50 steps to delivering great webcasts

The 2014 Marketing Resource Seriesfrom WinGreen Marketing Systems

50 Steps to Delivering Great Webcasts

50 Steps to Delivering Great Webcasts

An Informative E-book from the Marketing Resource Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

An Informative E-book from the Marketing Resource Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

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Introduction

Webcasts or web seminars (“webinars”) are an exceptionally valuable part of the content mix for B2B lead generation in technology and industrial companies. When used in conjunction with other content media such as white papers, e-books, infographics, blogs, and video, webinars help attract specific types of prospects at specific times during their evaluation process. They help identify the level of interest of sales prospects. For example, did a prospect register for a webinar shortly after registering for a companion white paper? Did he attend the webinar, or just register? How many minutes did he view the webinar? If you’re using lead scoring in your marketing automation, each of those indicators accrues to the score. If you’re not, you can still judge the prospect’s interest through the answers to those questions. Webinars -- better than any other medium in the content marketer’s toolkit -- allow for deep, meaningful analytics. For this reason, they’re a critical component of the B2B content marketing kit.

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Webinars are challenging to produce

But this value comes at a cost. Webinars are time-consuming. Webinars require teams of people to plan, promote, produce, and broadcast. Webinars demand reliable, high-bandwidth Internet connections and clear, predictable audio connections. Marketing organizations must find speakers -- “talent” -- who know their stuff, know the company’s key messages, can converse in technical or operational detail, and perform charismatic and articulate public speaking (a set of characteristics that rarely occur in a single individual)...








… and then get those people to outline 30 to 50 minutes of presentation material, write a compelling abstract, attend planning meetings, meet deadlines that probably aren’t assigned by their own bosses, and eventually create and deliver a professional presentation on a potentially worldwide broadcast.

Once you, the marketer, have all of that covered, you’ll need to work to a tight schedule, with many interdependencies.

Sending out the invitations three weeks ahead of the broadcast date doesn’t sound like a big challenge... until you realize you need the abstract, HTML emailers to promote the webcast, landing pages with registration forms, auto-reply emails with login instructions, and the names, titles, bios, and head shots of your speakers that you’ve worked so hard to convince to participate.








Run a complete dress rehearsal? Sure, no problem at all… until you discover that your three speakers all have regular jobs and no one mentioned to them a month earlier that they’d have to spend all this extra time on this. Or until you remember that the main point of a dress rehearsal is to test everything exactly as it will occur at showtime, and then discover that two of your speakers are traveling and won’t be in the same place for rehearsal and live broadcast.

You also will discover that you didn’t realize that holding a dress rehearsal at 10:00 AM doesn’t show you how your office Internet bandwidth will perform during your live broadcast at 1:00 PM. (Why does this matter? Here’s a tip from the pros: A significant number of your co-workers eat lunch at their desks and use the time to watch streaming video, which is a bandwidth hog. So if you’re hosting a midday webcast, you’ll want to know ahead of time that your network can sustain enough bandwidth for you to run webcast, video, and audio. Otherwise, the latency between your audio and your webcast will frustrate your viewers.)








Why not outsource webinar production?

At this point, we would imagine that you might think that outsourcing the production of your webinar sounds like a terrific idea. And it is. It’s actually a great idea. The authors highly recommend outsourcing your webinar production while taking in-house responsibility for trained, on-point speakers and delivering the key messages you hope will attract sales prospects. After producing hundreds of webinars from both sides of the fence -- as executives leading marketing departments and now as principals in our agency -- we can tell you with no hesitation: Outsource it. Agencies do webinars all the time. We stamp them out like a factory. High volume, high quality, no pain for you.

If you want to contact us to help you with your webinars, you can do so at www.wingreenmarketing.com/contact-us. If not, we’re still here to help, by presenting this step-by-step process to producing great webinars.







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Still prefer to produce your webinars in-house?

