50 Years of Growth, Innovation and Leadership Community Marketing: Focusing Your Webinar Strategy to Achieve Dramatic Results A Frost & Sullivan White Paper www.frost.com
Frost & Sullivan Introduction... 4 Utilizing Community Marketing... 4 Engaging The Community... 5 Ease Of Use And Increased Repeat Visits... 6 Marriage Of Webinars To Community Marketing... 6 Developing Close Relationships... 6 Leveraging Content... 7 Your Market Ecosystem... 7 Case Study: Intel Data Center Marketing... 9 Background... 9 Issue... 9 Solution... 9 Case Study: Dell SonicWALL... 10 Background... 10 Issue... 10 Solution... 10 Results... 10 Customer Channel... 11 Conclusion... 11 CONTENTS
Frost & Sullivan INTRODUCTION Webinars provide enterprises with powerful business-to-business marketing avenues. Marketing, sales and product management groups are able to leverage many aspects of webcasts to: Increase revenue through lead generation Dialog with prospects or customers and facilitate channel communication Gain insight about your target audience Promote thought leadership in your industry and be seen as a market leader content may not be relevant to the audience, the follow-up is lacking or the effort to promote the webinar was lost in the increasing amount of content and events promoted in every market. An effective way to increase the value of webinars is to group your content into relevant categories and develop engaged communities around this content. This allows community members to feel engaged with the overall content stream because they already know that they have an interest in the general theme of the community. A community-based marketing strategy also helps overcome some of the major pitfalls of traditional webinar programs that often fail to make it easy to access/browse content and often seem like a detached, one-off marketing effort instead of an integral part of a larger and functionalities gained through community marketing efforts, such as: Organic audience-building One-time registration Shareable and embeddable content Leveraging existing and developed content Partner and channel information distribution UTILIZING COMMUNITY MARKETING Community marketing is a strategy to engage audiences that have common interests, goals or values. Unlike direct or push marketing, the participants in a given community interact with the sponsor and other participants voluntarily. This opt-in atmosphere is vital because customers and potential customers already have a need for your product or service and are actively looking for information. 4 Frost.com Frost.com 4
Community Marketing: Focusing Your Webinar Strategy to Achieve Dramatic Results ENGAGING THE COMMUNITY The content that you post in the community should be valuable to most or all participants and not simply marketing material. To ensure the community you are setting up will be both informative to the participants and a valuable marketing tool for you, several questions should be answered before moving forward: What is the primary business objective for the community? Is it to build your brand, Who is your target audience? Remember that every potential community member may webcast or other content posted in the community and determine which technical features will be used to affect the outcome. For example, informing the community of new opportunities or threats that your company can help them address is one way of incorporating valuable content for the community with a call to action that drives your business. The goal is to narrow content to what community members really want. For example, if a pharmaceutical company has three different lines of products anti-depressants, pain medications and cancer treatments they should develop three different community marketing programs to maintain relevance. This is not to say that any user couldn t belong to more than one community, but the differences between an oncologist and a psychiatrist necessitate having different communities for each. This type of focus keeps the user engaged and promotes the idea that his or her time is not wasted looking through non-relevant content or receiving multiple notices about webinars that are not of interest. Frost.com 5
Frost & Sullivan Figure 1: Ongoing Implementation and Management of a Community Marketing Strategy Garner Direct Feedback from Users Refine Community Focus Utilize Analytics to Track Leads, Attendance, Etc. Leverage Relevant Existing Content Implement Ongoing Webinar Program Recruit Users with Profile that Matches Community Focus EASE OF USE AND INCREASED REPEAT VISITS Once a focus or theme for your community is set and existing relevant content, such as recorded webinars, white papers, etc., is populated, then community members can access all content, existing and live events, without having to re-register every time. This ease-of-use content, this also helps foster repeat user visits. Ultimately, over time, an effective community marketing strategy can develop go-to thought leadership that produces action. MARRIAGE OF WEBINARS TO COMMUNITY MARKETING DEVELOPING CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS Webinars are a highly effective tool that adds a high level of interactivity, professionalism and credibility to your sales strategy. The variety of media used in today s webinars audio, video, Web ensures your audience will maintain interest and attention during every event. Static media this white paper is a good example are valuable and useful tools to solidify opinions, build credibility and develop a business case to justify purchases. However, static media is not very effective at building relationships, garnering trust or developing initial interest in your product/service. Multimedia platforms, such as webinars, engage the user in a way that fosters a close relationship that can approach face-to-face meetings. 6 Frost.com
