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.

My reply to discussion questions: Does anyone really attend seminars anymore? Has any one hosted seminars in the past and had great success? If so what was the secret?

As an online marketer, I frequently recommend online seminars or ‘webinars’. I personally attend at least 2 online seminars each month and find them extremely useful.

Information sharing is one of the best ways to get qualified leads online. Clients come for the free information and if you do a good job, you can interest them in the product. If you follow up without being salesy rather providing additional information, the follow-up is welcome. Several times, I have attended multiple seminars for a specific vendor and when the time was right — either recommended the product for a client or purchased the product myself.

The online seminars through Webex, go-to-meeting and other vendors are a cheap and effective way of employing interactive seminars to sell your products. No need to pay a venue or for food and you are no longer limited to your local area. For the attendees, there is no need for travel. I don’t have time to drive 2 hours round-trip for a 1 or 1.5 hour seminar. But I can certainly login in between meetings.

You can also record the seminars and offer the recordings to attendees and use them long after the seminar is complete. You can offer the recorded seminars in an archive and ask for user information to follow up with for continuous leads. If you have a particularly good seminar, you can post your seminar on YouTube which helps with search engine marketing when someone is looking up information about the products you offer. I personally search YouTube for seminars on usability all the time. You can also use www.slideshare.net to post your slides, again providing more opportunities to promote your company through information sharing.  

I have found surprisingly, that many people attend these seminars (if properly promoted). Expecting only a handful of participants, sometimes I have participated with 30 to 80 participants. The participants ask questions at the end either through the chat or via audio, if available.

The online seminars also seem to encourage continued communication. Because you follow up with the materials via email, many times the participants will continue to ask questions and there is a strong lead for you.

For your services in particular, I put together a business continuity plan for a company some years ago and I can assure you I did TONS of research and ultimately hired several companies that provided information through webinars, white papers, etc. Establishing your expertise in the industry goes a long way with clients.

I’ve seen companies use webinars as a sales call and some of the attendes leave as soon as they realize it’s a sales call.  The same goes for landing pages that pretend to offer information in exchange for your contact information.  If they are strictly sales, the visitor looses interest.  People look for information and if you can establish yourself as an expert, you will see better qualified leads than if you trick them into attending a seminar.  Click here for 10 tips for setting up a Webinar series…

1. Build brand awareness.  Gain exposure to new readers (and customers) through natural social interactivity.   Getting a fan on Facebook displays your business information to all of your fan’s friends.
2. Build customer loyalty.  Create a collaborative environment that promotes interactive feedback. You can quickly share system updates using tools that your customers are already using.  Your customers will view this as direct access to the company that values their input and addresses their concerns.
3. Lower feedback costs.  By engaging your customers online, you get time sensitive feedback that is much less costly than focus groups or feedback sessions. 
4. Product innovation.   Open online communications can give you a unqiue view into unique ways that your customers use your products.  Not only can you use this information to create your next widget, gain valuable insight into terminology that your customers use for your Search Engine Marketing and sales presentations.  You now have free and open insight to what our customers think, what they need and how they perceive your business.
5. Increase Search Engine rankings.  Social media posts rank very well in search engines. By providing responses to customer posts, increase search engine exposure to your product.

So how do you ensure that your social marketing strategy works?  You must follow two simple rules: Check in daily and be responsive.  The biggest mistake you can make is to set up a system and then not respond.  That’s worst than not doing anything at all.  Stay tuned for strategies for setting up your Social Marketing plan…