If you’re committed to putting on one or more world-class webinars in-house, we’re very happy to provide you with this primer on the process of delivering great B2B lead generation webinars, with 50 pointers on what to do and when to do it. Follow the directions in this paper, don’t cut any corners or take any shortcuts, and you’ll be able to produce successful webinars.








50 Things to Do to Produce a Great Webinar

Planning and producing a great webinar requires effective project management and time management. Once you’ve committed to

broadcasting to a live audience on a particular date and time, you can’t let any of your milestones slip, or you’ll find yourself unprepared when the

time comes to click the “Start” button.Here are the things you need to do, in the order you need to do them.








One month ahead of broadcast

1. Choose a date and time. In general, B2B webinars should be held on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. If you’re expecting a coast-to-coast audience, schedule for sometime between 12:00 Noon and 4:00 PM Eastern Time, which will allow your west coast attendees to view between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM Pacific Time. Alternately, you could choose to broadcast two or three separate live webcasts and schedule any time of day within local times (lunchtime and early afternoon are best), or you could schedule for a live broadcast at a convenient time in one time zone and promote a recorded version to the other time zones.

2.Choose a topic and a title. You’ll be promoting the webcast just one week after this, so you’ll need to have a final topic and title at this time.

3. Choose your speakers. The best combination of speakers for maximizing registrations is one person from your company, one customer, and one third-party expert. We strongly recommend that you do not use anyone from your sales organization. (There are two reasons for this: [1] Sales people can’t resist selling and B2B lead generation webinars should never sound like sales pitches, and [2] effective selling is all about the productive use of time, and the hours spent participating in a webinar are hours that are not spent selling.)








One month ahead of broadcast (cont.)Company speaker: Choose someone who can speak in detail about your industry, the reasons for choosing products or services like yours, and, if you’re in a technology industry, how specific technologies support the benefits your listeners might derive. The usual source within an organization for in-house speakers is the product management or product marketing organization.

Customer speaker: The people that you want to sell to do not want to be sold to. They do want to hear how other people with the same problems or challenges solved them. Having one or more of your customers speak on your webinar in a “birds of a feather” forum will attract the most registrants and will give them what they’re looking for from the webinar.

Third-party expert speaker: If you are a subscriber to one or more industry analysts, we recommend that you look into having a “name brand” analyst or consultant be one of your speakers. Having a speaker from a big name firm such as Gartner, IDC, or Yankee Group will significantly increase interest in registering and attending from among your targets. The downside is that industry analysts charge a fee -- typically thousands of dollars -- for their time.

Make sure to choose speakers who have some life and personality in them. Spending 45 to 60 minutes listening to a dreary, monotonous speaker is not something that you want your prospective customers to need to do.

4. Choose your host (or “master of ceremonies”). Webinars sound much more professional when someone other than the speakers acts as the host. The host will greet the attendees, do the quick introductions and thank-yous, and act as the seamless transition voice between speakers.

5. Create an outline for what is to be presented.

6. Write an abstract to describe what will be presented.

7. Get headshots and bios of your speakers to use in the email invitations and the landing page. Keep bios very short.








Three weeks ahead of broadcast

The steps to take at this point will require the use of marketing automation and mass email software. If you’re not using marketing automation and you do not have a mass email platform, it is still possible to create email invitations, mailing lists, and registration forms. But it is cumbersome. For the sake of this guide, we will assume that you are using marketing automation, mass email and CRM systems.

8. Create your invitations -- email, social, advertisements. You’ll need to create emails in both HTML and plain text versions.

9. Create landing page with registration form.

10. Create your emailing list.

12. Send first wave of invitation emails.

13. Begin to create the presentation slide deck (and any audio or video you may wish to use).

11. Set up auto-emails to be sent on the following schedule:

● First invitation emails - 3 weeks ahead

● Second wave of invitations -- 1 week ahead

● Registration confirmations with login instructions -- in real time as people register.

