Every audience recruitment effort should begin with Identifying THE RIGHT PROSPECTS. As simple as it sounds to define this, in my experience this is where I see many professionals fall short of the mark. Identifying THE RIGHT PROSPECTS as it relates to successful webinar audience recruitment is just like Sun Tzu’s comment on the Art of War: in preparation, every battle is won before it has begun. Inversely, so is it lost!

So let’s talk about how we can be successful in Identifying THE RIGHT PROSPECTS? First, we must Isolate the value proposition. Now what do I mean by that? Well, clearly, the process of precisely targeting the right prospects begins with segmentation, and segmentation begins with clearly defining what THe heck it is you want to tell your audience!

Wikipedia tells us that segmenting is the process that a company uses to divide its market into distinct groups who have distinct needs, wants, behavior or who might want different products & services. And segmenting begins with isolating the value proposition. That is, what topic, EXACTLY, will you relay information about?

This of course seems simple and, frankly, it is. BUt this step is crucially important for the next phase of the process which is Developing a profile of your best prospect on which to build your audience around. As an example…so you want to offer a new online CRM app to the marketing community. GREAT! Which industries are you interested in connecting with?… And, within those industries, marketing levels (c-level, director, etc.), and what functions, or titles, within marketing (marketing communications, product marketing, channel marketing, direct marketing, vertical marketing) do you seek? And so on. These are all questions the answers to which form your prospect profile.

With that in hand, now let’s define the audience based on that profile. This means beginning the phase of the process by sizing and locating your audience, among other things. Do you want Fortune 1000 companies, or those with revenues between 10 and 50 million? What geography do you want to pull from? Will your audience be current customers, or fresh prospects, or both?

The answers are sometimes more difficult to obtain, unless your company subscribes to one of the many sources available out there, such as Hoover’s, Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInformation, and so on. Of course, you can also pass control of this phase to others who can size and locate for you, such as list brokers like ABI, InfoUSA and many, many others.

Regardless of how you size and locate your prospective audience, sooner or later, you need a means to source the prospect data itself.