Why You Need To Embrace Live Interactive Broadcasting For Your Business

We’re all used to sitting down on our couch and turning on the TV, only to be greeted with a news segment where the broadcaster is going over the latest news from the day. Can you imagine, instead of sitting on your couch as a passive viewer, if you were able to have a conversation with the broadcaster about the current segment?

That’s the promise of live interactive broadcasting for most of your customers, and it’s up to your business to turn that promise into a reality. After all, most of your customers are already familiar with live interactive broadcasting, as social media apps like Periscope and Snapchat already allow them to record live video easily and stream to friends and followers.

Your business can take advantage of live broadcasting too, and while 84% of businesses successfully utilize video for their marketing campaigns, you can go one step further and broadcast directly to your customers. There are plenty of reasons to set up a live interactive broadcast, but here are a few of our favorite reasons to use this trending technology.

Host Real-Time Product Trainings

Managing your expenses is a big part about running a lean business, and while onboarding customers is important, you don’t have to run those client onboarding sessions in-person. Using live interactive broadcasting, you can host video onboarding sessions in an instant, and that doesn’t just help your bottom line. When you transition to using live interactive broadcasting, you’ll be able to host onboarding and training sessions easily, no matter where you are in the world. This also allows you to host more product trainings than you normally would, improving client service, while keeping your costs low.

Stream Live Events

If you host any live events already, then you’ve got a great opportunity to bring more customers or prospects to your event instantly by adding live broadcasting to the mix. There are a few ways to do this, but one of the best would be to set up a high definition stream of your event, while including some form of live feedback. For smaller live broadcasts, you could have a direct video feed that allows streaming viewers to ask questions over the video. For larger events, you may want to set up an alternative mechanism for taking questions and answers, so that you can filter the questions before presenting them to the event host.

Take People Behind The Scenes Of Your Business

An excellent way to foster greater customer engagement is by showing your customers that your business is more than just a suite of products and services. Live video is a great mechanism to bring people behind the scenes of your business, introducing them to the people and environment where you work. When you incorporate an interactive component of that live stream, you can give your team a chance to connect directly with customers, something that they might not usually have the opportunity to do.

Host Q&A ‘Office Hours’

If you’re regularly getting questions from customers about a particular product or service, one way of handling a lot of those questions at once is to host regular ‘office hours’, where you go through and answer customer questions for a set period of time. This will let customers join to get their questions answered, or to get a quick walk-through of a specific issue that they’re having, and they can leverage the live broadcasting to ask you questions that may come up during the Q&A session as well.

Live interactive broadcasting is a great new technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way that you interact with your current and future customers. While having access to live video is a great way to increase customer engagement and to grow your business, it’s important that you make sure that your video feed is fast, high-definition, and lag-free. The last thing that you want is for your video feed to cut out or buffer during a heavily attended event, but you can get around that by using a video chat service like Agora.io to stream video all over the world. Regardless of the technology that you use, it’s essential that your video quality and video connection speed leaves your business looking great, and not like an old, stodgy firm that has trouble with technology.

How are you thinking about using live interactive broadcasting to reach more customers? Let us know in the comments.

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Give Your Company a Boost With These Business Development Strategies

In the process of starting a business? If so, you’ll need a game plan to get your business off the ground. In this article, we have put together several strategies that will help you attract your first customers, and then keep them happy.

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1) Be true to your word

In today’s business climate, there are few things that are more valued than a company that is authentic in its dealings. When you say that you will get something done for a client or a customer, do everything humanly possible to stay true to your word.

This reliability and consistency won’t just help your company; it has also helped established companies such as Steve Sorensen Select Staffing. Building a reputation as a business that could be counted on to get the job done right, they have built a dedicated client base over the years.

By adhering the same discipline to your business dealings, it is likely that you will experience the same degree of success.

2) Embrace the power and responsibility of social media

We’re well into the 21st century, and the internet has infiltrated every aspect of our daily lives. There’s no excuse to be ignorant of the importance of social media any longer. Even if you have a non-existent presence on social media, there are customers on review sites such as Yelp that are building up (or tearing down) your reputation.

