Filed under: Polls & Surveys, Webinars
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29 Jul
10
28 Jul
10
27 Jul
10
Having conquered the PC space and made a good stab at the MAC space, the webinar industry is now going where no man has gone before: the mobile space.
A few months ago, Adobe Connect introduced its mobile application for the iPhone. It allows audience members to attend a webinar on their iPhone. It looks pretty slick. I have not had an opportunity to test it yet so the jury is out for me. Look for a review of it here as soon as I get a chance to kick the tires.
What I have tested is an interesting application by Premiere Global Services (alternatively branding themselves as PGi). The application is called PGi Mobile. It enables the user to moderate a teleseminar (or the audio portion of a webinar) from one’s iPhone.
What is at first disconcerting is understanding that you are NOT calling into the teleconference when you use this application. You are using your login credentials (provided by PGi) to administer the teleconference. Hence you can mute and unmute attendees, kick attendees off the call, establish “breakout rooms” (called sidebar sessions), record your teleconference and dial new participants into the teleconference. Using this last option you can have PGi call your iPhone and bring you into the teleconference and even though you are the moderator you can just as easily enter the conference as a participant because all your moderator controls are in the application itself. If you want to control your behavior as the moderator, then you do need to dial in as a moderator.
For the teleseminar moderator, this application frees you from your desk. But what about the webinar moderator? This usage takes a bit of imagination to justify. One possibility: if you are using a webinar product that does not integrate audio controls into its interface, then using PGi’s audio service and using this app to control attendees might work. Another possible application might be a team moderation approach where you monitor the webinar chat room while your co-moderator who might not be near a PC, monitors and controls the phone portion of the webinar. Still, these ideas are a bit of a stretch. The iPhone app seems ideally suited to teleseminars. (If you have used this application with webinars, please let us know in the comments box below!)
Teleconference services have provided PC applications for conference control for some time now. The real conceptual trick to PGi Mobile, is wrapping your head around the idea that the application is on your phone but really has nothing to do with your phone. You control the conference using your phone as a portable computing device and you call into the conference using your phone as … well … a phone. Once you grasp this distinction, you will find PGi Mobile quite intuitive to use and a great example of the online seminar industry going mobile.
By Matt Bovell, President and CEO of Vell Group LLC
Filed under: Webinars
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26 Jul
10
Share your opinion in our poll @ http://polls.linkedin.com/p/97047/yajuy.
Filed under: Polls & Surveys, Webinars
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23 Jul
10
22 Jul
10
When B2B marketers first embraced email marketing, the idea was to populate a database and continuously send one-size-fits-all messages to supposed prospects. The idea being that by keeping these folks exposed to your company’s name and logo, you’d stay “top of mind.” That process is now referred to as “spray and pray” marketing. In a longer-term, B2B complex sales process, just knowing your company’s name or recognizing your logo is not enough.
The one-size-fits-all email blast is a tactic, not a strategic marketing process. And, a lousy tactic at that when relevance and value are the admission fee for catching and keeping prospect attention.
Consider this from a personal perspective for a moment. You’re aware of a lot of brands. Many of them probably send you stuff. How many of them do you pay attention to? When it comes time to buy a product, how do you decide which one?
Awareness doesn’t require action.
I’m aware of Anheuser Busch. I love their Clydesdale ads. But I don’t drink beer. I’m also aware of many other beers. If I had to pick one, it would probably boil down to a “close my eyes and point” exercise because I have no expertise in selecting beer. Or, I’d ask a friend I know who loves beer.
Moving back to the B2B side, consider selecting an email service provider (ESP). There are lots of options. In fact, there are so many options people don’t know where to start. That’s because they have limited expertise in selecting an ESP.
So let’s say that one buyer has been receiving emails from two vendors. Vendor A sends offers of special deals and incentives. They rave about how well their customers are doing by using their superior system.
Vendor B consistently sends educational content that helps the buyer learn about best practices for increasing the effectiveness of email campaigns. They share stories about their customers’ ingenuity in deploying email campaigns that produce results, despite the down economy.
When it comes time for the buyer to select a new ESP, the buyer goes online to look at both options. Hey, they were both Top of Mind.
