosen technology.

After the Webinar: Now What?

Be sure to record your webinar in the cloud, if possible. Alert attendees that you are recording it. After the webinar, you can make the recording available on a landing page on your website that acts as a constant lead magnet, capturing more leads through a gated landing page that requires visitors to provide their email addresses to access the content.

Webinar transcripts are also a great way to get more mileage from the recording. Inexpensive transcription software is available, but you may also want someone to clean up the recording, identify speakers, and remove the pesky “ums” and “ahs” that end up in every conversation. There are many freelancers and virtual assistants available who can do this work for you inexpensively. The final transcript can be offered as yet another piece of content for your webinar.

What about getting some extra mileage from the ideas shared during the webinar? Consider each idea shared as a fresh topic for a blog post or social media post. Challenge yourself to get at least 3-4 additional content pieces from your webinar information!

Next Step: Speak with the Experts

Dashboard Interactive Marketing can help you plan the content and marketing of your webinar. From developing lists of the most sought-after and searched keyword phrases to building effective landing pages that convert visitors into leads, we can be your partner on the many marketing aspects of running a webinar. Contact us at 763-242-2454 to speak with a digital marketing expert if you are interested in hosting a webinar as a lead generation activity.

Perhaps your business has made it past the five year mark and is now happily generating revenue. Customers are pleased with your products or services. Growth is steady and strong, but you’d like to grow it even more. You’re doing all you know how to do to promote your business. Is it time to hire a marketing agency?

Dashboard Interactive Marketing works with small and medium-sized businesses that are serious about growth. Our typical customers are companies that have grown beyond the startup stage and now need to generate new and recurring revenues. We put together comprehensive digital marketing strategies and plans to achieve positive ROI — leads and sales — and use measurable, repeatable tactics.

But if your company is on the cusp of growing, moving from a handful of employees to dozens, and you’re wondering what it is like to work with a marketing agency, we understand. Marketing may not come naturally to you. It may be like a foreign language. SEO? B2B? B2C? Alphabet soup, right?

We’ve put together the following frequency asked questions that business owners often have when working with a digital marketing agency. We trust that they will be helpful to you. If you have additional questions, feel free to call us. We are happy to help.

Marketing Agency FAQs: What Business Owners Often Ask About Working with Agencies

Question: What is the difference between hiring a marketing agency and a marketing consultant or freelancer?

Answer: A marketing agency provides a team to work on your business’ marketing. This team includes a project manager or liaison who will be your point of contact with the company and numerous specialists to provide comprehensive support. Consultants usually help with only one aspect of marketing, such as creating the strategy or plan for your business. Freelancers often provide a single service, such as copywriting (a marketing writer who writes the text of ads, web pages, and other marketing materials), graphic design, search engine optimization, WordPress development, etc. Hiring freelancers can be tricky since you will act as the project manager and guide them to complete a marketing project. An agency takes the entire burden off of you, which is an advantage for a business owner with limited time.

Question: How do I know it’s time to hire an agency? Why can’t my nephew, cousin, or spouse handle our ads?

Answer: You’re welcome to work with your nephew, cousin, or spouse on your marketing. But you won’t get the same results as you could achieve when working with an agency. Unless your relative is already working in the digital marketing field, they may not be conversant in the latest techniques to obtain leads and sales. They may make mistakes that a seasoned marketer knows to avoid, resulting in missed opportunities and lost revenue. Working with an agency ensures faster time to ROI because the agency knows the right steps to take to achieve your goals.

Question: Why does the agency want to have a strategy session first? Why do they ask so many questions about my business?

Answer: Many marketing agencies work with a wide range of customers in a variety of industries (although some do specialize in specific types of marketing or industries, such as an SEO agency for medical offices, or a marketing agency that focuses only on e-commerce businesses). For agencies to help you obtain your lead and sales goals, they must know the background and history of your business, your target audience, your products and services, and the marketing steps you have taken to date to achieve your goal. They will also ask questions about your competitors. This information helps the team create the strategy to achieve your goals and select the right tactics, or marketing channels and methods, to reach the most potential customers.

