A new trend has already begun to take hold on the Internet and you’d better take notice. The long-promised dream of using the Internet to broadcast television-like programming is finally here and, much like infomercials did in the early 1990’s, it’s taking off like a rocket among the marketing elite.
Created by Dr. Jeffrey Lant, Ph.D., of Cambridge, MA, one broadcast system in particular has caught the attention of thousands of marketing types in a big way. Dr. Lant knows marketing. In fact, he is the man who taught many of today’s top marketers their craft.
He and his staff have spent the last 2 years working behind closed doors to create a television-like service that runs over the Internet and is designed to help marketers reach out to their customers and prospects in a way that is much more personal than any current form of communication.
In many ways, the webcast service Dr. Lant and his team have created is better than television because it’s live, not pre- recorded, and audience members are able to interact with the speaker.
Over the past 90 days, I’ve been personally testing his system and the results I’ve seen in my own business are nothing less than astounding. Here’s what I mean.
For years, I’ve reached out to my clients via e-mail. While not the best medium for communication, it’s cheap, fast and typically reliable. Today, a lot has changed with e-mail. It has gone from being a truly useful marketing medium to an almost unbearable nightmare because of the increased level of spam and the multitude of attempts to block as much of the unwanted “electronic trash” as possible.
Marketers who have relied on e-mail to build their empires are today realizing that e-mail alone just isn’t enough. While some marketers claim that they use direct mail more and e-mail less, the costs associated with this form of marketing make this solution highly unattractive to most marketers. With options for cost-effective marketing limited, there is a big need for alternative methods to deliver our marketing message to our customers.
I’ve been a huge believer in teleconferences for the last 6 years. Along with e-mail, I use teleconferences to contact my clients and prospects at least once a week. While these technologies remain very effective marketing tools, when I began to use webcasting something very interesting happened.
These people, many of whom had heard me speak on countless teleconferences and never bought a single product, all of a sudden started buying. In fact, the more webcasts I held the more sales I made!
Well, I wanted to know what was happening. How was a webcast so different from a teleconference or an e-mail sales letter? Why was it such a powerful sales tool and what was happening that was influencing these people to buy when dozens of e-mail messages and live teleconferences simply failed to produce results that were even a fraction of what I was now seeing?
I didn’t have to look far for the answers. One man, a prospect from Iceland who had been on my e-mail list for years and had never bought a thing from me, attended one of my live webcasts. The next day, he handed me his credit card for a $3,000.00 purchase!
When I asked him what made the difference, he simply said that he felt he could connect with me and decided that doing business with me would be fine. The difference was, he could SEE the sincerity on my face when I spoke to him about my company.
Well, he wasn’t alone! This has been happening with many other people as well. The results of switching from a teleconference model to a webcast model have been nothing short of outstanding!
And it makes perfect sense why it works as well as it does. When you can speak into a webcam, look your prospects in the eye, tell them what you have to offer, and on the other end they can see your sincerity and see that you are a real person, they feel much more comfortable buying from you.
This has been the case for years in the world of television, which is why television is the most powerful (and profitable) advertising media there is. So it should come as no big surprise to you that webcasting could come in a close second behind television, and it absolutely does!
There is an advantage to webcasting that you just can’t achieve with television – live interaction. While I’m hosting a webcast, viewers can simply type in a question and it appears instantly on my computer screen, allowing me to answer it when appropriate.
Unfortunately, on a live teleconference your listeners can remain silent and nobody will know they are there. They can listen to the whole presentation, or they can hang up the phone and nobody will ever get offended. That’s why so many people simply leave the call long before the teleconference has ended!
With webcasting, the host and the viewers know who’s logged on at all times because there is a list of viewers on everybody’s computer screen. I’ve used this little option to have a LOT of fun with my viewers by singling them out and asking them specific questions they can answer by simply typing in their response. By doing this, viewers pay close attention to my presentation! The retention rate on a live webcast is virtually 100%, a figure unheard of in any other media! Not only are your viewers more likely to stick with you, they are more likely to buy from you. It’s the next best thing to being there in person, and you can host a webcast from anywhere in the world where you have access to a high-speed Internet connection!
While there are many webcasting solutions out there, Dr. Lant’s stands head and shoulders above the rest, not for it’s cutting edge technology, but rather because Dr. Lant truly understands marketing and has had his webcasting system built from the ground up to support the efforts of serious marketers.
It’s a system designed by marketers for marketing, and in this business you can’t get a better fit than that! That’s what sold me on this particular system over the many others that are available out there today.
Robert Imbriale is an internationally recognized Internet
Marketing Expert and the creator of “Motivational Marketing.” He
conducts many live webcasts and teleconferences for participants
around the world. To find out more about Dr. Lant and his
webcasting service, which is now available as a monthly service,
visit http://www.ultimatewealth.com/webcast
