Google+ hangouts are the unsung heroes of digital marketing. They allow you to communicate with customers, develop videos for your YouTube channel, and place distinctive content on your website and social networks…all for free.

Yet, how many hangouts have you organized last month? And, if you produced hangouts recently, have you scaled them to improve your social following and engagement? If the answers to these questions are “no” and “not really”, then this post is for you.

I will focus on the actions you should take to plan, execute and expand on Google+ hangouts in order to achieve the following outcomes:

• Engage your customers and offer them value
• Connect with other companies and potential business partners
• Use a new channel to promote your brand and convey its values
• Develop exclusive evergreen content with minimal cost
• Grow your Google+ presence
• Increase the number of YouTube views and followers

Start with what you know really well

You are the expert in what you do. Besides the products or services you sell, your company can share knowledge without actually giving away any products or services. Ask yourself: what information can I give my customers that they would find applicable and useful? The answer to this question is the base on which you can start planning Google+ hangouts.

For example, at Simply Business we realized we could share information on how companies could finance, market and manage their small business. Now, we use hangouts to share this knowledge. Our goals are to get more customers engaging with our brand (measured by how many of them attend a live event) and to develop video content in order to grow our Google+ community and YouTube channel (measured by number of followers and video views). We host the sessions in our office ‘studio’, putting questions to the expert panel on behalf of our community. By hosting subject matter experts in our hangouts, we built strong partnerships, with valuable benefits for our marketing efforts. One such relationship is with Martin Shervington, (the author of “The Art & Science of Google+”), who is now a regular consultant for Simply Business and helps us engage with users of Google+. Below is a clip from a hangout we organized with Martin, specifically around the use of hangouts by small businesses.

Setup an implementation plan to avoid brand damage

Since one of the end goals of running hangouts is to promote a brand, you need to ensure high quality of the video sessions. Otherwise, you are spending time on something that can actually hurt the trust customers have in you, which could have a negative impact on your brand equity. Therefore, I recommend against running hangouts ad hoc as doing so will increase the probability of technical and organizational heartaches (like ours!).

My recommendation comes from experience. When we first started hangouts, we improvised a lot. We knew what we wanted to get out of hangouts, but we did not come up with a detailed execution strategy in order to get it. It resulted in many blunders, big and small, that could have been avoided with proper planning. At one point, frustrated with the volume of challenges we were running into, we came up with a table listing some of the slip-ups and possible causes and solutions.

This stage can be broken into a checklist:

1. Preparation
The moral of the story is to prepare for your hangouts in order to ensure a successful campaign (and avoid some of the mistakes we made). Try splitting your strategy into four groups of project tasks:

• Decide on the topic and the date of the hangout
• Finalize the speakers’ guest list.
• Agree how they will participate (in front of their computers or in your ‘studio’).
• Ensure the speakers have the right equipment to run the hangout.
• Prepare the script, which outlines the discussion points.

2. Promotion
This is the outreach part of your hangout. It involves connecting with your target audience to raise awareness and let them know how they can benefit from attending. You need to allow yourself several weeks before the hangout to connect with your customers, business partners or followers. Use social media, a newsletter, word-of-mouth or even advertising to spread a message about the event. Also, get your community involved by asking for questions and input on the direction of the hangout – the more engaged your audience, the less likely they are to leave half way through.

3. Going live
This is your ‘on air time’. However, it also involves the time right before your hangout starts – the calm before the storm! Use this time wisely to properly set up your equipment and ensure your guests also have the correct settings. Check out this expert guide on running hangouts to make sure you have the right set-up before you start transmitting your video. Once you’re live, you need to have a dedicated person to stay on top of the social feed from all participants, both speakers and attendees.

4. Augmenting content
If you record your hangout, publish the clip (or parts of it) where and when people will find it. This may be a product page on your website, your social profiles, your YouTube channel or even a paid ad. This tactic can not only save you money on content development (why spend on producing a video ad, if you can use a clip from a hangout for the same purpose?), but it will also ensure you provide value for customers in as many places as possible.

Put video sessions through meticulous testing

The table of problems and solutions presented above lists some of the technical difficulties we ran into. Some of these will not be relevant to more simple hangouts – these may just involve a computer and camcorder. But if you are looking to use more advanced elements such as lights, an HD camera and clip-on microphones, you need to test your set-up diligently. The best way to approach this is with a list of questions to ask before every hangout. Here are a couple of examples:

Can our guest speakers, who connect remotely, hear and see us? And can we hear and see them?
Do private hangouts with each panellist a few days beforehand to ensure that any technical issues such as non-working microphones (you’d be surprised how often this happens) or dodgy cameras are ironed out prior to the hangout day. For best sound, you can ask guest speakers to use headphones with a microphone attached (e.g Apple earphones).

Do we have a reliable broadband connection?
Don’t trust your wireless connection. If you or your guests drop out it will be highly disruptive to the whole hangout and could be damaging to your brand. Make sure all guests have a dependable hard-wired connection.