Question: Do marketing agencies charge a retainer, like a lawyer? Or do you pay for the service, like a doctor’s office?

Answer: Each agency sets its own fee schedule, and there’s no industry standard. Most agencies will charge a ‘flat fee’ or a stated cost to write a marketing strategy and plan. Then there may be a monthly cost to run the marketing campaigns for you. Additional costs can include the fees charged by third party advertisers, such as the cost of running Google or Bing search ad campaigns, social media advertising campaigns, print campaigns, direct mail costs, or similar costs for the actual marketing tactic used to generate leads.

Question: How long will it take for me to see results from working with an agency?

Answer: That depends on the marketing activities that the agency has recommended for your business. Some tactics take more time to achieve measurable results than others. You should ask your agency for an estimate of when they expect to see a return. Dashboard Interactive is keenly focused on metrics, and we will provide you with detailed reports once your campaigns are active so that you can see precisely what has been done to achieve your goals, progress to date, and associated costs.

Dashboard Interactive Marketing

Dashboard Interactive Marketing has almost 20 years of digital marketing experience working with business owners just like you to achieve outstanding results. We provide website services, search engine optimization, local search marketing, digital advertising and marketing, social media management, content marketing, and much more to small and mid-sized businesses. We welcome your call and are happy to discuss your marketing needs. Call us at 763-242-2454.

In recent years it seems as if everything has become more expensive. From concert tickets to a gallon of milk, inflation is rampant. And it seems as if inflation is hitting the digital advertising arena, too.

If you think that your digital advertising budget doesn’t stretch quite as far as it used to, it is not your imagination. According to Search Engine Land, Google’s cost per click (CPC) rose 9% from 2023 – 2024.

What’s driving this increase? And how can small-business owners continue to generate leads from digital ads despite the increase?

Competition Drives Google PPC Pricing

Factors such as rising fuel and farm labor prices drive increases in the cost of a gallon of milk at the supermarket, but what drives the cost of Google ads? One word: competition.

Remember how Google’s digital ads work. When you create a Google advertising campaign, you place money in an account that works sort of like a checking account. Google Ads have a cost per click (CPC), but competitors bid on the actual cost per click in a virtual auction. The cost listed on the Google advertising portal is only the suggested bid. Advertisers can bid in any increment.

Keyword phrases in high demand often garner the highest CPC rates, with fierce competition driving up the costs for the coveted phrase. Curious about the most expensive keyword phrases? According to Wordstream, the following is a list of the top five most expensive CPC bids on Google:

Even if you’re not selling insurance or financial products, you may still feel the pinch as more small businesses eter the digital advertising arena. As a small-business owner, every dollar counts, and every dollar you spend on your advertising should produce leads and sales. How can you maximize your Google ad budget in this highly competitive environment?

The Best Digital Ad Campaigns Start With Strategy

One of the cornerstones of marketing is the reliance on strategy when competition heats up. A good strategy considers the marketplace, economic forces, demographics, products, prices, past promotions, and competitive activities. Based on this information, savvy digital marketers form their campaigns after finding areas where the competition may not be seeking new business or ways to differentiate a small business in new or unique ways from competitors.

Many small-business owners want to see immediate results, so they enact a digital advertising campaign without spending too much time, money, or attention on strategy. This is a mistake, in our opinion. Without taking the time to understand the marketplace and competition, for example, you may make simple mistakes in your approach to digital advertising that can take a long time to correct. And every mistake costs money — more money than ever before in today’s rising CPC costs.

Set Reasonable Goals — Crunch the Numbers

It’s also important to set reasonable goals based on metrics. What is the average value of a lead or sale for your company? How many leads and sales do you need to achieve to break even with your advertising campaign? We can help you assess how much to spend on a digital advertising campaign to achieve a profitable return on your investment.