The services are comparable, although Vendor B is bit more expensive. But the buyer feels an affinity toward Vendor B. The buyer has more confidence that Vendor B will be able to provide him with the additional expertise and support he needs to get the best results from the email system. Vendor B just seems to care more. The buyer contacts Vendor B to take next steps in his purchasing process.
This doesn’t mean Vendor A isn’t all of those things. But staying Top of Mind wasn’t enough to win them a customer when compared with all that Vendor B did to go beyond just staying Top of Mind. It won’t be enough for your company either, given the likelihood that your competitors are also emailing your prospects.
The goal for B2B marketing has to move beyond the idea of staying Top of Mind to building relationships that accelerate pipeline momentum. Achieving that goal requires the establishment of a marketing content discipline based on relevance and value applied specifically to address target audience needs.
In essence, email marketing must become lead nurturing. Email marketing is tactical. Lead nurturing is strategic. It’s a different mindset. The process of lead nurturing helps companies focus on prospects, instead of on themselves. And that’s what matters to your buyers.
By Ardath Albee, B2B Marketing Strategist, Marketing Interactions
Filed under: Webinars
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20 Jul
10
There is no doubt about it:
Lead generation webinars work and work well …
… but after working with hundreds of companies, some spending millions of dollars on generating prospects with their webinars, I am certain your webinars — and the lead generation campaigns they are part of — aren’t working as well as they could be.
While there are dozens of advanced strategies that can boost response, decrease lead cost, and increase lead quality; before you even think about diving into them you should check to make sure the right foundation is in place.
Why?
Because even the most successful companies I have worked with are usually making dramatic mistakes that are costing them money and time.
In this post, you’ll find an even dozen of the most common mistakes companies make with lead generation webinars.
They are broken into three categories: 1) what has to happen before your webinar, 2) how you deliver your webinar, and 3) what you do after your webinar is complete.
• Mistakes that happen before your lead gen webinar
1. Not offering different webinars to different segments of customers. This is a mistake in overall strategy. Too often, companies offer one “blanket” webinar in which the try to be all things to all people. Big mistake. Your webinars will generate better leads higher when you segment your market and tailor specific webinars to each of your best clusters of customers. Why? Because the more targeted your message, the more your attendees feel like you understand them and the more they want to get involved.
2. Choosing a dry, “me too” topic and title. Is your webinar title dull, broad and “business like?” If so, it’s one of the reasons your prospects are less likely to register for your webinar in the first place. The best titles elicit an emotional response from the prospects who read them. These titles make them stop in their tracks and think, “Yes, I have to have this information. This is well worth an hour of my time.” And if your webinar title doesn’t do this, you’ll never attract the kind of hungry, qualified prospects you desire.
Too often companies run their lead generation webinar on the same generic topics: a demo of this or a preview of that. And they run the same ones over and over all year long. Which is, in a way, good news for you. It means it’s easy for you to be different and to stand out from your competition. One way to do it is to capitalize on current news and trends. Constantly ask yourself this question, “What is my market most aware of or concerned with right now?” Then tie your webinar and it’s enticing title to that, and you’ll generate significantly more interest.
3. Not surveying your prospects after registration. So you’ve grabbed your ideal prospect with your irresistible topic and title, and they’ve registered for your webinar. Immediately after registration, do you offer them a survey? If not, your making another costly mistake, for two reasons.
* Surveys tell you more about who’s going to be on your webinar and allow your to tailor your presentation to the specific needs and desires of your attendees. You’d be surprised how open and honest people are with the anonymity of a private form. Which means you can gain new insights into your market that help you make stronger connections and bigger sales.
* The more your prospects interact with you and your company before the webinar, the more likely they are to show up. The small investment in time and information gets them excited about attending. And, when they know there’s a possibility one of their questions or concerns will be address, they’ll pay closer attention once they’re there, making it easier for you to convert them.
4. Not making handouts available prior to the webinar. When most people think of handouts, they think of fill in the blank. And this works. But just as, if not more, important are visual elements like graphs, charts, ect. Even cartoons or drawings have their place if they make your registrants curious about some part of your presentation.
