Tag Archive for: How to Run a Webinar

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Syndicate Webinar Content

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the ninth and final installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

In our most recent post in this series, we talked about pre-webinar bonding & follow-up. The last step of the process is to syndicate your content.

Syndicate Webinar Content

You’ve invested a ton of time planning and preparing for your event. Make sure you get the most out of your investment by syndicating your content. Syndication means taking the content and reformatting it to fit other mediums or marketing channels. For example, take your webinar recording and:

  • Have the video transcribed. We suggest using Upwork to hire someone to transcribe your video. It’s super affordable and worth the money!
  • Format the transcription into a white paper. Place the white paper on your website as Trackable Content in your marketing automation system and gate the content.
  • Put your video on an internet video hosting and analytics company like Wistia, embed it in your website, and gate the video.
  • Break down the white paper into smaller blog posts. Schedule the blog posts using your CMS.
  • Include the video, whitepaper, and any other related tools or documents in a downloadable “kit”, which is a fantastic lead generation strategy. Prospects are more inclined to give you their email address in exchange for lots of value.
  • Put the webinar recording in a “Resources” section on your website.

What to Expect

Attendance depends on the factors described in the beginning of this document. About 40-60% of registrants will show up for live viewings, but you can expect more registrants to trickle in and watch on demand over the next few days following your webinar.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series. If you’ve got an idea for a series, we’d love to hear it! Comment below.

Do you want your own personal copy of the entire guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Pre-Webinar Bonding & Follow-Up

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the eight installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

In our last post in this series, we talked about building a compelling landing page and “Thank You” page. The next step is to get comfortable with pre-webinar bonding and follow-up.

Pre Webinar Bonding

If possible, create further short pieces of content that cover any possible objections and start building more trust with registrants. This can be drip fed via email before the webinar. This content could be short videos or articles or just a nice webinar cheat sheet to download and print off before the webinar. Your marketing automation software can help you build a simple drip track for new registrants prepping them for the event.

Follow Up

Make sure to follow up with attendees and no shows once the event is over. We suggest doing so three (3) days after the event. In your follow up, include a video recording of the webinar. Put it into an email, but only include an image of the video. When clicked, the recipient should be taken to a landing page, separate from your registration page, where they can play the video. Separating your follow up page from your registration page will help you isolate statistics and get better tracking from your marketing automation system. This is especially handy for people that couldn’t attend the event as they can watch the video later at their convenience.

In the next, and final, installment of How to Run a Webinar we’ll talk about syndicating your content.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the entire guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Building a Compelling Landing Page and Thank You Page

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the seventh installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

In our last post in this series, we talked about Promoting your webinar. The next step is to build a compelling landing page and “Thank You” page!

Build a Compelling Landing Page

Your marketing automation system should have some great tools in place to help you build a landing page and web form that’s styled and customized to fit the look and feel of your brand. Here are a few ways you can make a compelling landing page:

  • Keep your communication succinct and list out the three benefits to joining the webinar (what you’ll learn).
  • If the presenters are well known, consider putting a picture of the presenter on the page to personalize the event.
  • If you’re offering an incentive, make it clear to the user what that incentive is.
  • Keep the focus on the page, and converting the visitor. Don’t put other things like your website navigation menu or other links that could divert the user’s attention.

Build a Great “Thank You” Page

Similar to the landing page, you want the Thank You Page to be simple, with an easy way for the user to add the event to their calendar. Add a “add to calendar” button with instructions on how to add the event straight to their calendar. AddToCalendar has some neat tools to create buttons and links for this purpose. After the registration form is submitted, make sure to send a thank you email. All of this will increase your attendance rate.

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about pre-webinar bonding.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison and Citrix’ GoToWebinar Join Forces

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GoToWebinar by CitrixWebinars can be one of your company’s most powerful marketing channels. It is nutritional content that is relevant, up-to-date, and interactive. You have the ability to connect with many clients at once, using one powerful marketing platform. What could be more efficient than that? Lead Liaison chose GoToWebinar because the user experience is very similar to Citrix’ GoToMeeting platform. As of July 2016, a little over 1 out of every 4 companies using webinar solutions in some capacity use GoToWebinar. This means the majority of a user’s audience will be familiar with GoToWebinar, making it easier for them to join and participate in your event.

