As I had mentioned in another article that one of the top 3 sources that generates natural market pull and awareness is the analyst community (the other two being your own web site and its ability to attract traffic and PR).
Here is how to win with the analyst strategy.
The companies that are on top of the analysts' mind will get the most benefit, because as the analyst clients call to ask questions about products and services, the analyst will drop names of companies that they not only remember, but care about. So, it is important to make the analysts your friends and make sure that you are fresh on his mind.
What should you do to accomplish this and stand apart from your competition? Here is a trick that will surely help you get there:
Schedule at least 3 analyst inquiries per week per analyst firm. If you are a customer of firms like Gartner, Forrester, IDC and others, you have (in most cases) unlimited access to the analysts. When you schedule inquiries, you are saying "I want to speak with an analyst to ask questions and learn" and they don't have a choice but to schedule a 30 minute call with you. But what you are really doing on the call is to spend 50% of the time to ask questions and learn for the sake of learning (that can't be bad either), but spent 50% to educate the analyst about you! Analysts, like you and me always want to learn, and by taking 15 minutes to bring them up to speed on your company, strategy, and recent customer wins, can be appreciated by them as well.
Doing this consistently on a weekly basis is time consuming, but I will guarantee you that it will pay off in the long run. Once you have gone through a long list of analysts, start again with the first analyst and repeat. You must do this consistently and not only will you be well educated, but each analyst firm and their analysts will know your company well.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Successful Webinar Tactics
If you're doing B2B marketing, then you are probably doing lots of (or at least you should be doing lots of) webinars - which are online live presentations.
As a marketer, you need to track and have specific goals for a number of metrics that differentiate a good webinar from a bad webinar. Here are the variables you want to measure and strive for the best outcome:
- Get the most registrations from each webinar (email to registration conversion)
- Get the right type of audiences (registration to opportunity conversion)
- Get them to show up during the webinar (registration to attendance ratio)
- Get them to stay for the entire duration of the webinar (attendance to stay ratio)
- Get them to buy (opportunity to sale ratio)
How do you succeed in all these? Well, after having done hundreds of webinar, I've learned that an entire book can be written around webinar strategies and tactis, as there are many variables that affect webinar outcome. However, here is a summary of a couple of key things you want to make sure you do to achieve a successful webinars.
1) Invite your own prospect database, but always have a plan to purchase or go after external databases as well for invitation to the webinar.This ensures that you hit your target registration metrics. You might have to invest in multiple databases, if the target is high. And you'll want to set your target to align with the sales target and everything else you to do support sales. It's always best to do fewer webinars and do them well (with lots of registrations), then doing lots of webinars with small registrations.
2) Give the audience at least 2 weeks from the first email to register. Ideally, you want to give them 3 weeks.
3) Send at least 3 reminders (first email about 2-3 weeks out, 2nd email about 1 week out, 3rd email the day before the event). Make sure that the subject of your last email starts with "Last chance to register for...".
4) Keep the emails as short as possible. If you can't read the entire email in less than 10 seconds, don't bother sending it out. It will not get read. Keep the subject related to the webinar. And always, make the emails personalized to the recipient.
5) Always have a drawing for a nice reward for people who register and attend.
6) Don't give the reward out to anyone - make them take a final 3-5 question survey, and ask them more about their business needs. And make sure the audience knows that only people who submit their surveys will qualify for the reward. This will dramatically help with the 'attendance to stay' ratio.
7) Keep the presentation under 30 minutes. You start losing people after that. Also, make it interactive with Live Polls during the presentation.
8) Have someone introduce the main speaker. This gives the speaker much more credibility.
9) Have people submit their questions, and then cover as many as you can at the end, but always have 3-5 questions pre-written to ask, in case there are no questions. I've also found that when you ask a question of your own, it is a nice ice breaker and gets others to start asking questions.
10) Promise the audience that they'll get answers to all the questions in a few days via email. In about 2-4 days, send out an FAQ style document that has all the questions submitted, a link to the recording of the webinar and a copy of your slides to the audience that registered. This not only ensure that people that could not make it see what was covered, but more importantly, it makes it real easy for people to forward to their friends and colleagues.
And finally, post the recording of all webinars you do as "on demand" presentations on your web site, to continue to produce leads over time. The more webinars you have, the better.
Good luck.
- yh
As a marketer, you need to track and have specific goals for a number of metrics that differentiate a good webinar from a bad webinar. Here are the variables you want to measure and strive for the best outcome:
- Get the most registrations from each webinar (email to registration conversion)
- Get the right type of audiences (registration to opportunity conversion)
- Get them to show up during the webinar (registration to attendance ratio)
- Get them to stay for the entire duration of the webinar (attendance to stay ratio)
- Get them to buy (opportunity to sale ratio)
How do you succeed in all these? Well, after having done hundreds of webinar, I've learned that an entire book can be written around webinar strategies and tactis, as there are many variables that affect webinar outcome. However, here is a summary of a couple of key things you want to make sure you do to achieve a successful webinars.
1) Invite your own prospect database, but always have a plan to purchase or go after external databases as well for invitation to the webinar.This ensures that you hit your target registration metrics. You might have to invest in multiple databases, if the target is high. And you'll want to set your target to align with the sales target and everything else you to do support sales. It's always best to do fewer webinars and do them well (with lots of registrations), then doing lots of webinars with small registrations.
2) Give the audience at least 2 weeks from the first email to register. Ideally, you want to give them 3 weeks.
3) Send at least 3 reminders (first email about 2-3 weeks out, 2nd email about 1 week out, 3rd email the day before the event). Make sure that the subject of your last email starts with "Last chance to register for...".
4) Keep the emails as short as possible. If you can't read the entire email in less than 10 seconds, don't bother sending it out. It will not get read. Keep the subject related to the webinar. And always, make the emails personalized to the recipient.
5) Always have a drawing for a nice reward for people who register and attend.
6) Don't give the reward out to anyone - make them take a final 3-5 question survey, and ask them more about their business needs. And make sure the audience knows that only people who submit their surveys will qualify for the reward. This will dramatically help with the 'attendance to stay' ratio.
7) Keep the presentation under 30 minutes. You start losing people after that. Also, make it interactive with Live Polls during the presentation.
8) Have someone introduce the main speaker. This gives the speaker much more credibility.
9) Have people submit their questions, and then cover as many as you can at the end, but always have 3-5 questions pre-written to ask, in case there are no questions. I've also found that when you ask a question of your own, it is a nice ice breaker and gets others to start asking questions.
10) Promise the audience that they'll get answers to all the questions in a few days via email. In about 2-4 days, send out an FAQ style document that has all the questions submitted, a link to the recording of the webinar and a copy of your slides to the audience that registered. This not only ensure that people that could not make it see what was covered, but more importantly, it makes it real easy for people to forward to their friends and colleagues.
And finally, post the recording of all webinars you do as "on demand" presentations on your web site, to continue to produce leads over time. The more webinars you have, the better.
Good luck.
- yh
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