How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps

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1 How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps Presented by Sponsored by

2 Executive Summary: Marketers tap a wide variety of communication and engagement channels to Progressive B2B marketing teams are build relationships with prospects and customers. Webinars, in particular, are a establishing thought leadership and great tool to compete in today s buyer-driven market. Nearly half (46 percent) engaging with prospective buyers by using of marketers surveyed cite webinars as a primary content marketing tactic, webinars as a channel to share information according to the CMI and MarketingProfs report B2B Content Marketing: 2012 and advance purchase decisions. Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends. Webinars help marketers establish this More marketing teams are realizing the significant value of webinars as part of necessary dialogue with prospective an overall strategy, as the report also noted a 25 percent increase in marketers buyers and ultimately create that usage of webinars or webcasts in 2012, compared to relevant, valuable experience to offer As B2B organizations are increasingly challenged to get permission to interact with buyers, webinars offer a unique opt-in opportunity. A webinar registration is in many ways a declaration of a prospect s desire to engage and interact with a solution or service provider. Industry research shows a 25% increase in marketers usage of webinars in 2012, compared to B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends, CMI and MarketingProfs richer interactions that supersede the typical content offer. Industry research shows that companies conducting multiple webinars per year find them more effective in generating quality leads than those who conduct fewer webinars, according to MarketingProfs, as nearly half (47 percent) of marketers indicate that webinars are most effective in helping generate quality leads. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 2

3 Looking back at my 20+ years of B2B marketing experience, I would consider webinars as one of my top three most effective lead-generation tactics, noted Kelly J. Waffle, Director, Account Strategy, Marketo. Webinars also are very This E-book will highlight 5 steps to successfully convert webinar attendees into customers: effective at increasing brand awareness, building relationships and credibility, nurturing leads, delivering product training, and providing on-going customer 1. Segment For Success education. Live webinars appeal to many as it creates a forum for interaction without having to travel. 2. Stay in Touch and Nurture Marketers can take advantage of this online relationship to extend the value of their solutions and services and present value across a variety of touch points, 3. Leverage Opportunities For Lead Scoring including , social and the web. This E-book will explore the strategies progressive marketers are employing 4. Integrate Your Systems To Optimize Data to improve webinar conversions, scoring and nurturing tactics, in addition to enhancing overall webinar content production and impact. 5. Accelerate The Sale How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 3

4 Step 1 Segment For Success The most successful webinars extend beyond meeting the simple criteria of The company s nurture campaigns having compelling content. Webinars that create impact and ignite prospects are aligned to lead stage and score interest have knowledgeable speakers with respected titles and credentials, all and each has a specific theme, so the directly relevant to targeted audiences. webinar content delivered is always most popular on-demand appropriate for the buyer stage and the webinars in long-term theme being promoted. nurturing campaigns or third party analyst or source. To tailor webinar content specifically to a target Experts advise that it s important to to provide early stage audience, marketers can enlist case study or anecdotal use case scenarios to develop content that is focused and validate the information being highlighted. refined, converse to the broad blanket education on key topics. Webinar experts advise to drill down subject matter that can be brought to life not only by your individual organization, but also perhaps by a valued partner By bringing on trusted experts and third-party resources, marketers can take advantage of their partnerships not only for thought leadership expertise, but also to leverage additional contact and database lists. Eloqua uses some of its approach that many marketers might The company s nurture assume to be more effective for campaigns are aligned to appealing to a bigger audience. To do lead stage and score. this efficiently, it s important for marketers While professional insight is a key component of webinars, experts advise to segment their databases, as well as marketers to consider the tone and language used to resonate with attendees. personas, to develop the right message, content and offers. Don t let your own knowledge impact how you deliver your message not everyone knows what you know so don t assume they do, recommended Elle Segmenting your audience into groups based on key attributes, such as Woulfe, Senior Marketing Programs Manager, Eloqua. Be detailed, speak in industry vertical, geography or specific preference, enables you to refine and normal, conversational language, tell stories and be interesting don t just drone craft messaging to resonate with the most impact. Segmenting also helps you on. Match your content to your channel or target your invitations to people who understand what prospects are most likely to convert and why. Segmenting can you know have expressed interest in your topic. Don t cover too much go help reduce list decay and shorten the buy cycle. deeper rather than wider. Additionally, supplementary thought leadership content, such as an For example, Eloqua uses some of its most popular on-demand webinars in E-book or Executive Briefing, can help enhance webinar value and extend long-term nurturing campaigns to provide early stage education on key topics. prospect communication. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 4