● Reminders to registrants -- 1 day ahead

● Third wave of invites -- 1 day ahead

● Final reminders to registrants -- 2 to 4 hours ahead of broadcast








Two weeks ahead of broadcast

14. Complete a near-final draft of the presentation slides (and audio/video if you plan to use them).

15. Complete a written script or speakers’ notes.

16. Create a set of staged questions to be used in the Q&A session (if you’re planning on doing live Q&A)

17. Send the presentation and speakers’ notes to the speakers for review.








One week ahead of broadcast

18. Send logistics and housekeeping to all speakers and participants.

● Dial-in and connection information

● Instructions to use only a land-line telephone (No mobile phones, no computer headphone/microphones). A high-quality speakerphone connected to a land-line is acceptable

● Conference room (or other room) from which the broadcast will be done. It’s best to have all speakers in a single room. If they cannot be, then remind all speakers to be in a quiet area for the broadcast

● Instruct all participants to join the conference at least 10 minutes ahead of broadcast.

19. Send second wave of invitations. (This should happen automatically if you’re using marketing automation software and set up your auto-send as noted in #11 above.)

20. Complete the final version of the presentation (slides, video, audio) and email it in both Microsoft PowerPoint® and PDF formats to speakers and organizers.








One Day Before Broadcast

21. Do a full scale dress rehearsal. It's preferable to have everyone participate fully in the dress rehearsal from the exact facilities and telephones/computers from which they'll be doing the live broadcast. The best time to do this is exactly 24 hours ahead of live broadcast in order to identify any time-of-day issues with noise, Internet connectivity, network latency, etc. Set up at least 2 computers with full speaker/moderator/organizer rights. Computers still break or hang.

22. Record the dress rehearsal. (If you want to use a recording of the live broadcast for archiving, you can edit parts of the dress rehearsal into the final cut of the broadcast if any mistakes are made.)

23. Send the third wave of invitations (This should happen automatically if you’re using marketing automation software and set up your auto-send as noted in #11 above.)

24. Send reminders to all registrants (This should happen automatically if you’re using marketing automation software and set up your auto-send as noted in #11 above.)








Day of Broadcast

25. Set up and test all computers, telephones, and other required equipment.

26. Send reminders to all registrants (This should happen automatically if you’re using marketing automation software and set up your auto-send as noted in #11 above.)

27. Log in to the webcast at least 30 minutes before broadcast time.

28. Load your presentation materials into the webcast system and run through all slides. Test any video or other embedded media. If you’re using a camera to show live shots of the speakers, test the camera.

29. Conduct a sound check for all speakers.

30. Have a scribe who can either write down questions as they come in online or through #socialmedia. Better yet, have a printer in the room for the scribe to print questions and comments to hand to the speakers.

31. At approximately 10 to 15 minutes before broadcast, put the broadcast into “Waiting Room” mode. Webcast systems allow you to customize what is shown to attendees before you go to the live presentation.

32. Almost every webinar has a few attendees who log in a few minutes early. At the -5:00 mark, the organizer or host should announce “For those of you who have already joined us for today’s webinar, we will begin the broadcast at two o’clock. Thank you for your patience.” Then mute all microphones (This should be done in the webcast system console by the organizer).

33. If you are recording the webinar (and you should be), click the “RECORD” button at the -5:00 mark. You’ll be able to edit out the five minutes of silence later. This ensures that the additional load on the computer created by recording doesn’t hang or slow down the primary computer used for broadcast. Best to use the secondary computer logged in as “organizer” to do the recording.

34. At each minute (-4:00, -3:00, -2:00, and -1:00), the host should again announce “For those of you who have already joined us for today’s webinar, we will begin the broadcast at two o’clock. Thank you for your patience.”








Broadcast Time!

35. At precisely the broadcast time, click the button to start the broadcast. The host or organizer should announce “Welcome to today’s webinar…” along with the title.

