A successful marketing Webinar series can educate your prospects on your company’s uniqueness, create a competitive advantage, dramatically increase lead flow, and drive sales. Sadly, most Webinar producers who try to create a series for the first time make common mistakes, and the series fails to reach its objectives. Their company misses an opportunity for advantage in the marketplace, and the Webinar producers look bad in front of their peers and managers.

Whether you want to produce a marketing or training Webinar series, there are certain strategies and tactics that work time and again, regardless of your target audience or size of your organization and budget.

This series, Create and Run a Winning Webinar Series, will help you get things right virtually every time and make sure your Webinar series is a continued success.

Key questions answered include:

• What are best practices for creating and maintaining a successful series of Webinars, and what are the common mistakes to avoid?
• How can you get more interest and increase attendance to your Webinar events by using social media marketing?
• How can you tap into the strategic power of a series to accomplish more?
• What is the easiest way to build better, more engaging content so attendees come back again and again?
• What’s working for leading organizations that are doing Webinar series? (Learn from specific examples, tactics, and strategies.)

A note to the reader before we get started: we focus primarily on live Webinars, one-to-many seminars delivered online for marketing and sales purposes.

We recommend recording those Webinars and promoting the on-demand version as well. Recordings can boost the total number of Webinar viewers by 40% or more.

PART 1: Stepping Up Your Game with a Winning Webinar Series

“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile-driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time.”
- Sir Winston Churchill

There has been a marketing revolution over the past 1 0 to 15 years. In our world of 24/7 media and Web 2.0, the old marketing strategies don’t work, and those that are early adopters or fast-followers of a strategy like a Webinar series will gain more sales leads, clients, and, potentially, even a competitive advantage.

Consider these recent successes with a variety of Webinar series.

A Technology Products Firm Becomes the Leader in Its Niche and Grows
Sales 70% per Year over Consecutive Years

A small products company wanted to cost-effectively position itself in a defined marketplace and generate new contacts in its marketing database with opt-in email addresses. So it collaborated with complementary vendors and media firms and created a monthly Webinar series.

The company was able to achieve its objectives with its series, including creating a list of 40,000 email names and also followed up with more product-focused Webinars, which fueled the compound growth of the company for years.

A Small Services Firm Becomes the Market Leader with Quarterly Thought-
Leadership Webinars

A small services firm desired to get beyond its lead service and demonstrate its expertise by featuring its full range of services in the marketplace. It created a quarterly Webinar series targeting decision makers with content on diverse topics that matched its new areas of competence.

The result: it added new clients for all its services. It also broadened the positioning of the company to diversify its portfolio of offerings in the market.

A Mid-Size Global Products and Services Company Repositions Its Firm from a stagnant Market to a Growth Sector with the Help of a Multi-Faceted Webinar Series

A geographically dispersed communications management firm with clients in Europe and North America had gone to market with the same message for 10 years. Additionally, its core target market stopped growing and even started to shrink, so the company knew it needed to reach new markets.

It decided to reposition the company around a rising global trend in communications and developed a benchmarking study of market use, issues, and management. To relaunch its products and drive thought-leadership around this new position, the company launched an aggressive Webinars series with as many as three Webinars a day. Fueled in part by the series, the company now has new momentum and-greater sales – in short, a whole new life. As these three success stories suggest, a Webinar series, if done well, can literally be a game-changing strategy for your organization.

Consider that others have used Webinar series to:

• Launch a product, service, or company,
• Move a product, service, or company into a new market,
• Reposition a company in the marketplace,
• Generate more sales leads, sales opportunities, and sales,
• Transform the way a company communicates with its clients,
• Turn training into a profit center or company asset,
And many more.

While a single Webinar can offer significant benefits to your company, creating and managing a Webinar series can help you gain significant advantage in the marketplace and boost your company’s profits.