Community Marketing: Focusing Your Webinar Strategy to Achieve Dramatic Results Not only does each webinar offer an opportunity to inform your potential customer base on the value of your product and services, an ongoing webcast strategy integrated into a focused community with common interests also increases brand awareness, improves channel penetration and supports successful product launches. And, with the high cost of travel and attractive relative to other marketing mediums. LEVERAGING CONTENT There are three general types of webinar content that can be populated into the community: A key to keeping users interested in your community is frequent and relevant information. To source of this content is existing presentations and webinars that can initially populate the community and, if relevant, populating them into the portal. Finally, other companies that you do business with, such as suppliers, channel partners and others that your company has strategic alliances with, develop content that may be of value to your users. These partners gain the advantage of having their brand shown to your community base and you gain the advantage of showing market and thought leadership. YOUR MARKET ECOSYSTEM ecosystem to drive users to your communities as well. Consultative sales can be all about the number of touches that are made and, if your community content is truly educational in nature, network, the same rationale applies. A live webinar allows them to make consultative contacts using tracking codes and other analytics, you can easily isolate all community registration and Frost.com 7
Frost & Sullivan BrightTALK provides webinars and videos for professionals and their communities. Every day, thousands of thought leaders are actively sharing their insights, their ideas and their most up-to-date knowledge with professionals all over the globe through the webinar and video technologies that BrightTALK has created. unlike traditional webcast publish it into active communities where it can be found by relevant professionals. This portal is a highly developed way to build and sustain a community marketing strategy. 8 Frost.com
Community Marketing: Focusing Your Webinar Strategy to Achieve Dramatic Results CASE STUDY INTEL DATA CENTER MARKETING BACKGROUND Intel, a leading global developer and producer of microprocessors and other IT products, is one marketing and sales challenges. ISSUE In this process of scaling a potential product from idea to development to beta testing and, and understanding necessary to partner with Intel before the mass production stage. Also challenging was the fact that Intel s product was only one albeit a critical component in servers produced by their technology partners. This meant mission-critical information needed While Intel had great brand recognition and a superb mass-marketing program, it became apparent that using webinars, white papers and events to reach this target audience was achieving mediocre results at best. We assumed if we blasted a mission-critical message to Director of Data Center Marketing. We consider white papers, press announcements, etc., to be a shotgun blast ; however, using BrightTALK is the rifle shot. We still use the shotgun, but we also rely on the rifle. It s always better to have more weapons in your marketing arsenal. -Eric Doyle, Dir. of Data Center Marketing, Intel SOLUTION mission-critical messaging to the customers who need it without having to rely solely on platform enables Intel s technology partners to book-end the content with their own messaging and branding and push it out easily, keeping lag time to a minimum. While Intel Frost.com 9
Frost & Sullivan the messaging reaches the right audience. As Doyle states, We consider white papers, press your marketing arsenal. CASE STUDY: DELL SONICWALL BACKGROUND network security and data protection solutions that dynamically secure, control and scale its customers and partners global networks. As a leader in network security, Dell SonicWALL must market in a way that develops and maintains thought leadership, builds educational communities and creates demand. ISSUE Dell SonicWALL marketing found that traditional Web conferencing platforms were too limited for its needs. Dell SonicWALL couldn t ensure that critical information was being received by marketing efforts for its thought leadership efforts. SOLUTION accessible to anyone, and a Customer Channel, accessible only to existing Dell SonicWALL limiting competitor access to critical information intended for existing customers only. RESULTS Thought Leadership Channel to increased interest, viewings and questions from the end-user community while allowing the sales department to leverage the viewing data to identify who watched what content where. directly to the sales team for follow-up. The company has also found that its pre-registration-to-attendee conversion rate has 10 Frost.com
Community Marketing: Focusing Your Webinar Strategy to Achieve Dramatic Results pre-registration numbers within a week or two of the live date. A recent example of this was Customer Channel customer loyalty and re-sales/up-sells for Dell SonicWALL. Under the Hood is a webinar series Dell SonicWALL has instituted to inform customers on of Your Firewall, a recent webinar in the series. Live attendance for this customer-focused webinar was higher than most events in the Thought Leadership Channel. However, viewings of the recording are lower after the event, indicating that existing customers appreciate the time Classroom Sessions is Dell SonicWALL s webinar series that informs existing customers about new threats to their network and explains how Dell SonicWALL products can protect excellent opportunity to up-sell other related products. CONCLUSION With the seemingly ever-increasing frequency of webinars, videos and other multi-media community marketing strategy that takes advantage of multimedia webinars, your message is delivered to the right people in the most effective way. Frost.com 11
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