36. Spend a minute or two to tell the attendees what to expect

a. Today’s webinar is scheduled to be xx minutes long

b. There will (or will not) be a live question and answer session at the conclusion.

c. (If there is to be a Q&A) Please submit your questions to our speakers at any time through the “Question” or “Comment” box on your screen.

d. All attendee lines have been muted








40. Try to complete the webinar in less time than what you’ve scheduled. Attendees appreciate a well-managed production and are happy to get those 10 minutes back.

41. If you’re doing a Q&A, have the host, organizer, or one of the speakers read each question that has come in. If no questions have been submitted, then use your pre-staged questions.

e. There will (or will not) be a PDF version of today’s presentation mailed to all attendees.

f. There will (or will not) be a recording of today’s webinar available.

37. The host should introduce all of the speakers and provide a one-sentence bio for each.

38. Hand it off to the first speaker. You are on the air!

39. Don't sell. Inform. Educate. Interact if possible and practical. But don’t allow any sales pitches unless you have explicitly promoted your webcast as a sales promotion.








Upon Conclusion

42. Shut down your webcast, save your recording, and thank everyone for their participation.

43. Post the recorded version to whatever video pages you use. If you don’t mind having it open to the general public, post it to YouTube. If you prefer to gate the access to it in order to collect registrations, you can archive it with your webcast hosting provider, usually for up to 12 months, and set up a registration page. You can also embed it on your own website.

44. Send emails to all attendees, thanking them for their interest, and include the PDF of the slides along with the URL for where the recording of the webcast will be. Use this email for a quick sales pitch and call-to-action. If you have other recorded webcasts and other assets (white papers, a blog) available on your website, put the URL for those into this email. Finish with something that says “If your interest in today’s topic is due to a current need for [product, service, help], we can help. Contact us at (xxx) nnn-nnnn or www.website.com” (These emails should have been set up for auto-delivery early in the planning process if you are using marketing automation.)

45. Send emails to any attendee who asked a question that did not get answered during the broadcast. (Leading webcast systems log questions and match them to the registrant who posts them.) Offer to have a one-on-one phone call to answer the question. Remember: anyone who attends your entire webinar and actively asks questions is most likely more interested in your subject matter and well down the path of research and evaluation. You can turn a “Sorry we didn’t answer your question,” email into a sales phone call.








Upon Conclusion (cont.)

46. Send emails to all registrants who did not attend. (These are also set up for auto-delivery early in the process if you’re using marketing automation.) Provide them with the URL for the recording, and invite them to check out your other webcasts and white papers.

47. Send a final invitation to the original complete list to invite them to view the recorded version of the webinar at their convenience. Make sure to point out that the recording allows viewers to use pause, rewind, and fast forward controls.

48. Post the slides to Slideshare.

49. Promote the recorded version through social media.

50. Send us a note to tell us how it went! (We’re serious.) Drop us an email to [email protected] or tweet us at @WinGreen_Mktng.







mailto:[email protected]


Follow Up

It’s important to conduct thorough follow-up activities soon after the completion of the broadcast. Regardless of what type of webcast you’ve completed, you’ll want to review what went well, what went wrong, and what you can do to improve.

Immediately after the conclusion of the broadcast, set up a new conference bridge and get your webinar team together. Do not just tell everyone to “stay on the line”. The team will be discussing internal matters related to the logistics, planning, and delivery of the webinar. You will not want outside parties listening to potential “dirty laundry”.

What went well?

Do a five to ten minute brainstorm on the question “What went well?” Capture all participants’ opinions on a whiteboard or flip chart or Evernote in short, “bumper sticker” format.

What went wrong?

Again, do a five to ten minute brainstorm on what didn’t go so well. If there were many negatives about your broadcast, you’ll obviously want to take whatever time is necessary to capture them all. Remind the participants that this is a brainstorm, and the intent isn’t to discuss, debate, or solve any of these items, but rather to capture them for the next brainstorming section, which is…

What will we do to improve?