Consider Less Expensive Keyword Phrases

While you may be out of luck if you sell insurance or loans, many small-business owners choose keyword phrases that are too general to describe their businesses and end up paying more for their CPC campaigns than they should. This is where having a digital strategy is vital. When you understand what your competitors are doing and saying, you can carve out a unique market niche and focus on that niche with fresh keyword phrases.

Check Geography and Focus on Local Markets

Google enables advterisers to specify the geography of their ads. If you sell only to a local or regional market, be sure to indicate this to limit the ad’s reach. Otherwise, you may be paying additionally for ads in markets where customers cannot avail themselves of your services, like a Minnesota restaurant accidentally advertising in Georgia.

Implement Landing Pages to Improve Conversion

Improving results from digital ad campaigns isn’t always about the clicks and keywords. Sometimes the targeting and keyword phrases are just fine, yet the campaign isn’t providing the desired ROI. If you do not have a dedicated landing page but instead send ad traffic to your website, consider creating one. Many studies show that dedicated pages for campaigns convert visitors better than general web pages.

Test, Test — Then Test again

Testing is an often overlooked yet critical component of successful digital advertising. Establish a baseline response rate and then test ad copy, images, landing pages, and keyword phrases against the baseline, improving what increases response rates and eliminating what doesn’t is essential to maximizing advertising budgets. The goal of testing digital ad campaigns is to find the right combination or formula for your business to achieve ROI.

Digital campaign testing isn’t one and done. It evolves over time. Expect to test your digital ads for a minimum of six months. It is better to continually test and refine every element of your digital campaigns to steadly improve response rates. Companies that successfully translate digital campaigns into dollars, in the form of leads and sales, are never satisfied with a single test. They are always trying to outperform their best metrics.

Work with a Google Certified Partner

We hope that this information has proven helpful to you. Dashboard Interactive Marketing is a Google-certified digital advertising agency focused on small business success. To maximize your digital ad campaign, please call us at 763-242-2454 for a complimentary consultation. We provide digital marketing strategies, campaigns, and Google, Bing, and social media pay-per-click advertising campaigns focused on your ROI.

In April 2024, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill to ban TikTok, the popular short video social media site. The bill was signed into legislation on April 23 stipulating that unless TikTok is sold to remove Chinese ownership it will no longer be available in the United States. In May, however, NPR reported that TikTok is suing the US ban in court, saying it violates the first amendment rights. This may take a long time to play out in the courts. It would be wise to look for alternatives now if you use TikTok to share video content.

TikTok, Home of the 15-Second Short Video

For those who are unfamiliar with the social media platform, TikTok favors ‘short form’ video content: short, 15-second videos. Users who watch one video find themselves drawn into more and more videos on the same topic as the platforms’ infamous algorithm serves up tailored content. What begins as a quick “let me look at this guy hammering a nail” becomes nonstop videos on DIY projects until users find themselves whiling away hours stuck like glue to the platform’s addictive interface.

TikTok Alternatives

If you have been uncomfortable with TikTok and the concerns aired by our elected officials during the discussions in the House, it may be time to find TikTok alternatives for your short video content. The following TikTok alternatives offer great places to share short videos that still share your marketing content with the right audience.

Instagram Reels

Instagram offers brands the opportunity to share photos and videos. Videos can be any length up to 90 seconds. The platform has a large and loyal base of 2.4 billion users worldwide, meaning it can reach an extraordinary number of people. Videos can also be shared across the other company owned by Meta, Facebook. This enables you to upload one video and achieve outstanding reach. The challenge, however, is that reels can sometimes be difficult to find on the platform, and they don’t have the same stickiness (ability to hold people like the TikTok algorithm) as TikTok. Still, Instagram reels offer one of the best alternatives to TikTok.

YouTube Shorts

YouTube is arguably the most popular video sharing platform in the world, attracting 2.7 billion users to 50 million videos each month. The company launched its Short feature in September 2020 to replace TikTok in India when the country banned the platform. Since then, it has expanded worldwide. Videos should be filmed vertically and may not exceed 60 seconds. They appear on a user’s home screen in a separate section based on YouTube’s recommendations. One of the benefits of using YouTube is its strong search engine features including the ability to tag videos with keywords. YouTube Shorts is another strong platform for short form video.