© 2010 Quantum Leap Marketing, Inc

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omNovia keeps quietly slipping features into their web conferencing software without making much noise about it. They don’t announce version numbers and new releases. Every so often I’ll log into my conferencing room and notice a new option. Then I go out to their Product Enhancements page to see what the heck is going on.

Today I noticed that after uploading a slide deck to the conference room I now have the option to show or hide a thumbnail display of the slides in my presentation. The display is local to my computer as a presenter. Other presenters can choose to show or hide it for themselves. The audience never sees it. I can click on a slide to immediately move to that point in the presentation (I still have the option to move forward or backward sequentially as well).

This is not a big new innovative feature for the industry. It’s more like something I simply expect a major webinar tool to have available. But I do like the fact that the option to show the thumbnail images is local for each presenter. I’m delighted that omNovia has moved beyond the rather primitive method of direct-accessing a slide by typing in its number. As a presenter, there are times when being able to see what slide comes next is a huge benefit. It keeps you from being surprised by your own presentation!

I also finally took the time to play with a feature that they added at the end of July. Presentation Manager is a tool that lets a presenter or moderator pre-load a sequence of content items to show during the webinar. Consider a complex webinar that includes the following steps:

1. Show slide deck #1 with introductory slides
2. Show slide deck #2 for first presenter
3. Conduct audience poll #1
4. Show movie clip #1
5. Show slide deck #2 for second presenter
6. Show movie clip #2
7. Conduct audience poll #2
8. Show slide deck #3 for summary and wrap-up

This requires someone on the presentation team to be very familiar with all the loaded content. Each time you want to bring up the proper slide deck, movie clip or poll, you have to open a presentation dialog popup window and select the appropriate content piece from a list of all loaded items. Not rocket science, but it can add a few seconds of distraction from the content and delivery. And if you accidentally select the wrong content item, you look disorganized.

With Presentation Manager, you do all the selection ahead of time and save the sequence under a name of your choice. During the live event, you bring up the sequence list and click each item’s play button at the desired time. The selected content immediately displays for the audience, without requiring you to go through the search and select process.

Although the Presentation Manager actions are presented in a sequential list format, you still have the ability to arbitrarily select them out of sequence if desired.

The one thing that seems to be missing is automatic tab switching. omNovia uses a tabbed display to show different kinds of content. The presenter chooses whether the audience should see the Application Sharing tab or the Slide Show tab or the Movie Player tab or the Live Video tab, and so on. If you are sitting on the Slide Show tab and click the Presentation Manager action item to show a movie clip, it faithfully loads the movie in the conference room and starts playing it. But nobody would see that video unless the presenter manually changed the view to the Movie Player tab. I can’t imagine a situation where you would want to start showing a new piece of content but not actually show it! Adding an automatic tab switch when appropriate seems like a good enhancement here.

Admittedly, in many simple webinars Presentation Manager would be overkill. If you just narrate over one PowerPoint deck, there is no need for the functionality, in which case you simply ignore it. But I can definitely see this coming in handy for more complex productions.

Reposted from Ken Molay’s article on The Webinar Blog

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Remember those “old days” of online marketing, when your strategic marketing goals determined your content strategy? Times have changed, and the social world we live in has flipped that model upside down. Instead of relying on corporate “push” messages, the most successful marketers of 2010 are giving prospects the ability to “pull” fresh, human, relevant content via search engines and social networks. This whitepaper will help you:

• Understand the shift behind the new age of content creation and distribution
• Rethink content in a way that aligns with what your prospects want
• Provide tactical advice on how to generate an abundance of content

Download @ http://www.box.net/shared/69cr1khadb .

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Join us this September 23rd and learn how to drive maximum post-webinar value from your registrants…both those who attended and those who did not.

One of the most common complaints from those producing and delivering marketing webinars is the lack of planning for development and nurturing of registrants into richer opportunities. Reasons for this issue include “skinny” sales & marketing organizations who don’t have the “bodies” to follow-up, lack of a CRM or lead-nurturing system and cultural obstacles for lead sharing within the sponsoring organization.