5 Step 2 Stay In Touch And Nurture Webinars are a great way to stay in touch with prospects and customers by Each week a new topic and/or product offering a perfect outlet for education-based drip marketing. Because the buyer functionality was explored. This helped journey involves a variety of critical factors, such as relevance and consistent the company demonstrate value in many communication, timing is not the only element of essence. different areas of business, and attendees A great way to encourage an ongoing communication and relationship with your customers and prospects is with a combination of live and on-demand web presentations, noted Ken Molay, President of Webinar Success. Live webinars can include canvassing of wish lists and priorities for enhancements, features, and ask the expert help sessions. Recorded presentations can be posted on a regular schedule to introduce new enhancements or to show demonstrations of use in different applications. By utilizing other automation functionality, looked forward to learning more about marketers can have the next topic. greater visibility into what When trying to stay in touch with stage buyers are in. They target buyers through webinars and drip can then build drip campaigns, I consider four factors: campaigns to help move buyer role, buying stage, content, and those webinar leads from timing, noted Waffle. For buyer role, prospects find content targeted to their one stage to the next, and Marketers are utilizing webinars to cultivate role or industry much more valuable progress to conversion. loyal relationships by educating and assisting that generic content. You may want to prospects with tips and tricks to optimize the have one webinar for managers and a use of their products or services. For example, separate webinar for technical users. You may want to have a series of seminars one marketing software company hosted a that address various vertical industries such as financial services, healthcare, webinar workshop series that spanned across government, etc., depending on your business plan. several weeks. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 5

6 The Dos & Don ts For Webinar Conversion Waffle reiterated the need for marketers to consider where the target buyer is in the buying cycle in order to drip content and offers accordingly. For example, educational content works well during the early awareness stages. Analyst reports and buyer s guides work well as prospects start looking for solutions. For prospects that are engaged in an active buying cycle, solution-oriented and company-focused content may be more effective. By utilizing other automation functionality, marketers can have greater visibility into what stage buyers are in. They can then build drip campaigns to help move those webinar leads from one stage to the next, and progress to conversion. Additionally, by understanding average buying cycle length, marketers can change up their initiatives with corporate s, personal s from a sales rep, phone calls and maybe even direct mail. Depending on your average buying cycle, your drip campaign may run over many months, Waffle said. Try to increase the frequency of the outbound communication as the prospect enters the later stages of the buying cycle. If you are using a marketing automation platform, you can offer the prospect the option to accelerate and receive information more often. Click to view the Citrix On Demand Webinar Whats Working in Webinars: A look inside the Best Practices of Power Users Most webinar marketers make mistakes at the front end and back end of their webinars. To optimize the value of webinars as a conversion tool, experts offer these Dos and Don ts for converting webinar attendees into customers: DON T treat the webinar registration page as a sales qualification tool. DO frame information in terms of your audience s very personal and selfish self-interests. DON T think so hard about the facts and data you want to present; DO think about how your audience would use the data and why they d care about the information. DON T get caught up in the product specs, functionality or competitive advantages. DO convey why they should be enthusiastic about the concepts you are presenting. DON T present the usual company overview information in the beginning of the webinar. DO realize that this doesn t so much establish credibility as it violates expectations. The audience has signed up because they were promised specific value propositions for them. Company background should almost always be a part of the sales process rather than the marketing process. DON T underestimate the conversion power of the archived webinar. DO take advantage of the many ways to promote an archived webinar and the archived webinar is probably the best way to reach a global audience. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 6

7 Step 3 Leverage Opportunities For Lead Scoring Having visibility into the buyer s journey has become an integral component of If marketers record the questions successful marketing initiatives, and therefore marketers are utilizing webinars asked by attendees during a webinar and the intelligence they provide to help determine the sales readiness of each and then later integrate that data buyer. This tactic helps sales and marketing teams develop processes to prioritize into a CRM or Sales Force Automation and engage with the right leads. system, this can provide sales with For example, in-session webinar polls offer a great way to gauge an attendee s current objectives and strengths, as well as understand their weaknesses. This knowledge provides marketers with the information they need to modify or maintain their current messaging to most effectively resonate with buyers based on their key attributes. Interactive polling during a live webinar can point to key areas of interest among prospects, Molay said. This can help to focus further marketing efforts and give you ideas for future webinar topics. Many webinar technologies allow you to drive attendees directly to post-webinar surveys, which can give you the deeper intelligence and context for follow-up calls, and help to further qualify that opportunity. Webinar platforms that integrate with marketing automation, sales management or customer relationship management (CRM) software enable marketers to include attendance and registration data in their prospect profiles. Additionally, marketers can in some cases export key information, such as comments or questions typed during the webinar, to enhance the current prospect file. opportunity to ask some of the qualification questions you previously tried to put To increase the value of marketing automation and improve the performance on registration pages. If people feel they have just received value from you, they of campaigns, marketers are realizing it is imperative to integrate their are more likely to reciprocate in a meaningful way. marketing automation platforms with their databases. With an integrated data process in place, marketers can improve key performance indicators (KPIs) in their campaigns including open, click through and conversion rates from leads to opportunities. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 7