Are we happy with our video feed quality?
Think about production quality, light the scene and organize the room so that the only things showing up in the feed are the ones you intended to. If you use a webcam, make sure it’s the highest quality possible. You may also consider getting a good quality HD camera – Google is introducing new HD hangouts, so now’s a good time to ensure your camera is up to scratch.

Do we have a script for Plan B?
No matter how well you prepare and test, things can and likely will go awry at some point. What if you lose connection with your guests? Or what if you simply run out of things to talk about after 15 minutes of a hangout scheduled for an hour? Come up with backup plans and ‘minimal viable product’ for adverse scenarios. If you lose your internet connection, for example, you may still be able to record a video with a guest you have in your studio. If you’re running out of things to talk about, have a list of backup questions handy.

Use Hangouts On Air to scale content creation

Hangouts On Air is a feature that allows you to broadcast and record your hangout automatically to your YouTube channel. The implications of this are pretty significant. It means you can be certain Google will index your video quickly (and likely do so faster than if you published the video on your own website).

The video will likely start to rank for related keywords in YouTube as well as in Google universal search. This will, in turn, provide more views and subscribers. In essence, using Hangouts On Air means you not only record, but also promote your videos without incurring any advertising spend. Recording the hangout is very simple, but you do need a verified YouTube profile, which uses the same email address as your Google+ account.

When your hangout is published on YouTube, don't stop there. Leverage the asset you just created to create more unique content for your website and your other social channels.You can publish an article, for example, based on the material from the hangout (here is an example on how we do that at Simply Business) or even just publish the video with a transcript underneath, similarly to what Moz does in its Whiteboard Friday. You can post your clips to your social pages and include them in other content such as guest posts, using YouTube's embed options.

Take BakeSpace.com. They have organized over 40 hangouts centered on cooking ideas and recipes. Every video session the company organizes is recorded and then optimized on YouTube with applicable titles and descriptions. Afterwards, BakeSpace social media coordinators post every hangout to the company social profiles: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. This consistent strategy has given the company a significant social boost. In fact, over the course of last year, during which the company ran its hangouts, BakeSpace's Google+ page went from 19,000 followers to almost a million!

Measure the results to justify investment and secure future sign-off

You should be measuring and reporting as soon as you publish your first hangout. While data gathered after one session is unlikely to provide reliable insights, measuring impact for multiple sessions over the course of many months will provide you with a good understanding of whether or not hangouts are helping you to achieve your goals.

At Simply Business, we organized nine hangouts for a total cost of $2,400 (guest fees and their travel costs). During this time, average attendance to our live events increased from 10-15 people to over 50. Activity amongst our Google+ small business community has spiked after every hangout with 50% of new discussions occurring today when compared to a year ago. Finally, the number of views on our YouTube channel doubled thanks large to views of the hangout clips (we cut every one-hour session into 15-20 clips).

Cadbury is a good example of a company with clear goals for using Google hangouts, but also for measuring outcomes to justify the investment. According to Jerry Daykin, Social Media Manager at Cadbury, the brand wanted to create content that was unique and exciting and cool enough that people want to share it. Therefore, measuring success for Cadbury meant proving that hangouts would increase social shares and followers.

Well, Cadbury proved it. The data showed that hangouts boosted its Google+ followers by 150,000 and earned about 75 "+1s" and 35 comments per hangout. Moreover, hangouts contributed to a 17% increase in click throughs across Cadbury's AdWords campaigns, an increase of 7.5% in traffic from Google URLs and sales of £8 million. With data like this, Cadbury marketers have solid proof that hangouts are valuable and clearly worthy of continued investment. You can learn more about Cadbury's success in the video below.

Takeaways

• You can be wildly innovative with hangouts as long as you know what you want to accomplish and have a plan of action. Embrace creativity, but do not try to organize video sessions around subjects you have no full understanding of. Stick to your expertise and focus on providing actionable advice.
• Written documentation is crucial. Have some kind of plan in place so that you don’t have to do everything from scratch every time you organize a hangout. Put in writing how you are going to prepare, promote and run hangouts as well as how you’ll use them in your content marketing efforts.
• Test, test, test. Your guests’ time is valuable so make sure everyone is happy with the output. If you struggle with any of hangout features, check out the page of +Ronnie Bincer, a hangout coach who runs his own Q&A sessions on the subject.
• Turn on the Hangouts On Air option for every session you run, but select carefully which ones you publish to YouTube publicly and which ones you keep private.
• Give yourself a break! If you run lots of hangouts, there’s a probability that something will go wrong at some point. The unique benefit of hangouts is that the audience is prepared to accept the lower video quality and technical slip ups – that’s the nature of daring to go live – as long the actual discussion is engaging and of interest to them.

I would love to learn about your own experiences with organizing hangouts and any challenges you ran into which I did not mention above. What works best for you and what would you discourage? Do you think the quality of the video is important? Thanks and good luck with your future hangouts.