In this webinar, you’ll learn best practices for not only planning for, but executing upon, a solid plan for developing interested registrants into more valuable opportunities, via post-event nurturing tactics from voice prospecting to email marketing and more.

Post-Webinar Opportunity Creation is part of our webinar Thought Leadership Series. You may view the inaugural event, The Business Value of Informational Webinars, by going to: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/852641187

Additional webinars in our Thought Leadership Series include: Living Case Stories, Leveraging Analytics & Metrics, The Nuts and Bolts of Impactful Webinar production, and more. Stay tuned for additional details!

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So, we’ve identified the group we’re going to recruit our audience from, and we’ve developed some highly-impactful messaging.  We’ve developed or acquired a list.  We’ve conceived our invitation strategy.  Now it’s time to deliver the messaging to market.

Clearly, there are many ways to deliver invitations to your group.  However, the most cost-effective by far is the one which best leverages the Web itself…email or, as I call it, e-broadcasting.  And this really is the context I’ve been talking in all along.

Again, in using email 1) start inviting 2.5 weeks prior to the webinar, 2) send 3 invitations and 1 list-wide reminder, 3) send the invitations in a rhythm of 3 business days, instead of once a week AND 4) interpolate plain-text and HTML content for optimum outcome.

ALSO using email, first and foremost, means being CAN-Spam compliant.  Many of us are acquainted with the requirements of CAN-Spam.  But did you know that, irrespective of quote unquote best practices, the CAN-Spam Act does not require you to have permission to communicate with your prospect?  It does require you to use a legitimate “from/to” email address, to include a physical address, to use genuine language that is not misleading and that, above all, you provide an easy means to unsubscribe.  It does not require you to have permission to communicate with your prospect.  It does require that you honor an unsubscribe request within 10 days of the request being made.

Many of our clients are professing lessening outcomes from fatigued permission-based lists.  Meanwhile, many well-known large enterprises have invested in broad licenses of tools like Zoom Information and Jigsaw.  Why?  Because you can reach a much larger audience…one with fresh perspectives and interests.  This is a very important topic to consider when conceiving your integrated marketing strategy for 2010 and beyond.

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http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/64432/xmwyu

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http://img.en25.com/Web/CitrixOnline/MarketingProfs_9_Management_Practices.pdf

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from Dave Paradi and I am the author of “The Visual Slide Revolution.” I help presenters transform overloaded text slides into persuasive visuals:

I’m back from PowerPoint Live and today’s tip is about the top ideas I learned while at the conference. First off, the conference is changing its name. It is now known as The Presentation Summit, reflecting the evolution of the content beyond just software features to many other techniques and ideas that presentation professionals need to know about. The next conference is Oct 17-20, 2010 in San Diego.

I went to an excellent session by Echo Swinford on creating templates in PowerPoint 2007. She gave a clear workflow to follow and explained how we can create a theme in PowerPoint that can carry colors and fonts over to Word and Excel for even greater consistency in our communications. I see so many problems with templates designed by professional designers who don’t know the secrets Echo shared. Echo is going to create a series of video programs that every marketing, design and presentation professional should watch to save themselves and their colleagues hours of frustration in working with templates. I’ll let you know when the videos are available.

Dr. Carmen Taran gave a session on using dramatic photos to capture attention. The session was so popular that she was asked to deliver it again at the end of the conference. The great idea I got from her session was to keep a lightbox on istockphoto of photos that you may need in the future. A lightbox is a folder where you can keep items you like but aren’t ready to purchase yet. Then, purchase the photos only when you need to use them. This is a great way to capture those interesting photos you see and save money until you need to spend it.

Conference attendees were also given a sneak peak at PowerPoint 2010. I heard nothing but positive comments about it. Some of the new features include true embedding of video files, the ability to create a video of your presentation from within PowerPoint and more. A public beta version will be available before the end of the year and it has virtually the same user interface, so the upgrade learning curve won’t be as steep as between version 2003 and 2007.

