Virtual events and webinars as a tactic for building rivers of information for you audience.
One of the most popular tactics when you want to influence your market via content is providing webinars and virtual events. According to the The MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, this is a very effective online marketing tactic (48% of responses in a survey answered that virtual events and webinars were either somewaht effective and 43% answered they were very effective).
If writing and publishing content requires a set of skills, webinar broadcasting requires other skills because, additional to the content and the presentation slides, this tactic requires a good presenter and an intensive outbound marketing effort to attract the audience on the date and time of the webinar. People perceive more value through a webinar compared to content published through a blog. As in all tactics, it requires : people, process and technology. The process also needs special attention because a webinar can be tied to an email campaign, a blog publishing and white paper release so planning needs to consider that all elements need to be ready in the right time. For example:
- Once the topic, content and materials are ready, an invitation needs to be sent through the social media channels, through an email marketing campaign and through the previous blog releases.
- A good presenter needs to be appointed
- Technology for the webinar needs to be chosen, we can suggest at least four platforms: WebEx, GoToMeeting, Adobe and Microsoft.
If you are planning on using webinars as part of you rivers of information strategy, it is a good idea to see how the experts are doing it: try to follow and analyze companies as WSI, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Profs, Constant Contact, HubSpot, once you register with them, you will be receiving frequent invitations to webinars: analyze the invitation, the wording, the action items, the design; analyze the flow of the webinar and analyze the post-webinar activities where they usually thank you for attending and provide a recorded version for you to review. Many times this recorded versions are recommended by the user to other co-workers so the broadcast gets an aggregated audience through the replays.
If you would like to design and implement a write and publish strategy and launch a “rivers of information” initiative, contact Prospect Factory
Carlos Guzman D | WSI Certified Internet Marketing Consultant.