Again, as with surveys, handouts are about involvement. About piquing your registrants’ curiosity and making them excited about one or more pieces of information you’ll reveal on the webinar. Additionally, handouts satisfy your prospects’ need for instant gratification when they’re the most “hot and bothered.”
When done correctly, the topic, title and registration page for your webinar your make registrants want the information you’re teasing right then and there. But when they have to wait a few days for the actual event, that initial excitement wears off. Your handouts give them a taste of the information they so desperately want and hold out the promise of more.
• 5. Not using video prior to event. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because someone registers for your webinar that they’ll show up the day of the event. People are busy and won’t remember the exact date and time of your session if they’re not reminded. And even if they do remember when it is, they may not remember why they were so excited about it in the first place. By using video between registration and your webinar, you do two things.
* You connect with your attendees, increasing the likelihood they’ll show up. People like doing business with other people, not nameless, faceless corporations. Using video beforehand gives your registrants the opportunity to get to know you (your face, your voice) and makes them more inclined to trust you and your offer.
* You stay in front of your registrants, making it harder for them to forget your session. Use the videos to remind them when the webinar is, why they need to pay attention, what they’ll gain by being there, and what they stand to loose by not. Essentially, you want to re-ignite whatever it is that go them excited enough to register in the first place. Hit the same emotional “hot buttons” and direct them to your handouts one more time.
Mistakes that sabotage your webinar delivery
6. Being boring. Anyone can hold a webinar. Very few people can sell on them. Even less can entertain on them. And an even smaller number can both entertain and sell. But the good news is if you get the “entertaining” part down, the selling part is easier than you think. Why? Because when you entertain your audience, you engage them … you draw them in and before they know it, they’re pulling out their wallets to give you money.
Now when I say “entertain”, I’m not talking about being over the top or outrageous. The best way to be boring is to recite a list of facts. The best way to entertain is by telling stories. Find a way to make the same points in story-form as you would in your list of facts.
7. Having “me, me, me” content. The bigger your company, the more likely you are to make this mistake …
Your webinar is not about you or your company, it’s about your attendees and their problems or goals.
If you don’t get that, read it again.
You don’t want to spend 90 minutes talking about how great your company is, how long you’ve been in business, how many clients you have, ect. You do want to spend 90 minutes talking about your prospects problems and/or goals and offering your product or service as a way to overcome and/or achieve them.
8. Reading your slides. Not only is reading your slides boring, but it directs your attendees attention away from where it should be: on you. Let me ask you, are your slides set up to teach, make points or deliver information? If the answer’s yes, then you’re making this mistake.
Your slides should be set up to engage your audience and recapture their attention. If attendees know all you’re doing is reading from your slides, they’ll tune you out and focus just on their screens. Instead on using your slides to make points, you could …
* pose a question
* highlight a spectacular result they want to hear the story behind
* display a visual or illustration relating to the point you’re speaking
Using slides this way grabs your audience’s attention and directs it back to you, not the screen. Do you see the difference?
• 9. Not having enough proof. Let me be very clear, you can never offer too much proof. Proof comes in many forms. Some of the most common forms are testimonials, case histories, visual displays (graphs, charts, before and after photos, ect.) Most people are looking for a reason not to buy. And when you overwhelm them with proof, you make it hard for them to make a case against you and your offer. Think about the different ways you can demonstrate proof and the different times during your presentation when you can present it. I’ll say it again, you can never have too much.
10. Not defining a clear course of action once the webinar has ended. Have you ever ended a lead generation webinar by saying, “If you’re interested in what we’ve talked about tonight, call the office.” If so, you’re leaving too much up to your audience. Anyone who’s already made up their mind about doing business with you or who has just a few more questions before they decide to get involved will respond to that kind of close. But the majority of your audience will not fall into that category. And if all you leave them with is an invitation to call the office if they’re interested, they won’t.
What you need to do instead is give them a clear path and make it easy to follow. Call them out specifically: “If you’re in this situation (whatever the situation is), and you want this to happen (whatever that is for them), and you understand that this will happen if you don’t act (whatever it may be), this what you need to do now (and be specific!).”