If you want to get a sense of the commentary that Twitter users filed during the conference, search for hashtag #pptlive on Twitter. Thanks to everyone who stopped me in the hall or came up to me during the day and said that they enjoy my work. It means a lot to know that my ideas are making a difference for you. I look forward to seeing many more of you next year in San Diego!

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So let’s wrap up WITH SOME final points on DRIVING optimal WEBINAR ATTENDANCE…
First, remember “Content first, any inducements second.” At WebAttract we espouse informational webinars, which are case-study-centric, communicating best practices and lessons learned, and demonstrating business value, supporting metrics and ROI. There’s little room for inducements unless you are doing a nakedly commercial webinar that is product-centric.

2nd, be sure to leverage credentials of contributing parties, both on your landing page and especially in your email invitation content.

3rd, use touchstone words and phrases to gradually increase sense of urgency across touchpoints. A special note here to be certain and not use words which will cheapen the message or trigger spam filters.

And lastly, send reminders prior to event, ideally using your registration engine to invite registrants and your own email channel to reach out to your overall prospective audience. This last email, BTW, is the one which, if on no other touchpoints, you want to use plain-text.

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“Jim wrote in and asked “What’s a good source to compare the various web conferencing applications before choosing one?”

This is a question I have addressed in the past, but it’s worth talking about again, as it is one of the most repeated queries on this blog. The short answer is that I don’t know of any trusted, all in one source for comparing web conferencing applications on an equal basis.

The closest you’ll get is Publicare’s site: webconferencing-test.com. It gives you some criteria they selected for making a rating system and points you toward some very usable software.

Problem number one (for my blog focus) is that Publicare chose to “focus on online conferencing solutions for smaller and medium-sized companies and the self-employed.” These tend to be less expensive solutions designed primarily for peer-level collaborative meetings. That is a valid niche, and I’m not knocking their choice of focus. But you need to be aware that it leaves out web conferencing packages targeted at large structured web seminars or training sessions where the focus is on presenters providing information to an audience.

Problem number two is that all rating systems have a built in bias towards the criteria that the tester chooses to emphasize. Those criteria might not meet your priorities for product selection.

Problem number three is that many of the big web conferencing vendors have multiple versions of their software. Adobe, iLinc, and WebEx are just some of the big recognizable names that license distinct versions of their software designed for small events, large events, eLearning, or support. Which version do you choose for your comparison?

Problem number four is that you are dealing with a moving target. The vendors update their software all the time. With web conferencing commonly licensed as a hosted SaaS solution, the programs can (and do) get upgrades whenever the vendor feels like it. These are sometimes not even announced publicly!

Problem number five is that there just isn’t a strong business return for the poor shlub who is thinking about doing the work. If you accept advertising from the vendors on your site, your testing objectivity comes into question. You spend an enormous amount of time testing and writing up results, then spend the rest of your life retesting and updating and answering challenges from vendors and users. And every new piece of software that comes along wants you to add them to the review list. It’s a major commitment if you plan to take it seriously.

I wrote up a blog post a year ago on “My Favorite Webinar Technologies.” That was a snapshot in time, and it is now out of date. I have been using omNovia quite a lot lately with excellent results, and it would be high in my list. InstantPresenter got a major update, and I like it much more now (coming in first place for fee-based events). I haven’t tested iLinc lately, and I know they have had updates. Connect Pro actually slipped a bit because of some slide conversion problems that I found frustrating.

I try to keep this blog updated with mini-reviews of various webinar products from time to time as well as key announcements when I find out about upgrades that affect usability. But I’m the first to say that I don’t use a structured approach and it’s not very useful for vendor to vendor comparisons. Given that this is a non-revenue activity for me, I’m afraid the haphazard nature is likely to continue. In the meantime, let me point you to a series of articles I wrote on Webinar Wire where I talk about some of the major webinar features and how vendors implement them in different ways. You can go to the site and do a search on “features”.

If you find a comparison site I don’t know about, please let me know and I’ll publicize it for everyone to use!”

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