Now that the team has enjoyed the “What went well” part, and endured the “What went wrong” part, it’s time to take what was learned from both of those and apply it to “What will we do to improve?”

Take five to fifteen minutes with the team to capture the key things that need to be done for future webcasts, based on what everyone learned from the one just completed.

Document and Distribute

Copy all of the bullet points from the review process verbatim into a single document. Distribute this document to the entire webinar team so that all participants have the entire review. Set up a short meeting or online chat to assign tasks based on the “What will we do” section.

Production Team








Sales leads

Since the entire purpose of the webinar was to generate quality sales leads, the critical step after the conclusion of the webinar is the contacting and qualification/disqualification of the registrants and attendees.

Process decisions

There are two organizational process decisions to be made prior to undertaking any lead generation webinars.

1. What organization conducts initial contact and lead qualification? Will the marketing group be assigned, with the objective of delivering marketing qualified leads (MQL’s) to the sales group? Or will the sales group take immediate responsibility for follow-up, with ownership of the lead from first contact through closure (win or lose)? Each

company has its own strengths and weaknesses in follow-up and qualification, so there is no standard answer. The key is making the process and responsibility decision before conducting the lead generation activity.

2. At what point in the process should registrants first be contacted? Do you want to try to engage a registrant at the point at which they register (which could be weeks before the broadcast)? Or do you want to wait until the webcast has been completed and begin all phone contacts at that point? Similarly to the previous point, this really is an organizational decision. There is not much evidence to point toward either choice. The one factor that might sway the decision is that waiting to contact

registrants until after the webinar provides the follow-up caller a conversation point and ice-breaker. “How did you like the webinar?” “Was it informative and useful? Do you have any suggestions I can take back to the webinar team?”

Different levels of interest among webinar registrants

Unlike other content marketing tactics, such as white papers, e-books, or podcasts, webinars present the marketing organization with deeper statistics and analytics. Most importantly, your webcast reports show you not only who registered, but also who attended, and the amount of time they were logged into the broadcast. From these statistics, you can derive an implied level of interest for each registrant.








Registered -- Interested in the topic. May or may not become an MQL or SQL

Attended -- More interested in the topic. Took the time out of their busy day to watch and listen. Will almost certainly become an MQL.

Attended and remained online for the entire broadcast -- Significantly interested. Took an entire 45 to 60 minutes out of their busy day to watch and listen. Will become an MQL and probably will become an SQL.

Attended, remained online, and asked one or more questions -- The most interested lead. Took an entire 45 to 60 minutes out of their busy day to watch and listen. Paid enough attention and has a high enough degree of topic interest to form a question and expect an answer. Will become an MQL and almost certainly will become an SQL.

The follow-up call

Make sure your follow-up callers -- whichever organization they’re in -- understand that they are not conducting cold calls. They are calling individuals who have expressed interest in the topic of the webinar, which means they have some level of interest in what you sell, if you’ve chosen your webinar topic correctly.

Follow-up callers should have all of the webinar stats at their fingertips. It’s best to script something at an outline level for each of the levels of interest described above. Leads who attended the entire webinar and posed questions should be prioritized and perhaps even handed directly to outside sales (or account sales, or whoever is ultimately responsible for closing). They’re ready to be qualified in

or out and their specific questions during the webinar Q&A present opportunity to generate very specific sales discussions.

The tone and “voice” of the initial follow-up calls should be helpful and supportive rather than probing and pushy. “I’m calling as a quick follow-up to our webinar that you attended recently. I just wanted to make sure that you were able to see and hear our broadcast alright, and answer any questions you might have.” After the person has responded to this question, one might ask “I’m curious about what may have led you to register for this. Are you working on a current project? Facing some immediate challenge?” If they answer affirmatively, then you have yourself someone with whom you can proceed into a selling/buying process. If they answer (as most people do) that they are








just researching or learning, you should ask if it was helpful, and mention that you have a “resource center” on your website with white papers, e-books, and other relevant webcast recordings. “Would you like me to send you that link?” Then update your CRM system to reflect the outcome of this conversation and move forward with whatever tickler or lead nurture process you use.








