How Brands Creatively Hosted Virtual Offsite Meetings As the world continues to move in a remote-first direction, it's important to consider how to make your company's in-person events remote-friendly. Even if you don't always do remote events, the remote option is great for anytime your team is spread around the world. But, a virtual offsite meeting? Sounds oxymoronic. How can you have an offsite, that doesn't feel like work, virtually? In this post, we'll take a deep dive into how these brands thought about virtual offsites in a creative way. And didn't just ask everyone to be on Zoom for 8 hours. 1. Loom VR Virtual Offsite At the end of 2020, Loom decided to host a virtual offsite. What made this different than attending an 8-hour Zoom meeting? Well, first, the company sent VR headsets to their team to allow employees to feel like they were leaving their homes for a large company meeting they used to travel for. We just announced our @loom offsite being done in VR and us shipping everyone an Oculus headset. The smiles. 🙂 — Vinay Hiremath (@vhmth) December 10, 2020 According to Loom, "with virtual reality, we were able to send everyone an Oculus Quest 2 headset to bring the virtual world to them. Plus, we were able to limit Zoom content to only two hours per day to keep the content engaging." Once they got started with virtual reality, they had to find virtual reality...

10 Common Virtual Meeting Mistakes to Avoid, According to Remote HubSpot Employees Whether it’s with a single client, a large internal team, or external stakeholders, hosting successful, engaging meetings is an art form. It takes skill to know how to simultaneously capture attention, inform, be interactive, and leave a lasting impression — it’s really not an easy feat. The prospect of holding a meeting may become even more stressful when the session is online. As meetings are new to the virtual world, there is no roadmap to hosting a successful one. However, as nice as it would be, a roadmap is not always the key to success. Sometimes the key can be learning from people who have experience hosting virtual meetings and understanding what they think makes them successful. In this post, we’ll discuss common virtual meeting mistakes and get insight from experienced HubSpotters on how to avoid them. 1. Not acknowledging mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. Although many people know that, an all-too-common moment in virtual meetings is pushing mistakes under the rug and acting like they haven’t happened. Unfortunately, when everyone is looking at their screen, most people notice mistakes, and ignoring them can create a sense of awkwardness. In these moments, it’s important to remember that an increasingly virtual world is new to everyone. We’re all aware that adapting to new processes can be difficult, so of course, there will be unexpected issues. Jon Dick, Senior Vice President of Marketing at HubSpot, agrees, and his advice is relatively...

The 10 Best Video Conferencing Tools for Small Businesses Over the past year, marketers got a crash course in remote work. As 2021 approached, many of us had already invested in at-home desks, workout equipment, and other tools meant to make work-from-home a little easier. At the top of that list? Video conferencing software. Video conferencing tools saw a 500% increase in demand in 2020 as a result of the worldwide pandemic. And, as the workforce continues to shift to a more flexible, hybrid model, it's critical your business invests in equipment designed to foster collaboration regardless of an employee's location. But video conferencing software isn't always cheap, and the fancy bells-and-whistles aren't always necessary for small businesses looking for a simple, effective solution. Here, we've compiled 10 of the best video conferencing tools for small businesses, ranging in price and features, to help you find the best fit for your needs. But first — what are the benefits of video conferencing software, and do you need it, anyway? Video Conferencing Benefits Video conferencing offers opportunities for collaboration, productivity, and increased engagement with colleagues, stakeholders, and customers — all without the hassle (and cost) of traveling to an in-person location. I could write a whole blog post about the benefits of video conferencing, but for our purposes, let's focus on four: Video conferencing is a cost-effective opportunity to have face-to-face interactions with colleagues, prospects, stakeholders, or customers. It's more personal and engaging than a phone call, and it's...

Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting "This could have been an email." Those six words can take the wind out of an office. They mean that time has been wasted, employees are frustrated, and leadership has been ever-so-slightly undermined. Unjustified meetings are inefficient and grating. Haphazardly putting time on colleagues' calendars — only to fumble with its purpose, conduct it without direction, or spend all your time talking at attendees as opposed to collaborating with them — takes a toll on everyone involved. Here, we'll review some criteria you should look for when deciding whether a meeting is worth everyone's time, see a few definitive signs that an issue doesn't warrant a meeting, and go over some of the more prominent, effective meeting alternatives. When You Should Hold a Meeting The issue at hand is urgent and time-sensitive. If the information you need to convey is must-hear and timebound, don't think twice — book a meeting. You don't want to run the risk of sending a mass email about a pressing issue, only to have some employees gloss it over or ignore it entirely. Some things are need-to-know and can't wait, and your response to those instances needs to reflect that kind of urgency. Don't be overly passive. Don't count on your team members to get to the information on their own time. Book a meeting, and get those points across. You need a space for thorough discussion and multiple perspectives. Some issues call for some...

Whiteboarding: What It Is & How to Use It In Your Meetings Do you remember those old school projectors they used to have in school? Whenever the projector was pulled out in class, I knew I was going to have fun. Teachers would allow us to go up and write on the projector, and it just felt more collaborative. That's kind of what whiteboarding is like in business. As marketers, you probably have a lot of brainstorming sessions where you're laying out landing pages, writing copy, and creating a strategy for a campaign. And brainstorming sessions and whiteboarding go together like peanut butter and jelly. In this post, we'll dive into whiteboarding and learn how you can use this process to improve your brainstorming sessions. Whiteboarding Session While whiteboarding sessions are great, it's easy to lose control over a brainstorming session. To conduct a successful whiteboard session, we've gathered a few tips. Whiteboarding Techniques 1. Be creative. One of the best parts of a whiteboarding session is that it allows your team to be creative. People can share documents, put up sticky notes as reminders, and share their ideas with the team. When you're in person, it's fun to let all your team members use the whiteboard, so everyone has a chance to write down notes and share their thoughts. 2. Stay focused. With any brainstorming session, it's easy to lose track of what the goal is. To stay focused, we suggest writing out your goal at...

How to Run Marketing Team Meetings That Don't Suck Meetings suck. They're time for people to avoid doing actual work, stare blankly at each other, throw in generic comments to look like they're paying attention, and if you're lucky, maybe come out with some wicked notebook doodles. Is that how people perceive your marketing meetings? I hope not, because they don't actually have to be that way. Turn your marketing meetings into something useful by — you guessed it — creating compelling content! (Oh my gosh, inbound marketing concepts work in real life, too!) As your team grows, it's important for everyone to get in a room together and talk about what they've been working on in their corner of the world. So to ensure those marketing meetings aren't blocks of time your team dreads, make note of these tips for how to make marketing team meetings truly useful for your employees. How to Run an Effective Meeting While this post will primarily focus on marketing meetings, I want to address a team-agnostic section about effective meetings as a whole. As I said above, meetings can be a grandiose waste of time. It's tempting to run your work by others, gather feedback or affirmation, or simply avoid the tough stuff by calling meetings. I'm here to tell you — don't do it. The first step to running effective meetings is to only schedule meetings when absolutely necessary. Quarterly meetings to report on company progress and important news?...