BigInnovations Wins Business With Marketing E-Learning

Articulate Studio ’09 is the leading tool for creating quality, interactive elearning courses. Its blend of audio, video, animation, and interactivity in an easy-to-use package makes it possible for anyone to create great, Flash-based elearning. Those same capabilities make it more than just a powerful elearning platform.

Studio ’09 for Sales & Marketing

Darryl Hall, a founding partner with BigInnovations.com — a marketing, sales and business growth consulting company — says that he and his team primarily use Studio ’09 for online marketing, sales, and service presentations. They sell their creations as a 24×7 “virtual salesperson” for their clients, and as a tool for online and on-demand infomercials. I asked Darryl to share more about using Studio ’09 for this kind of application.

“Every company serious about selling their products or services tends to rely on more than just passive marketing to do so,” said Darryl. “They also have a proactive sales team. Why? Because in general, a sales team will yield 3 to 6 times more sales vs. relying on even the finest marketing creativity alone. In other words, if you split a list of prospective buyers and send a quality marketing promotion to the whole list, but have a good sales team work only half of the list, that sales team will harvest about 3 to 6 times more sales from their half of the list. We’ve found this to be true again and again in objective, head-to-head tests across many industries. It is tangible proof of the power of human persuasion.”

 

“Why does this happen?” continued Darryl. “A quality salesperson can do several things that even the most polished marketing copy can never match:

• Convey emotion and enthusiasm in their spoken words
• Dynamically adapt or branch their presentation per each client’s needs
• Demonstrate the product benefits in tangible ways
• Handle client objections on the spot”

Example Marketing Presentation

Below is the marketing presentation BigInnovations.com uses to promote its services, including a section on “Multimedia Marketing or E-learning Presentation,” which covers how the company creates promotional presentations with Studio ’09:

 

View BigInnovations.com marketing presentation

 

The BigInnovations Approach

Darryl continued to explain his approach:

“When we are pitching Studio ’09 creations to our clients, one of the first, more grabbing benefits is playback screen size. We’re often showing them a screen 2-4 times larger than streaming video options — even when the latter is rendered for higher speed connections. And when we tell them it can be viewed by all of their prospective buyers — even those with dial-up connections — with little to no buffering delays, Studio ’09 becomes almost a no-brainer. The bigger screen gives us the expansive real estate to really show off their products or services in very tangible ways. As a point of comparison, try to show a picture of the product and a selection of supporting text bullets on a tiny streaming video screen and that text will be just too small… if it is readable at all.”

 

Along with the ability to record one’s own audio and add emotion through the voice to a presentation, Darryl loves the ability to incorporate video and PowerPoint animations in his marketing presentations. One of his other favorite features is the ability to leverage Presenter ’09’s branching capabilities to give his prospects the ability to pick and choose the content about which they wish to learn.

Darryl’s Articulate-related Marketing Ideas

Beyond creating a promotional presentation for your products or services, Darryl has a list of his 8 top ways to leverage Articulate products to create an unforgettable message:

1. Better marketing ROIs: by standing out from the crowd with a unique form of online marketing, any company can get a better return on the expense of using this form of marketing.
2. Email marketing alternative: instead of blasting out another long copy HTML email, invite the recipient to watch and listen to your latest presentation.
3. Time savings: if a chunk of a telesales presentation is fairly linear, a well-proven model used by some of our clients is to start live with the prospect, then point them to the online presentation, then reconnect live immediately afterwards for any unique issues or outstanding objections.
4. Distribution on CD: for select applications or very narrowly targeted direct response marketing, burning a polished Studio ’09 presentation to CD to hand out at a trade show or to mail to a strong list is a great way to show what you and/or your company has to offer.
5. The (new) website tour: sooner or later, many companies will freshen up their website. Change is often met with reservations or confusion by existing users. Use a Studio ’09 new website tour as the bridge to show existing and first-time visitors around the new website.
6. The virtual road show: BigInnovations uses Studio ’09 as a way to virtualize a road show for entrepreneurs meeting with potential investors, so that the entrepreneur can show it to prospective investors all over the world without having to actually hit the road.
7. Create the need: While Quizmaker is an excellent tool for supporting the absorption of elearning topics, it can also be very helpful in creating the demand to buy educational products. The key to growing demand is proving the prospect needs the product. A free Quizmaker quiz embedded within a product promotional presentation is a great way to show a prospect that they don’t know enough about the topic(s) covered in the educational product.
8. “Show me” service solutions: if a picture is worth a thousand words, showing someone how to do something is much better than trying to tell them how to do it in words. Studio ’09 makes it relatively easy to produce a lot of self-service ‘show me how’ presentations so that website or software users can help themselves, rather than using much more expensive customer service time.

Darryl concluded:

“I know many of your users see Studio ’09 as an educational tool — and a terrific one at that. But those with good marketing and sales backgrounds, capable of developing a presentation that can move viewers to want to ‘buy now’ can make many multiples of the purchase price back by using it like we use it. Articulate Studio ’09 tools are amazingly capable, so the biggest key to success is knowing how to develop the creative content that can move the viewer to take the desired (buy now) action. We’ve got clients who have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales that can be credited — in part — to as little as one well-designed Articulate Studio ’09 ‘wow’ promotional presentation. I encourage any of your readers with such skills to take a new look around the web; there are plenty of opportunities begging (to pay you well) for this kind of fresh marketing solution.”

Thanks for sharing your story, Darryl!