Conclusion

B2B webinars are an outstanding tactic for cost-effective lead generation. Registrants and attendees are usually people from your target market who have a higher level of interest than those from other lead gen tactics. Content creation, setup, administration, and follow-up can be conducted with internal resources, if they are experienced, detail-oriented, and able to meet tight deadlines.

For those with limited resources or a desire to keep the marketing team focused on strategic initiatives, webinars can be outsourced to experts in marketing agencies who conduct them all the time. Outsourced webinar production and campaign management actually cost less than in-house production when all costs are considered, and the time to do all 50 steps in this paper is returned to the marketing organization for more

strategic tasks like brand, promotion, marketing communications, product marketing, and field marketing. The sponsor of this paper, WinGreen Marketing Systems, can run a comprehensive webinar program for you, whether you want just one webinar per quarter or 50 webinars over 12 months. Contact them at [email protected].

For those of you who remain committed to in-house production for your own organizational reasons, we do hope you’ve found our 50 step process to be helpful and informative. We’ve honed it over the course of delivering hundreds of webinars for dozens of companies over the past 15 years, so we’re confident that if you follow these steps, with no shortcuts and no missed deadlines, you’ll deliver world-class webinars every time.










This e-book is part of the 2014 Marketing Resource Series sponsored and brought to you by WinGreen Marketing Systems. WinGreen commissions original new e-books and white papers and curates informative, well-written content on topics related to content marketing, email marketing, and inbound marketing.

Do you have a topic you’d like to see covered in a future e-book or white paper? Send us your suggestions to [email protected]

Are you an expert on content marketing and lead generation? Would you like to be a contributor to the WinGreen Marketing White Paper Series and have your writing be seen by tens of thousands of marketing and sales leaders? Contact us at www.wingreenmarketing.com/contact-us.










About the SponsorWinGreen Marketing Systems is a content marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing, email marketing, and high-impact lead generation programs for technology companies in the United States and Canada. Headquartered in Philadelphia’s suburban technology corridor, the company was founded in 2009, and is a business partner of Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Ringlead Inc., and a member of the Google Engage for Agencies Program.

WinGreen’s content marketing services include authoring and publishing of client-branded content in all digital forms, including white papers, e-books, articles, blog posts, social media posts, webcasts, videos, and podcasts. WinGreen delivers compelling content that attracts target buyers and influencers across the entire spectrum of buyer personas and buying phases.

The company’s inbound marketing services utilize WinGreen-authored content in its many forms to attract and engage target buyers and influencers to its clients’ websites. WinGreen uses leading marketing automation to manage content, campaigns, and analytics. The combination of content published by WinGreen and inbound marketing methods and tools is unbeatable for building prospect pipeline and revenue growth.

WinGreen also provides email marketing services for predictable, reliable, cost-effective lead generation. In addition to authoring all required content, WinGreen also builds target email databases, delivers mass email marketing, plans and executes regularly scheduled campaigns, and utilizes its own commercial-grade, cloud software infrastructure for all marketing automation. WinGreen’s outbound content marketing is the perfect way to get immediate lead generation results while building long-term inbound marketing engagement.

Contact WinGreen at www.wingreenmarketing.com/contact-us or call (650) LEAD-GEN (650-532-3436). Learn more at www.wingreenmarketing.com.

© Copyright 2009-2014, WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All Rights Reserved. WinGreen Marketing Systems, The WinGreen System of Marketing, and The WinGreen Systems Architecture are trademarks of WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their

respective owners.







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50 steps to delivering great webcasts