8 Step 4 Integrate Your Systems To Optimize Data Webinars help marketers automate their lead nurturing and scoring campaigns to improve the conversion rates of new inquiries to qualified leads. In order to increase efficiency, marketers need one central database to store and share updated lead and contact information. Using APIs To Enhance Data Collection Marketers also are using application programming interfaces (APIs) to add Ideally, the information collected in this database should not be limited to flexibility to their data collection methods, to optimize the information available webinar engagement data, but should be integrated with intelligence on form from a variety of sources, including social platforms, mobile, and web submissions, page views, web site sessions and engagement, among sites. This helps integrate customer touch points and develop seamless data other attributes. management processes. If marketers have their databases fully integrated, they can take campaign initiatives a step further and calculate which activities either before or after the webinar contributed to higher lead quality and close rate. By integrating webinar platforms with a marketing automation solution, marketers While many marketers use webinars as a means of demonstrating thought leadership, experts warn that just because someone made contact and engaged with an organization by attending a webinar, they may not be a prospective buyer. In many cases, unqualified buyers are looking for valuable, free educational content. Scoring helps marketers separate the leads from the rest. can ensure that webinar leads meet agreed upon qualifying criteria, before passing them along to sales. Integrating automation systems with webinar platforms also connects what was once a series of separate, time-consuming, manual data-collecting steps. These steps can now be integrated together for webinar invitations, registrations and follow-ups. We also use webinars to wake up segments of our database or to re-engage Without scoring the names generated from webinars, your sales team will have to place a lot of calls to bad leads, which hampers productivity and harms the relationship between sales and marketing, Woulfe noted. Many of the names sourced through webinars are early stage they might not be ready to engage with sales today but lead nurturing will ensure those names are cultivated over time and scoring will ensure that once they re ready for sales, they automatically get routed to the right person for follow up. them, Woulfe said. We align the content to core challenges our product can solve to help prospects understand how our solution could be used in the scenarios described in our webinars without making them product pitches. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 8

9 Step 5 Accelerate The Sale Webinar follow up is a critical point in the conversion process. Similar to initial personalization and batch signatures points of engagement highlighted earlier in this E-book, a prospect s impression is to make it more of a one-to-one dependent upon the offers and value proposition demonstrated after a webinar. communication, she said. This also lets At the end of marketing webinars, you advance conversion by giving the audience one and only one explicit and concrete call to action, Molay a good lead start a direct dialogue with the rep. Don t paralyze them with an abundance of choices as to what they can do next. Drive them noted. Don t paralyze them with an abundance of choices as to what they The company also offers additional, can do next. Drive them to a single web page that focuses on whatever ungated, value-added content to a single web page that you were talking about. Or tell them you will be contacting them within the collateral, such as an analyst report, focuses on whatever you next week and you would like them to read the or take the phone call guide or video, that is paired with some were talking about. because they can get additional value. Pick one thing and make that a clear product information, typically an online expectation of their next step. demo. Leads are then scored based on According to Woulfe, Eloqua has a standard, automated webinar follow up process, which is typically the same process for online and in-person events. The company automatically sends a relevant follow up based on someone s attendance status, their lead their behavior as soon as it s recorded. Ken Molay President Webinar Success Sales reps follow up with the marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and the other leads are entered into nurture programs. stage (including opportunity Webinars can be very effective, especially for vertical marketing, Woulfe stage) and their account noted. If you have a very targeted message for a finite group of prospects, a type. Everyone gets a version webinar is a cost effective way to deliver that information. Similarly, for target of the same but it s accounts, you may want to do something more high-touch, like demonstrate a tailored to them and we use specific use case on a private webinar. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 9

10 Understanding The Journey To Conversion Marketers can leverage automation platforms to understand which phase Marketers should pay close attention to webinar leads are in the buying process, as well as conversion time between the conversion rates of webinar leads each phase. They can then build programs to accelerate the conversion at the various buyer-cycle stages to times if necessary. Marketers can also see how many webinar leads became understand KPIs such as: opportunities with a CRM platform and what the potential revenue will be. become sales opportunities; Similarly, Waffle noted, marketing automation also should show marketers multitouch attribution on an opportunity. This helps marketers understand, for example, how a recent deal that took nine months to close actually evolved. Organizations a given period of time; and path to become a deal, he said. A marketer can see where a specific webinar data at a program level to see how much influence a specific webinar or webinars How much revenue has been generated from webinars over can see all the times marketing touched or influenced an opportunity along its played a role in the success of that deal. Marketers can also see performance How many webinar leads have Which webinars were the most With this dashboard view, marketers can spend more of their time developing strategies to improve conversion rates and rollout more webinars. Kelly J. Waffle Director, Account Strategy Marketo effective for particular buyers. in general had on a corporation s revenue pipeline. With this dashboard view, marketers can spend more of their time developing strategies to improve conversion rates and rollout more webinars, Waffle noted. They also are better prepared to show the overall influence of marketing on revenue and have more informed discussions with management to justify budget and headcount increases to support webinars. Knowing the impact of marketing on revenue is a key tenet, regardless of the marketing medium. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 10

