There are many benefits of video conferencing for small businesses. Small businesses are the soul of the global economy. Nearly all major successful employers today had their roots in humble beginnings as small organisations.
It can be difficult for smaller businesses to stay up to date with cutting-edge tools that will help them excel and grow into the 21st century because they often have too much on their plate at any given time to take a step back and reassess how they go about their operations.
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In 2022, the deepest trend for business growth and adaptation is integration with digital conferencing, sales, and more broad-reaching communication over the internet. The reality is that an increasing portion of the total available business opportunity is online, and smaller niche companies stand to benefit enormously by growing in this direction.
Here are 10 fundamental reasons to consider using video conferencing more often as a small organisation.
Be in more than one place at one time
There’s a lot on the shoulders of small organisations. It’s common for a small business owner to fill multiple roles such as administration, business operations, sales & business relations, human resources, and tax & compliance.
Much of your time and energy as a small business owner is spent repeating yourself in different settings. You’ll find yourself saying the same things at business meetings, to your colleagues, to your sales prospects, and to regulators. It can be quite taxing.
Consider the launch of a new product or service from a B2B perspective. Rather than manually repeating your spiel to every one of your customers, a video conference or live stream can allow you to make that announcement to all of them in real-time, while preserving their ability to interact and give feedback or ask questions. Best of all, a persistent video recording of the livestream allows you to extend the announcement to any one of your future customers and begin building a content base with consistent messaging.
Mobile devices dominate the modern digital landscape. They allow you to produce the livestream from a device that fits in your pocket, and anyone in the world can receive your messaging from theirs.
You can then distribute the livestream or message directly to your phone’s contacts list. Small business owners can do this by themselves for close to zero cost as one of the benefits of video conferencing.
Stay relevant with webinars
Small businesses are constantly having to adapt in order to survive and thrive. One of the persistent challenges for them is staying relevant to their customer base, either with product launches, or sales relationships. Webinars are excellent tools for keeping up with customers, and the market more broadly.
Webinars allow you to efficiently produce and instantly distribute messages to your customer base. They are ultra-low-cost and very high-yield for effectively marketing yourself to customer bases– no matter how niche, or how broad those customer bases may be.
Secure customer feedback in real-time or asynchronously through content comments
Knowing how your customers feel want is the better part of doing sales–you are building a relationship with each and every one of your customers when you do business.
But there’s only 24 hours in the day, and you are only one person. In order to grow your business, you have to secure more relationships– or deeper ones. How do you do that as a small team?
Fortunately, video conferencing is a great, scalable solution for rich relationship-building with your customers.
With Samba Live, you are enabled to get real interaction and feedback from your customers while broadcasting live
But also, the webinar or conference itself is effortlessly convertible into persistent online content.
Video conferencing or hosting a webinar with Samba Live doesn’t only let you effectively be in more than one place at a time… it also allows you to be in more than one time, at one time.
When customers interact with the content that you produced as live webinars, they still feel the benefits of your presence and guidance, and thanks to comments on the persistent content… you are able to extend your ability to cultivate relationships forward in time.
It does sound really far out to put it that way, but it is true, and it serves to underscore the immense potential for benefits to small businesses that webinars provide. You can think of your business as a collection of relationships and agreements, and webinars as cutting-edge tools for extending communication into the digital age offer the best leverage for building those relationships that make up your brand value, and business more broadly.
Share ideas instantly with your customers
Both video meetings and audio conferencing enable both the hosts and the audience to communicate instantly. This is valuable because the audience can indicate what excites them, or what matters to them as customers. This is very valuable information that the host can receive with clarity and precision.
As a host, you can also respond to your audience’s feedback in real-time, which gives rise to you both quickly iterating through ideas to find what potential is most viable, practical, and worthy of exploration. Live audiences are fantastic ways to develop a clear vision of where your business should be going. No need for slow and costly trial and error processes.
The mere fact is that by regularly using webinars, you are cultivating an environment of continuous regular customer engagement. When customers feel listened to, they feel that they are participating in the building of your business– because they are.
Do customer support quickly and from anywhere
Video conferencing solutions come with useful tools like screen sharing, and Samba Live even supports embedded live web applications. This level of connectivity makes it easy for you to troubleshoot a problem that a customer is experiencing, and for you as a small business owner to learn from that experience.