Lead Liaison combines automation with webinar-planning. Users manage details of the event by incorporating data from Prospects’ information and behavior with its powerful tools, such as landing pages, forms, emails, postcards, gifts, print material, etc.

What’s more, Lead Liaison’s marketing automation platform is responsive to the actions of the participants, much like any other event held using the capabilities of Lead Liaison. Brooke Barnes, Marketing Specialist at Select Energy Services, explains how the software helped her manage their most recent event,  “after we sent [our] invitation, based on how the recipients acted – if they opened it, or if they hit RSVP, or if they had a question – we were able to send follow-up emails based on the information that they needed. I would definitely recommend Lead Liaison to any business that has marketing and sales needs. It is so essential to have a single platform where you can manage all of your marketing communication, all of your content creation, get reports for your ROI, and align your marketing and sales team better. ”

Happy clients aren’t the only ones excited about our advanced integrations. Daniel Waas, Director of Marketing, GoToWebinar at Citrix, says, “Lead Liaison has built a thorough integration with GoToWebinar. Connecting the two platforms provides marketers with a great deal of flexibility in matching webinar content to the right audience through smart segmentation, in personalizing email invitations and follow-up emails to maximize attendance and in scoring leads based on their engagement.”

The ultra-supportive marketing automation company, Lead Liaison, prides themselves on the level of responsiveness and guidance they provide to their users. As a part of their growing Resources Library, they recently released a content-rich white paper titled How to Run a Webinar. This publication thoroughly defines what it takes to make each webinar a success, from defining the webinar guest list and registration process utilizing add-to-calendar features, to sending post-webinar communication to participants.

Imagine being able to manage the webinar process from the moment you send the invitation, through follow-ups and reminder emails, to hosting and then thanking participants, while capturing and calculating important data (such as Lead Score) all within the same application. It’s possible with Lead Liaison’s integration with GoToWebinar.

About Citrix

Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) aims to power a world where people, organizations and things are securely connected and accessible to make the extraordinary possible. Its technology makes the world’s apps and data secure and easy to access, empowering people to work anywhere and at any time. Citrix provides a complete and integrated portfolio of Workspace-as-a-Service, application delivery, virtualization, mobility, network delivery and file sharing solutions that enables IT to ensure critical systems are securely available to users via the cloud or on-premise and across any device or platform. With annual revenue in 2015 of $3.28 billion, Citrix solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organizations and over 100 million users globally. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

About Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Promote the Webinar

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the sixth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve figured out how marketing automation can help you with the entire process. The next step is to promote your webinar!

Promote the Webinar

Don’t rely solely on emails as the gateway to webinar success! Your target database is just one of the ways you can get people to attend your webinar. Think out of the box, get help from companies in your network, and promote the event through other channels. Here are some suggestions to maximize promotion of your event:

  • Issue a Press Release at least two (2) weeks prior to the webinar. Make sure to include a link to your webinar registration landing page (more about that later!) in the Press Release. The Press Release will also give you a little SEO boost on the topic. Here are some tips from a 3rd party on how to write your press release. Here’s an example of a company doing a press release on their webinar.
  • Consider getting help from your partners to announce the webinar to their database and send prospects to the same registration page.
  • Don’t forget to invite your customers!
  • What about your partners. Don’t forget to actually invite them!
  • Hire a list broker who can send out email (through their resources) to drive contacts to the same registration page.
  • Post the webinar on social media. Your marketing automation system should offer a way to schedule posts. Spread out your posts leading up to the event.
  • Create a handful of blog posts on the topic leading up to the event.

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about creating a landing page and “Thank You” page.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Have a Marketing Automation System in Place

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the fifth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve defined your invitation and registration process. The next step is to consider using your marketing automation software to help you with the entire process.