11 Case In Point: Webinar Platform Helps Inspired Marketing Drive Conversions & Revenue One classic example of how webinars can help influence conversions else because they allows us to and drive revenue is Inspired Marketing LLC. Based in Columbus, OH, the introduce ourselves to potential Webinars are an company sells digital materials and online training programs about using customers for a longer period of incredibly efficient way social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. time and help us close the sale more to generate business. In effectively, he added. January 2011 we had sales Marketing offers free, educational webinars on social media strategies, Another new area for Inspired of $250,000 from just seven its core business, and also presents fee-based training webinars for Marketing is the use of automated GoToWebinar events. client companies. Webinars are recorded and made available as webinars. Recognizing that live home study courses. events are far more effective Co-founded in 2010 by Lewis Howes and Sean Malarkey, Inspired In 2010, the partners presented more than 300 webinars (both their own and through other people), and the platform has helped the company grow its business to a projected $2.5 million in sales for Webinars are an incredibly efficient way to generate business. They are extremely powerful tools. For example, in January 2011 we had sales of $250,000 from just seven GoToWebinar events, said Howes. The partners attribute their high conversion rates to live, online training. Lewis Howes President Inspired Marketing than recorded trainings, Malarkey explained that they have found a way to offer what appears to be a fully live webinar yet seamlessly incorporate a recorded segment. By scheduling the event for a specific time and providing a live introduction and question and answer period, they retain audience interest while sparing themselves from having to present the same material over and over. Webinars increase leads and help us convert better than anything How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 11

12 Conclusion 7 Best Practice Webinar Tips For Conversion Webinars offer marketers a unique opportunity to engage with prospects on an To optimize the value of webinars as a key conversion tool, Woulfe offered 7 exclusively opt-in basis. Cited as a primary lead gen tool for many successful B2B tips for marketers: organizations, webinars also are very effective at increasing brand awareness, building relationships and credibility, nurturing leads, delivering product training 1. logging into the platform is clearly explained and easy for the user. and providing on-going customer education. To enhance the impact of marketing initiatives, many organizations are into targeted campaigns based on the events for which they registered, whether or not they attended and other common factors. Marketers can then create targeted marketing messaging based on a prospect s exact interests. Use ICS, or ical-compatible files, so users can easily put the date in their calendars. integrating their technology systems with webinar platforms to align webinar data with and drip marketing efforts, automatically segmenting prospects Make sure your webinar campaigns include a few reminders and that Use pictures instead of words to show, rather than tell, your story. No one wants to see slide after slide of bullets. 4. Use anecdotes, make it relatable and don t use lots of jargon, to keep people engaged. Marketers can effectively cater to today s time-starved B2B buyers, who now expect interactive content and seamlessly integrated engagement at every 5. Your follow up should account for lead stage and should be prompt. possible touch point. By integrating the reporting and intelligence from webinar Send a follow up campaign as soon as possible and don t use a one- platforms with marketing automation systems, progressive marketers are realizing size-fits-all message. more efficient means of connecting the dots between campaign efforts, content offerings and driving real conversions. 6. Personalize your follow up messaging for customers, people who registered but didn t attend, people who did attend and contacts who already have open opportunities. 7. Use the follow up as an opportunity to convey a relevant message to each group and provide a piece of value added content instead of making it just a thanks for coming message. How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 12

13 About GoToWebinar Webinars Made Easy About DemandGen Report GoToWebinar is an easy-to-use do-it-yourself webinar tool designed to increase DemandGen Report (DGR) is a targeted e-media publication spotlighting market reach by enabling presenters to connect with up to 1,000 attendees the strategies and solutions that help Business-to- Business (BtoB) companies online. With GoToWebinar, you can reduce travel costs, generate more qualified better align sales, marketing and disparate teams to support growth and drive leads at a lower cost and enhance communication with customers, prospects revenue. DGR content and news coverage focuses on the sales and marketing and employees. All You Can Reach for one low monthly flat fee. automation tools that enable companies to better measure and manage multichannel demand generation efforts. DemandGen Report is the only information source directly focused on this rapidly emerging business discipline. Citrix Online 7414 Hollister Ave Goleta, CA State RT 17 S Suite 410 Hasbrouck Heights, NJ How To Convert Webinar Attendees Into Customers In 5 Easy Steps 13