Snapchat Spotlight Videos

Around the same time YouTube launched Shorts in response to India’s ban of TikTok, Snapchat responded too, launching Snapchat Spotlight. Videos can be uploaded from your phone, but the platform seems to prioritize videos made with their proprietary Snapchat Camera and Creative Tools. If you market to a younger demographic, SnapChat Spotlight videos may be a great way to share short videos.

Is Video Marketing Right for Your Brand?

Many companies benefit from using videos as part of their social media marketing strategy. While you may think that video has to be about consumer products, business-to-business marketers also use video quite effectively to tell their product or brand stories. Additionally, content creators use videos to generate hits and clicks, and can make money from advertising, sponsorships, and affiliates.

From a strictly ads-based marketing strategy, Google’s videos seem to be doing well also and have easy-to-update templates to follow. They ARE video-based content for a brand, but get inserted into the addictive recommendation algorithms that the ‘social’ ads platforms enjoy.

Meta’s Facebook is ramping up to compete with TikTok. They’ve announced already that they will start using their own full screen player and vertical video will be a big part of it.

Instagram also has made some recent changes in how they are incentivising video creators, including making an attempt at protecting the original sources when videos are shared. Creator content can be monetized and is prioritized in the algorithms. It raises the bar on looking for influencer creators who can partner with your brand.

Lastly, AI will be a big part of video creation going forward. We’ll have to see how it plays out, as appropriate guardrails are not established.

If you’d like to explore videos as part of your digital marketing strategy, give Dashboard a call. Our social media strategist can give you a great plan that matches your company to the best platform – the place where your audience likes to get information.

We’re called Dashboard Internet Marketing, yet we’ve never talked to you about marketing dashboards before.

Today, we’re going to rectify that situation and show you how marketing dashboards can transform your campaign strategies.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s hop right in.

What Is a Marketing Dashboard?

A marketing dashboard is a form of data visualization for marketers. Data visualization tools transform raw data into pictures. If you work with an accounting program, for example, you may have a reports feature which enables you to output your revenue information into bar charts, pie charts, line graphs, and so on. That’s a form of data visualization.

Marketing dashboards take this to an amazing level by incorporating multiple data streams into one convenient dashboard. When we work on a digital marketing campaign for our customers, we may include multiple tactical channels: organic search, paid search advertising, social media marketing, social media advertising, email marketing, and so forth. A marketing dashboard takes in the data from all these feeds and transforms it into easy to understand, visual information.

Below are several examples of marketing dashboards and how they can be used.

Why Use Marketing Dashboards?

If you’ve ever peeked under the hood and looked at just your Google data, you know that it can feel overwhelming to find even the smallest piece of information to help you understand what’s working or what’s not to drive traffic to your site. Although Google includes plentiful data in their free reporting tools, it’s hard to understand.

Now imagine running three, four, five or more digital marketing channels at once. That’s not uncommon for most of our customers. The more complex the digital marketing campaign, the more data it generates, and the more data it generates, the hard it can be to log into each platform, extract the data, and make it into meaningful information.

One of our goals at Dashboard Internet Marketing is to ensure that business owners have meaningful information on their marketing campaigns so that they can make data-based decisions. If a campaign is generating strong ROI, we keep it going. If it’s not working, we make changes until it is. But we can’t know this without the data. And, while we can get this information from each platform separately, combining it into dashboard makes it easier to glean meaningful insights.

Do You Need a Marketing Dashboard?

Are you curious about whether marketing dashboards are a good fit for your marketing goals? Let’s talk. If you’re like us, and you rely on data to guide your business decisions, then we can help by providing you with one effective place to gather your data for marketing campaign decisions: a marketing dashboard.

Call Dashboard Interactive at 763-242-2454.