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.
Nobody is really sending me funnels anymore. But I have a bunch in my email box that I haven’t gotten to. Here is one that is great. It represents the “funnel to the funnel”. As I have railed in favor of before, you have to understand your marketing funnel like sales looks at their sales process funnel. You can’t just send leads to Field Sales Reps or others. You have to understand from web traffic to passing the leads to sales. And what you do in the Sales Support stage will have a substantial impact on your lead ROI. The hard part is convincing an organization that doesn’t understand that you will have increase cost-per-lead to drive a higher ROI. Unfortunately, the best lead generation organizations I have seen start out with a realistic view of cost-per-lead (ie they dont just use the $90 CPL from TechTarget, they build in realistic conversion rates, drip/nurture costs, lead qualification costs).
This was another funnel sent to me by one of my friends. . This funnel was taken from the Sales2.0 blog, the poster is David Thompson, the CEO of a great up-and-coming marketing automation company Sales Genius. (who I owe a long post about) Anyway, the impetus for this funnel was a meeting David had with Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame.
Their goals was to show:
how many of the Web 2.0 technologies are driving a faster, higher volume, incredibly efficient (measurable!) customer acquisition process, from Google AdWords providing anonymous inquiries to a customer’s web site, to on-demand CRM systems making it easier to track pipeline progress, to real-time web site monitoring helping qualify customers faster and offer personalized service, to online communities of customers and sales people trading leads, and web conferencing making it easier for Sales people to “connect and close†with customers on the Web.
Here is the cliff notes to what we have here:
- “Anonymous Visitors” - SEO, search, etc
- “Named Visitors” — Online contact databases
- Qualify Named Prospects:
- Tools for your sales team/inside team to connect with and qualify customers
- Track/Manage
- Close
- Companies like Echosign that have automated order forms
- Loyalty
Ok, now for my commentary:
- I like it, whether I agree with it or not. Obviously this was built with the idea of being able to put their partners into a puzzle.
- I could say: “where is so-and-so” but being what I know from #1 above….this isn’t about that.
- This does not fully represent process (again this is ok) but anonymous visitors have a second step that should be part of a company’s automation funnel which is optimized landing pages, etc.
- We need a place for DRIP/Nurture on there. Always hard in a funnel, but if we are talking about true Sales 2.0 than that part of the process HAS to be accounted for
- For Named Visitors, I would include buying targeted registrations on the internet via whitepapers or other offers. This is also very much in the repertoire of the new-age sales and marketer.
- So is metrics and reporting…that should probably run across the side of the pipeline next to the process arrow. (PS dont think you can use Salesforce.com for this)
- Im still not feeling the EchoSign and Nsite part of the process.
- All in all, I think this is a start and a good one at that. Of course, my company is not on here, but I am game with that…that will change. In the funnelholic.com, I am an editor not a shill.
First let me say, I have NOT talked to Bulldog about re-printing their funnel. One of the CRM analysts I work with, Adam London, sent this over to me as a great funnel. He is right. I have always liked Bulldog’s marketing tactics from branding, educational materials, and their nurture emails they send me. I also like their offering, they basically work with their customers as a value-added webinar provider. They do everything from audience development to scoring to presentation.
Like I said, they have a great funnel.
Here is the webpage this was found on
This funnel is trying to represent the fact that if you don’t follow up immediately with leads, 50% will fall out of your funnel. With Bulldog, their scoring system tells you which leads need to be engaged with sales immediately. Good stuff, except what I liked about this funnel is that it represented something much more to me. Broken funnels can come from:
- Ineffective hand-off processes — my favorite and most recommended is to build a highly optimized Lead Development team. That’s right HUMANS whose job it is it both connect with and qualify leads.
- In VoIP, where I sell a ton of leads here is what I am seeing:
- Companies with Lead Development Teams never complain about “not reaching leads”
- They always have 10-50% better lead-to-sales opportunity rates
- 5-20% better total ROI on ALL lead sources.
- One company we worked without a lead qual team and then with one after is a perfect example. First let me give you the scenario, the VP of Marketing was buying leads all over the internet. They had a 20% lead-to-sales opportunity rate and 10% ROI against all lead sources.
- What was amazing was: lead sources they thought were terrible, became successful
- Their lead-to-sales opportunity rate moved up 25%
- 15-17% ROI
- Happier sales guys
- No lead drop-off.
Bulldog’s reference to scoring is an equally important part of the marketing-to-sales connection but I just don’t believe it fully keeps the pipeline from breaking…in conjunction with a lead qual team you will re-align your funnel
And thanks to Bulldog Solutions for letting me use their funnel…please go and check them out.