Customers will be able to easily call you with a problem. They usually will be able to show you the problem as well. Sometimes you will even be able to work on the problem with them in real-time by using a video conferencing solution.
IT-oriented businesses often can be handled with hands-on support. But by no means is live support limited to IT-related customer problems. Even for mechanical problems, like if a customer’s car is making a certain noise, simple audio-conferencing can greatly narrow down the time it takes to get a diagnosis, because you can experience the problem in real-time rather than having to try to reproduce it in diagnostics.
Increase your social media presence
Samba Live’s video conferencing software is also video production software
Samba Live supports simultaneous live-streaming to multiple social media outlets, such as Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, and more.
Being able to produce and publish these live streams from one central hub that is highly automated allows your messaging to reach out to many more customers on their chosen social media platforms. You will reach more people, and on the terms they are most used to.
The software goes to them for you, so you do not have to go through the tedious management of so many online accounts.
This ability to reach out to people while live on social media is one of the benefits of video conferencing for consumer brands, because there are increasingly more people using social media to casually shop than there are any other shopping outlets, such as in-person malls, or even dedicated e-commerce website traffic!
Save time and resources by letting the software do the travelling for you
Consider all of your customers and business partners, and where they are physically. Being able to meet with them in person would obligate so much more time and resources than it would be to simply hop in a video call.
This fact has been ubiquitously understood for years now, and yet it still goes under-implemented. A substantial amount of air-travel today is still business travel for the purpose of business meetings.
There is a reason why it’s still practised is because… meetings still work.
While an international corporation may have the resources to put people on jets every day, anyone including you can capture the same power of being able to hold meetings with anyone in the world instantly at a fraction of the cost, by merely clicking a button.
The fact that corporations are still putting people on jets should underscore the value of holding meetings.
Physical travel does not scale well for small businesses. Digital travel is the only viable alternative for keeping your business organised.
People intuitively use the internet and cell phones to connect with each other for most of their communication purposes. Moving these communications to a purpose-built conferencing solution could potentially be cheaper and more scalable for your business to grow, as well as improve the conference quality for communications that you already naturally gravitate towards.
Double-down on what works. Trust that your intuitions were pointing in the right direction.
Automate large portions of employee training with in-house produced video
All employees need training to some extent. Mostly, the people who work with you become skilled from hands-on experience, but getting employees passed the learning curve of what you do can be a point that’s hard to get through for both the employer and the employee. A lot of employees don’t make it through the learning curve.
As a small business, it can be particularly hard to work on improving this because taking the time and resources away from active ongoing work to devote to new employee training, while recognised as important… is perpetually not a first priority compared to getting more work done for customers.
Actually guiding and teaching employees is also very repetitive. Not only will you have to work with training multiple employees the same way, but often with the same employee you’ll have to show them the ropes multiple times before they get it.
Imagine being able to easily produce a training video once, and be able to give the video to your employees instead of your time in order to help train them.
Imagine it being easy to build a comprehensive catalogue of video training content for every procedure you have, in a way that can be easily referenced for helping future employees learn the ropes.
Samba Live’s webinar solutions will enable you to build that content easily
Every training video can be a short webinar, which is persistent. Being enabled to shorten the time and resources spent in training is one of the main benefits of using video conferencing tools to integrate with existing business operations.
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Webinars are both powerful and very affordable
The major and most immediate hesitation that small businesses have about anything new is cost.
Then, if you do commit to something, it is not always a guarantee that it will work out the way you had hoped…
These two fair reasons are why there is a free trial period, for many of the cutting-edge enterprise-level video conferencing solutions, including Samba Live.
Samba Live also comes with flexible pricing that fits each customer’s usage, so being at a small scale with your business doesn’t bar you from being able to access the best tools that the industry has to offer.
It’s easy to get started
What usually makes something easy is when you have help and cooperation from someone qualified who knows how to help you.
With Samba Live, when you book a live demo, a qualified technical sales representative will reach out and actively show you the software and how it works. Having a real person with answers to your questions and thorough knowledge of the product itself makes bringing the best communication tools to your business painless.
