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Google Hangouts are a terrific platform for melding your online video marketing with your social media. Directly connected to your Google+ account, it provides the advantage of being super easy to use, and fast. You can go online and create a Hangout, and begin broadcasting in minutes, and then after that find it uploaded to your YouTube channel for you! Sounds like a perfect business medium to me.

Not only that, they're free to use. This makes it easy to choose to adopt Hangouts at least in part for your business, even so the question remains, how? Which ways are best incorporate this platform into my marketing mix quickly and easily?

Let's look at 3 ways you can do just that!

3 Uses of Google Hangouts in your Business

Another choice for webinars – Using webinars in your small business could be cost-prohibitive, especially if you are using a state of the art platform like GoToWebinar, which can set you back over $500 if you have a decent sized audience. Hangouts, alternatively, are free to run and most of the heavy lifting is done for you, including the recording and rendering of the video. This can make it really easy to use Hangouts for webinars on the fly, customer service tutorials and more.

Give a glimpse into your business – Hangouts can be an easy way to show off your latest products, introduce new services, and give a look inside your business. Using hangouts for instruction and customer service are excellent ways to increase your brand authority and give customers top-notch service. This is especially valid if you use social media together with Hangouts to widen your reach.

Engagement and fast service – Hangouts work great for engaging with your audience, particularly a small one. Being virtually face to face with your audience is invaluable, and has a great many benefits with regards to your efforts to brand yourself in your chosen market. Hangouts also make it possible to be a participant in what is becoming known as Agile marketing, that is, the ability to quickly respond to trends and market events with answers and solutions. This type of ability on your part will resonate wide within your market.

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Everybody enjoys freebie, except for the people who need to spend for it. That is the unsaid truth that exists behind any “giveaway or freebie” marketing approach or campaign. There is usually, though not always, a real cost in terms of time and expenditure.

So how can you get an affordable image of the real expenses of a free marketing promo? First is by comprehending the difficult costs you are handling to develop and deliver, and then by considering your time.

Exactly what ranges of “free” are we talking about here?

The most significant locations we see free work its method into our businesses is with the act of collecting email addresses. Providing a freebie is conventional operating treatment, and will certainly not be altering at any time quickly. Most of the time we are offered a free ebook, report, video series, e-course, webinar or email series in exchange for our e-mail address and other contact data.

Exactly what you have to realize is that there are costs connected with the production of these giveaways. Let's have a look at a few of the actual hard costs you'll be forced to deal with in the production of your freebies.

• Creating the material – Someone has to write, film, record whatever content you are producing. Unless that is completely you, you'll pay for this.
• Designing the squeeze page or landing page – There are several wonderful software applications out there, but they cost as well. And we understand how much designers expense.
• Manufacturing expenses and shipping – If you have to manufacture a tough item, opportunities are you'll have to pay to get it where it's going.
• Marketing funnel hard costs – Email autoresponders, setup costs for technical aspects, webinar charges. GoToWebinar for example, charges at the bare minimum $99 a month for their least expensive plan, which only permits 100 participants. (to be reasonable, there are other lower-priced services).
• Advertising – Are you going to be taking out ads for this giveaway to bring in the widest possible audience?

While it's still a smart concept to use this kind of bribe to construct a list of email customers, you have to be aware of exactly what your giveaway really costs, and aspect that into the expense per lead.