Intelligent Demand Generation™

5 WAYS TOWEBCAST SUCCESSWebcasts Remain One of the Most Cost-Effective Marketing Vehicles

Intelligent Demand Generation™

5 Ways To Webcast Success

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Why Online Events?

Webcasts remain one of the most cost-effective marketing vehicles for reaching and educating audiences, as well as identifying interested prospects. At less than half of what face-to-face seminars might cost, and 75% less than trade shows, webcasts are a good investment. You can reach large audiences, and reuse the digital recording for additional marketing efforts and campaigns. Best of all? No travel is involved!

Marketing automation makes it easy to build an audience and automate the invitation, reminder and all-important follow up processes.

Webcasts are particularly powerful for communicating to prospects and folks that are already moving through the buying cycle. Buyers continue to rank webcasts as one of the most useful resources for finding business solutions. Demand Gen Report’s recent content preferences survey showed that 45% of surveyed business executives found webcasts as “most” or “somewhat” valuable. For comparison, the rates are 48% and 40% for white papers and eBooks respectively.

Here are Five Key Areas to Consider.

1. Planning

You’ll want to figure out right off the bat:

• Who are you trying to reach?• What are you trying to communicate?• What actions do you want them to take?

Make sure to leave yourself plenty of time to get your planning tasks completed. Remember that you’ll have to have the topic fully vetted, presenters locked-in and the main messages and key points agreed upon before you can write the promotional copy and the invitation text. Reserve sufficient time in your schedule to get these tasks completed before you publicize and promote the event.

45% of surveyedbusiness executivesfound webcastsas “most” or“somewhat” valuable

Intelligent Demand Generation™

main: 408.490.2900 toll-free: 800.858.8500 www.eTrigue.com

Marketingautomation’swebcast eventmanagement simplifieswebcastworkflow

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2. Promotion

Plan on at least 8 days from the time you start sending your invitations to the time of the actual event. Many folks run this for far longer times. Make sure to leverage every channel at your disposal for promotion; your own data and in-house mailing lists, social media, the presenter’s personal networks, press, and word of mouth.

Be prepared to send out two or three rounds of invitations. The last invitations should go out 1 to 2 days before the webcast. Many folks who won’t sign up in advance will sign up at the last minute, as they may have better clarity on calendar commitments.

Effective promotion includes having a call to action that is easy to understand. The text has to make sense to quick, casual readers. While you may spend hours poring over your text, the average viewer will spend less than a few seconds on your subject line and title before deciding to look further at your invitation, or go on to the next thing.

3. Process

Automate as much of the process as you can. Marketing automation’s webcast event management simplifies webcast workflow by letting you build a single campaign that sends invitations, invitation reminders, and also sends the important “thanks for attending,” and “sorry we missed you,” messages.

Webcast invitations will typically include several graphic elements as well as links to the registration site.

Intelligent Demand Generation™

main: 408.490.2900 toll-free: 800.858.8500 www.eTrigue.com

Rememberyou are thereto educateand inform

Drag-and-drop webcast campaigns make it easy to quickly craft and execute effective webcast invitation and follow up programs. And marketing automation populates registration and attendance information into the marketing database automatically, allowing easy access to event detail and viewership.

Registration should be simple for your audience to accomplish. Set it up so that registrants get reminders along with instructions for how to logon to the webcast right before the show. Don’t worry; all of the major webcast providers build this capability in at no charge.

4. Practice

Content is critical to a great webcast. Build tight, concise webinar slides that tell a story. Don’t put all of your words on the slide. Use the slides to illustrate your key points.

Make sure to get a practice run in with all presenters. It’s important that all participants know their roles and are comfortable running the webcast system in advance of the show. Work on your delivery so that it’s authoritative but friendly, and one that your audience will follow until the end. The practice run is also the perfect chance to test audio levels to ensure that every presenter sounds crystal clear.

Most of all, make sure that your webcast stays on topic. Stick to the promise offered in the invitations, and don’t get caught up doing a sales pitch or a feature-by-feature product demo, unless that was the topic of the webcast.

5. Performance

At show time remember that you are there to educate and to inform. Keep focused on the subject matter without wandering into rhetorical tangents. If you’ve practiced you delivery and material, this shouldn’t be a problem.

The length of the webcast has to fit the subject matter. Half an hour, or an hour? It really depends on the topic and level of depth you and your audience have agreed on. In any case, don’t ever go over time. Ending early is OK, but going over isn’t fair to folks who stay until the scheduled end but have to get to their next meeting.

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Intelligent Demand Generation™

main: 408.490.2900 toll-free: 800.858.8500 www.eTrigue.com

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About eTrigue Corporation eTrigue DemandCenter® marketing automation platform helps marketers build more sucessful demand generation programs that target, nurture and qualify prospective customers based on their “digital biography.”

eTrigue Intelligent Demand Generation® SaaS products improve the way marketing and sales teams generate qualified leads, and they help close sales more quickly.

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Your success depends equally on your planning, promotion, process, practice and performance

Marketing Automation for the Rest of Us®

Let the audience ask questions. All webcast systems have simple question and answer tools built-in that let attendees ask questions in writing. Always prepare a few realistic questions in advance to get the Q&A session going. If you run out of time, and can’t get to all questions, follow up with everyone who took the time to ask a question.

Record your webcast for reuse in further marketing efforts. Recorded webcasts make great replays on your own website, and are excellent source material for written documents and white papers. In fact this paper is based on observations from a recent webcast we conducted with Skype’s Barry Castle.

Final Thoughts

Webcasts remain one of the best content marketing tools available. No matter if you market to small or large audiences, webcasts are the way to go. Above all else, make sure you deliver on what you promise in your webcast. No one likes to get pulled into a sales pitch under false pretenses. Your success depends equally on your planning, promotion, process, practice and performance.