Mistakes that waste the effort put into your lead generation webinar
11. Not having a multi-channel follow up process. If your idea of following up with leads is handing them to your salespeople once the webinar has ended, you leaving a lot of clients and potential profits on the table. Following up with your webinar attendees in one way only is not enough. Ideally, the end of you webinar should trigger a series of follow ups in different media: e-mails, postal mailing, phone calls, ect. The best follow-up processes are well thought out, choreographed efforts. They’re planned to hit you leads at their highest points of interest, re-engage them at their lowest, and stay in front of them overtime.
12. Ignoring non buyers. Understand that very few people buy at the first point of contact with a company. Sometimes they buy the second time, sometimes the third, sometimes the seventeenth. The point is if you ignore a lead because they don’t buy on your webinar or from your sales person right after the webinar, you’re missing out on a huge potential for profit. You could sell twice as much as you are currently if you have a well-planned follow-up process to convert non-buyers overtime. Stay in front of your prospects. Make it hard for them to ignore you and the solutions you provide and, through time, you’ll maximize the value of the leads you paid a significant amount of money to get in the first place.
by Michael Cage, in Teleseminar, Webinar & Video Blog
Filed under: Webinars
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18 Jul
10
I haven’t seen anything on the wires yet, so this may be your first chance to hear of a new lower price option for Cisco WebEx Event Center. If you are not intimately familiar with the WebEx family of web conferencing products, you can easily get confused by the different names and versions. There is Meeting Center, Training Center, Remote Support, Remote Access, and a Beta product called WebEx Meet. Confusing, isn’t it?
The version that I always end up using for formal scheduled webinars is Event Center. It adds features to support registration, reporting, tracking, attendee communications, Q&A management, eCommerce, and other things necessary for complete control and analysis of a webinar. It also has an integrated telephony and streaming audio option for attendees that includes some very nice international access features.
One of the biggest negative perceptions of WebEx Event Center has been its high price. Traditionally the company focused on selling big enterprise accounts allowing many users to host webinars. These commanded premium pricing that practically excluded smaller users who just wanted a single account to do a webinar or two.
Today my Cisco representative gave me a new pricing option on Event Center, available immediately. A single user (webinar host) can have an Event Center room with up to 100 person capacity for a flat rate charge of $99/month on month to month billing, or as low as an equivalent $79/month when you prepay for a year of service.
Higher capacity rooms are also available. A 500-attendee maximum costs $399 or $319/month (per month vs yearly billing) and a 1000-attendee maximum goes for $499 or $399.
These prices include attendee audio through their choice of computer audio or toll telephone access. Presenters can speak via their preference of a VoIP computer headset or a toll telephone call. Toll free and local international access numbers can be added at an additional charge. There is also a one-time optional charge for branding your room with corporate logos, hyperlinks, and a domain-specific URL.
I’m quite pleased to see WebEx becoming practical for small business webinars through Event Center. There are a lot of great features in the product and the low flat rate usage option should be attractive to many who had previously eliminated WebEx from their selection short list based on price.
From Ken Molay, President, Webinar Success
Filed under: Webinars
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15 Jul
10
Imagine this: Your best friend comes to you one morning and tells you she’s had it with her telephone. She’s throwing it away because it doesn’t help her with traditional handwritten communication.
Crazy talk, right? Your friend doesn’t need a different tool for traditional communication, she needs a new approach to communication.
Traditional B2B marketers who resist social media aren’t much different. They resist social media because it doesn’t work when they use it as another outbound marketing channel.
Instead of rejecting social media as a channel, traditional marketers need to reject their outbound approach to marketing.
Traditional marketing — outbound marketing — is about buying attention. You figure out where your target customers hangout, then you buy access to them. You fill the pages of trade publications they read with print ads. You interrupt them with unsolicited phone calls at their office. You send out mailings that they throw away.
These tactics are incompatible with social media. If your Twitter account is simply a product information broadcast, you won’t have many followers. If you don’t share any helpful, interesting or fun content on your Facebook account, your pages will get little traffic.
