The Funnelholic

The webinar is fast becoming an extremely important element to one’s marketing mix.  In my generation, guys grew up watching television.  They hated reading.  From Happy Days to Laverne and Shirley to the Cosby Show to the Simpsons: They did not pick up a book.  P.S. they also were, bar-none, the biggest consumers of Cliff Notes. The moral of the story is: Have a variety of mediums you use to reach prospects.  If you have read my blog, you know I believe in whitepapers but you can’t JUST do whitepapers and you can’t just do emails.

It is my belief the webinar is a nice “quadruple whammy”.  A vehicle where you can get your money’s worth.  Remember: 4 reasons.  When you think of you webinars don’t just think of lead minimums and cpl, think of the entire package.

Note:  I know training is a major factor in the webinar market, but is not of use to me especially as part of the marketing mix.

The 4 main reasons to have webinars be part of your marketing mix:

Brand Awareness

There are many parts to the branding exercise:
1.    From Marketing Sherpa: “Multiple touches are the killer branding app…Every effort to generate the audience is an opportunity to promote the brand.”.  Think of it this way, the promotion of the webinar whether they go to the event or not involves thousands of emails, banners, websites, and newsletter postings.  When you work with a third party credible media site or research organization, you gain even more cachet.”
2.    Webinars for product launches are a great call as well.

Thought Leadership

Doesn’t this go without saying?  You spend a lot of time and money (I hope) on working analysts, ghost writing blogs, and PR trying to create thought leadership and put simply, conveying that you are smart.  What better place than in the webinar.  Education is really a key element to getting people to both sign up and attend webinars…so your topic should be educational in the first place.  Now realize: Your organization and specifically your assigned spokesman has the chance to look really smart.

Lead Generation

Quantifiable results.  “Hi boss, we ran a launch webinar.  We rolled-out the new product to an online audience of XXX.  Thank you for my promotion”

Drip/Nurture

“…the trend we see in the marketplace is clients using webinars more and more for lead nurturing (i.e. as follow-up offer to an existing database)” Howard Sewell, President of Direct Connect.  This we see more and more.  ONE MESSAGE: GET THE MOST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK.  Run the event and market it to your database.  Net-new + another touch is a win-win for your marketing organization.

It’s very simple, when I used to drive to work, I could literally tell how the team would do that day based on freeway traffic.  Don’t say it is obvious, because I have never heard anyone else say that before.  When traffic was particularly gnarly, we killed it that day whether it was leads, inquiries, web traffic…

When traffic was light, we got destroyed, the team was bummed.  Of course, everything I have done in my B2B life has been focused on a scoreboard tallying people filling out internet forms,  connecting with a lead development rep or sales rep, watching a webinar.  For the last ten years, highway traffic is my proxy for the amount of business about to go down that day.  I don’t care about statistics on this one, I know what I know.  I’ll have to find out if what I have just written is what my journalist colleagues might call a “musing”.

Great example:, the other day I took 101 from San Jose (Guadalupe parkway) straight to SOMA in San Francisco.  The results from the lead team, 60% of production. One week before that, it took me an hour to go 20 minutes, lead team results= record breaking day

At that point, I had to write this post

OK, I am not timely…but I just found out that Jigsaw is giving away company data for free.  If you don’t know Jigsaw, they are a large user-generated contact database.  Users can trade contacts; that is, upload their contacts into the database in order to receive contacts that are already there.  If one’s contact information is incorrect, you can return the name.  (Which in turn, helps Jigsaw constantly update their database).  Many people don’t actually trade, but just buy the lists directly from Jigsaw.  (like me, no uploading for me).  Jigsaw is a service I and many of my marketing colleagues use for list building.  When people ask me today: “Do you know a good list broker?”, I typically reply with “Yeah, Jigsaw.”

Jigsaw announced their company info give-away via an extremely dorky but memorable video with their two co-founders:   They went with a “data independence day” promotion.

I think this is a great idea.  A needed and good service that it will get people to their site and signed up as members…Just a quick note: This is not real philanthropy, but a smart business move.  The money for Jigsaw is in the selling of contacts. Coincidentally, the contacts and their contact information are ultimately the largest value to their user base.  In sum, a great move for everyone.  Props to you Jigsaw.

Image via Wikipedia

The irony here is I was about to post about how the Social Media revolution was over-hyped.  I had just gone out to lunch with an SMB b2b analyst and we talked about how no SMB buyers were on Second Life or LinkedIn. As a matter of fact, they weren’t not online that much at all. I had this big negative post all ready.

Then, something happened.

Our US Women’s Olympic water polo team has an exhibition match on July 10th against their arch-rival Australia before they head to the Olympics in Beijing.  The game is being played at Stanford which has a large pool venue. In the past (the Stone Ages…pre-facebook’s advance), we would do word-of-mouth…some email, etc.   The goal is to: 1.  Get people to the event 2.  Get people excited about the event so that they come ready to cheer.  In b2b lead generation terminology: both lead gen as well as education and branding.  Water polo is very tough as very rarely do people NOT involved in the sport go to its events so the key is to hit a very narrow target market: people involved in the sport, families with kids wanting to expose their kids to the Olympic movement, and people who used to play.  All of this on a meager budget.  Here is what we did:

Facebook:
There was a late decision to throw up a facebook page supporting the event: [here].  And POW, the page took off.  Kids started RSVP’ing, commenting, and inviting their friends.  Then something really cool happened: the national team players started RSVP’ing and commenting. All of this killer publicity: FOR FREE.  Everyone involved (all aged over 30 minimum) learned the power of Facebook over the last week as we watched the page take off. Facebook may have deals with the NBA and other big organizations but it’s a niche organization like ours hitting our target audience and becoming believers.

We also did some “comment spam” against a number of the water polo groups on Facebook.  Comment spam is the “art” of posting comments with leading links back to your page.  The term spam is inappropriate here  because it is a welcome notice as water polo events are typically few and far between.

We posted a video which we hope to have kids and others forward along.  See Below

YouTube
We still believe we could’ve done YouTube better but something was better than nothing.  We might get a small attendance spike from this, but as importantly we believed this would add enthusiasm for the event.  Watch the video here.  We don’t just email everyone and put fliers up at Jamba Juice, we put up a Facebook page and dropped a video on YouTube.  The local coaches are telling their kids to watch it and forward it to their friends.  We are posting out on Facebook and sending it to bloggers. See below.

Blog Outreach
We hit up the blogosphere. (if you are working online social media channels, you know the deal here) and got our site posted on theirs.  For example read this.

Net, the event hasn’t happened but we have already seen a large number of Facebook RSVPs from outside our core base of people and 10X the number of pre-ordered tickets.  In the next Olympic cycle, we will have online ticket purchasing so we can watch the effectiveness in real time.  The greatest part of this experiment is how we could reach a wider net of our extremely targeted audience fast and inexpensively.  I’ll have to save my negative social media article for later  (or never)…