By taking the lead on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and monitoring social review sites, not only can you tackle problems head-on, but you can also pick up on trends that will allow you to shape the future strategy of your business.

3) Get involved in philanthropy

Seen as a way to give back to the community, not many business people realize that charitable giving and community involvement can also be a business development strategy.

While it might be crass to suggest that getting involved in an altruistic arena can be a way to boost profits, companies that are genuine about contributing towards the greater good are more likely to be seen in a positive light by members of the public.

This goodwill will become a factor when customers make a choice between your business and one of your competitors, so don’t be afraid to roll up your do-gooder sleeves!

4) Follow up with your clients (like you mean it)

When it comes to client acquisition, it is shocking how passive many small business operators are when it comes to following up. It is especially important in today’s world, where distractions of all kinds abound.

Just because a potential client did not answer your email does not mean they aren’t interested in doing business with you. It may simply be a function of an overloaded email inbox, or the fact that they are swamped with business from other clients.

While it’s important not to smother them, continue to make an effort to make or renew contact every four to six weeks. While this number may vary depending on your industry, it is a great place to start.

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Give Yourself Credit for Being a Smart Business Owner

What does it take to be a smart business owner in 2016? More importantly, are you one of those smart business owners?

Running a company these days takes myriad of skills and traits.

For starters, you have to be a people person. If you’re not, you stand a good chance of not being in business for the long run.

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Secondly, you have to be an intelligent person.

No, a Harvard law degree is not exactly necessary, but you have to have an eye for managing finances, overseeing people (your employees of course), knowing when to go full-steam into an advertising or marketing campaign and when to cut back or pass altogether.

That said one of your other important tasks in successfully running a business is making the right deals with vendors.

From those who protect your computer system to those selling you merchant service accounts and more, make sure you align yourself with companies that not only have proven successful in their own right, but have your best interests in mind.

So, can you give yourself credit for being a smart business owner?

Increase Customer Base with Sound Decisions

So that you can increase your customer base (and hopefully your revenue stream), remember a couple of pointers moving forward:

  • Payment options – You will find the going rough if you do not do what is best for your customer base as far as payment options. Yes, some business owners stand by cash-only payments, but they are growing less and less by the year. Many business owners realize that not only is the credit card option necessary, but so too is the mobile option. Allowing customers to pay via their mobile apps is becoming more and more popular by the year. One of the big decisions you have already faced or will in the near future is finding a reputable merchant services company. That is a key piece of the puzzle, especially given how millions of consumers still rely on the plastic buy and rent goods and services. If you have been slow to accepting credit card payments with your business, give that a serious reconsideration moving forward. With the right merchant services company working with you, the sky is oftentimes the limit as to how much revenue you can bring in, especially if you have been a cash-only business up to this point and time;
  • Service matters – Without a solid customer service effort day after day, your business probably won’t stand a chance against competitors. Yes, offering customers the right payment options and allowing them to buy and rent on-the-go is crucial, but your customer service initiatives can never be taken for granted. Make sure you remind your employees time and time again that the customer should always be given the benefit of the doubt that is without treating any of your workers with disrespect. Also look for ways to make the customer experience even better for them on a regular basis. For example, customers who have been with you for a while now should stand out from the crowd, so treat them with a little extra care. From rewards programs to pre-sales that are not open to the public until your top buyers have had first crack, there are multiple ways for you to reward those loyal customers. If you have been a business owner for years now, you’ve likely made a career out of giving consumers what they want. Always ask yourself, what can I do more of to make my customers keep coming back over and over again? When you have the right answers, the rest will typically fall into place.

Smart business owners are those men and women who lose a little bit of sleep at night. Why is that?

They are the individuals always looking for ways to move their businesses forward, ways that not all others running companies are quick to think of.

Put the time and effort into determining how you can be one of those smart business owners if you are not one already.

Over time, you will to find that many of the traits needed to be a smart business owner all boil down to good old-fashioned commonsense.

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