Every month, we compile the internet’s biggest list of free skill-building webinars. Thought-leaders, entrepreneurs and business owners are always looking for innovative ways to adapt to the challenges of working remotely, all while trying to grow their skills and projects. The webinars below cover a variety of skills, news, and advice to help. Topics include business strategy and innovations, thought leadership,business practices, HR, TED talks, economy, renewals, eCommerce, and DEI. Now onto this month’s webinars. Please note, all times are indicated in ET (unless otherwise noted). The Importance of Paid Advertising in a Digital Space September 5, 10:00 AM Advertising in the digital space can be complicated, especially with different ad formats, multiple platforms, budgeting, and running your own business! If you are not sure where to begin, or are confused on what kind of ad to run, this session is for you! In this webinar, the Digital Service Squad from Toronto will share key insights into Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads. Unconventional Benefits: What Does Your Workforce Really Want? September 5, 3:00 PM In today’s tight labor market, employers need every competitive edge they can get to stand out. For many, the time to think outside the benefits box is now. In this session, you’ll get a better understanding of the best path forward as it explores: enhancing the employee experience with better benefits, tips for thinking outside the box when planning benefits and seven unconventional benefits to attract and retain top talent. Digital Done Right: Enhancing Student Engagement on Social Media September 6, 2:00 PM Your typical college and university student probably spends most of their free time with their head in a book… but those who aren’t studying hard are most likely to be found on social media. If you want your educational institution to operate at the highest level of communication and engagement this year, it’s time for you to get active on social media, too. This webinar’s for you if you work for a higher-education institution and want to kick-start your organization’s social media presence. How to Improve the Future of Talent Acquisition September 6, 10:00 AM Despite the emphasis on recruitment in recent years, most organizations continue to struggle with talent acquisition, according to the HR Research Institute’s 2023-2024 Future of Talent Acquisition survey. This webcast will discuss further findings from this study, including: the degree to which organizations believe their TA function is effective, the TA challenges organizations face, the tools and metrics most commonly used to facilitate talent acquisition and much more. Turn Your IT Strategy Into a Reality With a Business-Aligned Execution Blueprint September 6, 10:00 AM In the digital era, the closer the relationship between an enterprise's business and IT strategies, the more likely it is to achieve its strategic goals. However, a good plan does not guarantee success. The strategy must be shared, understood, and supported widely across the enterprise, and be well implemented. However, only 47% of organizations successfully accomplish their strategy objectives, according to a Gartner study. This complimentary IT strategy webinar will provide CIOs with a template for and examples of a strategy execution charter that will drive execution success. Sales and Business Development September 7, 10:00 AM Having the right knowledge and skills in sales is crucial for successful business development. Join this mastermind session to learn how to improve your sales techniques and build better client relationships to drive growth and profitability along with the proven 5-step sales method: the DEBUT model. Leader Talk: Sales Training Essentials: Develop and Empower Your Sales Team September 7, 11:00 AM Organizations must ensure their sales teams have the skills and capabilities they need to effectively communicate with customers, meet business goals and close deals, regardless of where they are working. To do this, learning leaders must deliver engaging and impactful sales training programs that enable sales reps to be successful in a competitive business environment. In this Training Industry Leader Talk, you will learn how to effectively train your sales team to thrive in this new age of selling. Steppingstones of E-Commerce: Part 1 – Expanding into E-Commerce September 7, 11:30 AM In an evolving digital world, e-commerce dependency is prominent and driving growth for small businesses. The series breaks down the state of the industry and explores how to maximize your online presence by leveraging an e-commerce solution. This session will cover the importance of the modern e-commerce landscape, establishing your digital hub, and how to get e-commerce ready as Digital Main Street supports your small businesses journey. How to Use AI in Your Digital Marketing Strategy September 7, 1:00 PM Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the way businesses determine and execute their marketing strategy. This webinar will explain the basics of AI and how it can improve your digital marketing, from helping you find the right audience to optimizing your social media content. Discover how AI can make your blog and website easier to find online and gather strategic insights about your industry and competitors. Whether you're new to digital marketing or just want to improve your digital marketing strategy, this session will show you how to use AI effectively and confidently. Setting Better Cyber Job Expectations to Attract & Retain Talent September 7, 2:00 PM Curious about ways to attract talent for cyber roles? Is your talent acquisition team looking for ways to improve? Join this webinar to learn more about how to update job descriptions to better reflect cyber role expectations to improve hiring, training, and retention. Optimizing for Search Engines - Understanding SEO Basics September 12, 10:00 AM Often you will hear about needing to optimize for search engines or SEO. But what is it, and how does it impact your digital presence? In this webinar, the Digital Service Squad will explain search engine optimization and the best tactics you as a business can use towards increasing your ranking in the search engine result pages. Driving Success in the Digital Era: The Crucial Role of Business Schools September 13, 11:00 AM In this webinar, attendees will learn from speakers representing the business education and corporate worlds how they are navigating digital innovations, such as generative AI, online and hybrid delivery, data-driven decision making, and others. It will discuss where the greatest opportunities and challenges of digital transformation lie and share best practices in areas such as strategic planning and management, faculty development, and student preparation. Embracing the AI Revolution: How to Master it for Content & Video Marketing September 13, 2:00 PM Did you know that AI-driven marketing teams can increase lead generation by 20%? Marketing and communication teams everywhere use tools like ChatGPT to automate content creation, conduct research, generate topic ideas, optimize existing content, and become more strategic and customer-focused. Join to discover latest trends and data around AI's impact on the marketing landscape, how AI can revolutionize your communications, content and video marketing efforts, and more. Marketing