A marketing automation system can help you automate your webinar and create a repeatable model to use for future webinars. Marketing automation is used to manage the Invite, Registration, and Follow Up Processes. It can also help:

  • Qualify prospects based on their participation in the event
  • Log their status (no show, registered, etc.) with the event to use for future targeting
  • Automatically create a Prospect in your database
  • Nurture Prospects that attend or do not show up for the event
  • Automatically sync leads into your CRM system, such as Salesforce.com
  • Track landing page conversion rates and email statistics
  • Keep everything in one place (folders)
  • Measure ROI of the webinar, including cost per lead

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about how to promote your webinar.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Define Your Invitation and Registration Process

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How to Run a Webinar

This is the fourth installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

You’ve picked your ideal webinar service provider. The next step is to define your invitation and registration process.

Define Your Webinar Invite Process

Once you’ve got your data ready and your target audience defined, it’s time to start putting together a process for inviting people. We propose the invitation process below. The process sends out three invitation emails to your database. The second and third emails are sent out to people that did not open or click previous invite emails.

Webinar Invitation Process

 

Make sure to vary your “preview text” for each invitation email. In your marketing automation software, you should have an option to enter in some preview text in the email builder. The preview text is usually at the upper left side of the email in small text. It’s what shows up in the preview pane of the recipient’s email inbox. They’ll usually see anywhere from 1 to 3 lines of text in their preview depending on their settings. With more than half of all emails getting opened and read on mobile devices, it’s critical to have a compelling preview text. Use different preview text verbiage for each of your three invite emails.

After the event is over, add recipients who opened the email into an “Active List” in your MA software. As an optional step, you could email everyone that opened any of your three invite emails but did not register for the event. We suggest sending this email the day before the event.

Define Your Webinar Registration Process

This is the process people will go through once they register for your event. As shown in yellow below, there are two ways to register participants. Through the event provider, such as GoToWebinar, or via your marketing automation system. If using the marketing automation system, create a web form and landing page in the platform. There are a number of advantages for creating the form and landing page in a marketing automation system. Some of those advantages include the ability to build a smart form with progressive profiling, deeply customize your landing page, style your web form to your liking, and control all of the branding. Data also gets injected directly into the marketing automation system, which can be used for future marketing purposes.

Registration Process

In the diagram above, the steps in green require your company to create email content for each step. With the invite process, there are nine (9) emails in total. All emails should use your standard template though, which will be recognizable to recipients and prevent them from marking your email as spam.

Leading up to the event, most of the messages are reminders. Don’t forgot to include a shortcut for the user to add the event to their calendar of choice (Outlook, Google, etc.) in your thank you for registering and reminder emails. We like using AddToCalendar for this. Once the event is over wait a few days for data to be collected and send a follow up to people that registered and showed up, with a separate follow up for people that didn’t show up.

Your marketing automation system will help you capture this data and configure the process from start to finish – ahead of time. This can be a relief to most companies. The stress of running a webinar increases around the time of the event. If your processes are setup and scheduled ahead of time you’ll have more peace of mind, more time to get things done, and more time to focus on your webinar content and execution. All administrative and marketing tasks will be handled by the system!

In the next installment of How to Run a Webinar, we’ll talk about the importance of having a powerful Marketing Automation tool in place.

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: How to Pick a Webinar Service

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This is the third installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

How to Run a Webinar

You’ve gotten your data ready. The next step is to subscribe to a webinar service. But, which one?

Choosing a Webinar Service

There are a few key things to look for when choosing your webinar service. Obviously, it needs to be web-based. But also think about how you want the registration to look. Think about your budget. How many people do you estimate will attend? Is it important to you that the recording can concert to MP4 (we think so!)?

This webinar comparison is a great little tool that guides you through a series of questions to help you find your match.

We suggest using GoToWebinar from Citrix for running webinars, simply because the user experience is very similar to Citrix’ GoToMeeting platform. As of July 2016, a little over 1 out of every 4 companies using webinar solutions in some capacity use GoToWebinar. This means the majority of your audience will be familiar with GoToWebinar, making it easier for them to join and participate in your event. And you want things to be easy for people. Adding roadblocks only gives people a reason to no-show. Adapt to the needs of your intended audience.

