Webinars for Marketing Your Product – Part II

This is the follow up to my prior post on using webinars for marketing.  In addition to the prior post, I had some specific recommendations for putting together a Webinar plan:

Here’s what I recommend to your sales/promotions team:

1. Put together a good online seminar plan for the year or at least for the quarter — maybe monthly seminars and show your webinar calendar online (a couple of months in advance is good).
2. Set up a method for feedback and diligently review to enhance and improve the online seminars since they are quite different from speaking and pointing in person.
3. Set up an online seminars follow-up strategy. Don’t just send out one email or place a phone call after you get the lead information. Continue communicating with those customers by having them opt-in to your webinars series and send out a monthly email inviting them to your new seminars. I have companies that send me an invitation every time there is a new seminar posted. Again, I may not need their services today, but my clients and colleagues do and I share and recommend products very often.
4. Post seminar links in any social marketing that you are doing, like Facebook and Twitter. Yes, they are relevant even for your business. Email me if you want more information on how to use these for your business.
5. Share your events with partners and maybe invite strategic partners to some of your events. This is a great shared marketing opportunity and it is beneficial to have a strong brand behind your business.
6. Make the sessions informational NOT salesy. If I wanted a sales call, I would call the sales department. This is for information, like a white paper. What are the challenges that your customers face and then ultimately how did your product help address some of those challenges? Unique ways of using your products. Particularly for you – real-world examples of everyday invocation of recovery plans, like extended network outages or the email server dies with no backup, etc. The reality and stats around these two is always an eye-opener that hits home. You want to genuinely help potential clients; the sale will come more naturally if you can show how your product benefits them.
7. Grab attention with the event topic. The topic is even more important when you are doing online marketing. Instead of ‘Business Continuty & Virtualization’ (also spell check please) and ‘Learn Best Practice Business Solutions…’ — that are too general, get more specific, like ‘Best Practices in Virtualization for Protecting and Restoring Critical Business Applications that Meet Regulatory Compliance’. Or cut it down to – ‘Meeting Regulatory Compliance through Virtualization Best Practices’. Be creative with the topic to grab attention quickly. Provide more details in the description.
8. Promote, promote, promote. The more you promote online, the more the events show up in Search results too. You might end up using your webinars to boost your online marketing efforts.
9. For your business, see if you can post your webinars in some of your local government counties’ websites that promote business disaster planning. If you can provide their audience with useful information, it’s another opportunity to get in front of prospects and you also provide a service on behalf of the county.
10. Learn how to use the presentation service BEFORE you host your first webinar. Try it a few times with someone on the other end. Fumbling through the first 10 minutes of a webinar is not cool.This should get you started if you want to move on to webinars rather than in-person seminars. Your audience is business people who don’t have time to visit and chat. Quick and easily accessible information is what they need. The best part is that you can test the waters without incurring a huge expense. Try and compare the available services for a solution that gives you the best ROI.  

I recommended a similar strategy to a client and they decided to do the salesy thing instead.  I am sure they did get some sales but a properly planned webinar strategy can be a great compliment to your sales efforts and provide you very strong leads.  The key is to make sure you are sharing useful information.

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