Plan Execution September 14, 10:00 AM Executing a marketing plan involves a variety strategies. Learn how to effectively implement these tactics to drive results and maximize your marketing efforts. Join this webinar for a mastermind session including top low cost and no cost executions, digital marketing, and website optimization. Session will also include a Q&A. Engage, Influence and Sell: 3 Ways To Improve Your Customer’s Journey September 14, 12:00 PM Understanding the customer journey is a crucial task for retailers because it enables them to smoothly deliver personalized experiences that drive customer satisfaction, loyalty and, most importantly, sales. However, the increasing frequency, nonlinear nature and fragmentation of customer journeys make this understanding a daunting task. This webinar will look at three ways you can improve your customer journey by exploiting recent advances in AI, Data collection and retargeting technology. The 7 Key Trends That Will Affect Your Strategic Planning September 15, 10:00 AM Executive leaders cannot predict the future, but they must build a future-fit organization that can withstand disruption. To do so, they must adopt a deliberate approach to sensing and responding to trends, and understand how trends weave together to impact their strategies. This complimentary webinar will enable executive leaders to better spot trends and disruptions so they can shape a more effective enterprise strategy, and help to minimize complexity, embrace uncertainty, and drive confidence in decision-making while exploring bold new opportunities. Data-Driven HR: Driving Transformation through People Analytics September 20, 10:00 AM Studies have shown that most organizations continue to struggle with people analytics. So, how can HR departments boost their analytics capabilities even while helping their organizations to meet key strategic goals? To help answer these questions, this webcast will examine the findings such as: HR's ability to gather, understand, and communicate people analytics, which types of people analytics organizations are using, how difficult it is for organizations to collect, integrate and analyze people data and much more. Data Storytelling as a Solution for Change & Future Development September 20, 12:00 PM Data by itself is useless; it's how we contextualize it that gives it the power to drive real change. Knowing what data to collect and how to collate it is critical for any organization looking to harness real information and intelligence from their output. If anything, we might be being bogged down by too much data, which can make it difficult to identify where the most value lies. This episode will look at how BI can detect the most important stories within your data -- and how to leverage this for meaningful action. 10 Business Planning Tips for Starting a Business September 21, 1:00 PM Are you thinking of starting a business but don’t know where to begin? In this webinar, an expert presenter will give you 10 business planning tips to help you start your entrepreneurial journey on the right path. At the end of this workshop, you'll have a list of simple steps that you use to begin your business journey today. Topics include defining your business idea, understanding competition, marketing strategy, management and more. Diversity Culture: How to Bring Psychological Safety to the Workplace September 21, 2:00 PM If you’ve heard more about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the past few years you’re not alone. Although DEI has been around for a while, it’s an area of business that’s been steadily gaining attention more recently. This webcast will help companies get diversity culture right by discussing what it means to provide psychological safety at work, the core benefits of a strong DEI program, how to educate without alienating, how to fight implicit bias in the hiring process, and actionable steps for achieving psychological safety at work. Manage Conflict and Resistance From Teams With Difficult Personalities September 25, 10:00 AM Difficult team members may fixate over technicalities, disdain innovation and think you (or others) are after them. The repercussions of their negative behavior can range from difficult to toxic — gossiping, unreliability, undermining, bullying, insubordination, display of incivility, and insolence. All of these actions have impactful ramifications for the organization and its workforce in terms of the overall climate, culture, engagement, and productivity. Executive leaders need to identify and address the most common dysfunctional behavior in their teams and partner with HR and their legal department using their companies’ practices and processes. As labor becomes more communal, networked, and overlapped to boost productivity, this free webinar focuses on helping executive leaders manage these workers and the stress they cause. Enable Customer Learning to Drive Commercial Performance for Your Sales Organization September 26, 10:00 AM Stifled customer learning prevents commercial success in both self-service digital commerce and traditional seller-buying. This presents a challenge for sales organizations. Chief sales officers (CSOs) need to reimagine how sellers deliver a customer experience that overcomes the common pitfalls of self-service digital commerce and augments the benefits of the digital buying environment to foster customer learning. Join this free sales webinar that explores how to enable customer learning to drive commercial performance. A Beginner Guide to Creating a Landing Page for Your Business September 26, 1:00 PM Having a good landing page is the foundation of digital marketing. Without a well-crafted landing page, potential leads have no way to access or learn more about your business online. In this webinar, you’ll learn the basics of digital marketing, the key components of a landing page and how to turn your landing page into a funnel that turns leads into sales. Mitigating the Impact of Inflation: Cost-Cutting Strategies for Businesses September 27, 9:00 AM Rising inflation is hitting companies hard, impacting their bottom line as they struggle to pass on its full effect by raising their own prices and to compensate this loss by productivity gains on direct costs. Adding to their wows, the rapidly rising cost of debt and the financial demands of energy and digital transitions stretch corporate cash flows to breaking point. Luckily, help is at hand with clear strategies to reduce indirect costs. Join for a lively and informative discussion covering the factors at play and ways to tackle the impact of inflation head-on. Use Analytics to Drive Business Growth Through Customer Service and Support September 28, 11:00 AM Customer service and support leaders say that data and analytics is their top organizational priority, but what does a mature service-and-support analytics program look like? Where should leaders focus their investments to harness data effectively, developing analytics capabilities that unlock the full potential of their service organization and propel business growth? Join this free webinar to identify the key components of a successful service analytics strategy. You will explore topics such as the importance of developing strong data literacy within the service organization, and how to build effective collaboration on shared analytics priorities with other parts of the enterprise.