On the other hand, if you reject this approach to marketing, and use social media as part of an inbound marketing strategy, it will become a core part of your marketing mix. If you engage with your industry’s community on Twitter, if you share top-notch content on Facebook, and build relationships on LinkedIn, social media will work for you.
“Wait!” you say. “We’re a B2B operation! We don’t have social-savvy customers like B2C companies.”
Lame excuse.
No question, social media grew out of the consumer space, and B2C examples of social media success are easy to find. But take a step back. Look at the value that businesses get out of social media. You’ll see it’s not specific to B2B or B2C companies. Consider the three main benefits marketers get from social media:
1. Listening — Every company needs to listen. Doesn’t matter if you sell solder paste, CRM software or fencing supplies. You need to listen to your competitors, your customers, your prospects — your community. Social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook make this easier.
2. Reach — Reach is important to any marketer. It’s the number of people you can communicate with directly via email, telephone, or any other channel. You need this whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses. Social media tools media it easier to build.
3. Nurturing — Nurturing is another critical marketing task for all companies. Regardless of what you sell, you need to build trust with potential customers and educate them about your company and your products. Social media facilitates the development of personal relationships at scale. This makes it an ideal tool for nurturing in any business.
How do you use social media at your company? Have you found it useful in a B2B context?
From Hubspot Social Media Blog
Filed under: Webinars
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12 Jul
10
With all of the various features that can be used with Webinars these days, it can be hard to determine which ones are the most beneficial.
Since Webinars can cover a variety of topics, there are times when some features may be more appropriate to use than others. So we asked a wide audience to tell us what old and new features should be used when hosting a Webinar.
Questions and Brainstorming
The most popular recommendation was to allow the audience to ask questions openly. Many hosts do not keep the question box viewable to everyone watching the Webinar, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for questions or discussion. Even more interactive than questions, is using the webinar for brainstorming purposes, as suggested by Jim Vetter from the Education Development Center.
“We’ve recently been having good results from using on-screen brainstorming in our webinars. In Adobe Connect, we create a chat pod that, at the right time, appears over a PowerPoint slide containing the prompt question. Participants then type in their ideas, which appear on a growing, scrolling list. This strategy has significantly increased participation with groups that are too large for us to leave phone lines unmuted for brainstorming. With the right brainstorm topic, the activity has increased participant engagement and learning as well as contributing valuable, user-generated content to the session.”
Webcams
With web cameras becoming standard equipment for most laptops these days, video has now become an option in most Webinar software. Many who responded to our questions felt this was a very underutilized feature and something that has been available for a while. It creates a personal experience when you can see the person who is talking on the phone, or others who may be participating as well. Anthony Russo from Infinity Conference Call claims that many people come to him asking for the feature and then never actually turn their web camera on because they forget.
“I find that video is a feature that winds up being under-utilized, even by those that specifically are looking for it when they come to us…What happens after the first few meetings is most people never turn on their webcams…live video gets forgotten once the ‘novelty’ wears off, and people don’t bother to turn it on to see each other.”
Twitter Feed
The final recommendation that was consistently made was the use of a live Twitter feed while the Webinar is running. Adem Sengul from omNovia, believes that using social media is very important with live web events. Assigning a Twitter hashtag to your event in the invitation is helpful when people want to reference your Webinar and see who else is talking about it, especially while the event is going on. (Putting a # in front of a word it then makes it searchable). “By adding the conversation in social media to the live webinars, companies can significantly increase the reach and the impact of their online events. I believe as the demand for social networking increases, more web conference providers are likely to offer similar modules [like omniTweet].”
Having been a Webinar participant many times myself, I know that all three of these recommendations would have greatly enhanced my experience. It would be great to be able to interact with the host and participants using chat boxes, video conferencing and Twitter (based on Hashtags). As more and more features become available, it will be interesting to see if these three actually make it up to the top, or if they continue to fall by the wayside.
What has your experience been with Webinars and underutilized features? Are there any features you feel are important for webinar hosts to use in order to enhance the webinar experience?
Posted originally on WebAttract LinkedIn group by Rachel Levy, founder of WebinarListings.com
Filed under: Webinars
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