Check back next week when we cover how to define you invitation and registration process!

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Get Your Data Ready

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This is the second installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.How to Run a Webinar

You’ve determined that you are definitely ready to run a webinar. The next step is to get your data ready. Albeit tedious, this is an important step to keeping things running smoothly.

Make sure you have a good database to start

It’s important to know the topic of your webinar and who it relates to. Don’t invite people to a webinar when you know the topic would not be of interest to them. To maximize registrations, use your existing database of contacts with a focus on opt-in contacts. This could be customers, partners, or leads you’ve had any type of engagement with over the past year.

Determine criteria for who you’ll invite

Once you’ve got your database ready, gather criteria for who you’ll invite. If you’re sending out invitations to thousands of people you’ll want a good marketing automation or email marketing solution to help you. Marketing automation platforms will help you easily segment out people using lists, demographics, behaviors, and other types of criteria. These systems also support dynamic segmentation. Dynamic segmentation helps you create rules for your lists that never have to be updated again. The same audience will be ready for you to send invites to for future webinars.

We suggest staying away from purchased lists if you’re using a marketing automation or email marketing system. Most email service providers do not allow purchased lists as part of their email sending policy. There are services available to help you target certain industries and send out communication. Outsourced lists and invites should not be your core invite strategy, but could be used to complement your invite process.

Your data is ready. The next step is subscribing to a webinar service. Check back next week for the next installment of the series How to Run a Webinar: Subscribe to a Webinar Service!

Can’t wait to get your hands on the rest of this intuitive guide? Download the full white paper here.

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!

 

Lead Liaison

How to Run a Webinar: Are you Ready for a Webinar?

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This is the first installment in the series How to Run a Webinar.

How to Run a Webinar

You’re probably reading this with the mindset that you are going to do a webinar. You’ve thought about the topic, decided your company is going to do it, and thought about the material to use; but – are you really ready for a webinar? Executing a successful webinar can be expensive, and requires a lot of preparation. Here are some things to consider before moving forward:

Expect Higher Attendance with:

  1. Strong audience connection. If the audience already knows, likes and trusts you or they know, like and trust whoever is promoting the webinar then attendance will be much higher.
  2. Your opt-in database or cold audience. Participation will be much higher when marketing to your own opt-in list vs. a “cold audience”.
  3. Low industry/topic saturation. If your industry or even the topic has been saturated with webinars expect a lower turnout.
  4. Hot topics. If your subject matter is a hot topic right now that’s pushed the audience’s emotional hot buttons of pain, desire or curiosity, then you can expect a higher attendance rate.
  5. Big name involvement. If you’re going solo on the webinar, and don’t have a lot of people to invite, it’s a lot harder to drive attendance than having a co-presenter, as well as invite-support, from a big name company. For example, suppose you were a technology company with Google as your partner. Could you get a Google employee to co-present with you? Could Google help broadcast the event through their marketing channels thereby sending more people to your landing page? Your webinar will benefit from a big brand name, making it more attractive to your audience, with a larger pool of people to invite.
  6. A larger invitation list. The quality of your invitation list is certainly a factor, but the size of your invite list matters as well. Inviting 50 people to a webinar is a lot different than inviting 50,000.

Let’s be honest though. If you’re a young company (startup) without much brand recognition, a database that’s not quite “there” yet, and no partners to help with the event…you might still be able to pull off a good webinar with a few tricks. Try offering some incentive to get people to attend. Here are some ideas:

  • Offer up a free white paper (worth $X)
  • Provide a discount on your product/service if they attend
  • Offer a giveaway for the first X number of registrants (think iPod, Chromebook, etc.)

Attendance depends on the factors that will be described throughout this series. About 40-60% of registrants will show up for live viewings, but you can expect more registrants to trickle in and watch on demand over the next few days following your webinar.

Now, you’ve thought through things and you’ve decided you are ready. The next step is to get your data ready. Check back next week for the next installment of the series How to Run a Webinar: Getting your Data Ready!

Interested in a demonstration of our robust marketing automation tool?

Click here for a demo!