I’m constantly talking to marketers about webinar best practices and increasingly, they are turning to social media as an outlet to help them drive more registrants, more attendance, and more engagement from their online events.

Today’s post is written by Brett Schklar, CMO, Market Creation Group. During his 14-year career, Brett has become a well-known and respected marketing guru, business visionary and community leader in the Denver area. On February 3, he will be presenting a webinar with the American Marketing Association.

I’m “jump out of my seat” excited to share with the 5 Marketing Forces that I’ve developed over the years and implemented in over 50 companies through Market Creation Group’s strategy process.

Here’s why you should be excited too!  During Friday’s webinar, you will:

1. Learn about the Five Forces of B2B marketing that provide you with a new lens to marketing success/successfully defend your budget and find the areas to invest more based on results
2. Learn how the volume and velocity of demand generation play in ensuring a successful transition to the sales team
3. Understand the right type of social media program you’ll need based on which marketing “force” is most needed
4. See a new way to have a webinar presented with interactive drawing/sketch work done in real-time

During this presentation, I will be unfolding how the 5 Marketing Forces (Awareness, Familiarity, Consideration, Purchase and Experience) are used to create a more focused marketing program based on what is working or what is not working within most marketing programs.  While we explore the 5 Marketing Forces, we’ll also discuss how well or not well your sales program is going and where marketing can put significantly more effort to best align with sales to drive more results.  Whether we look at the Volume/Velocity ratio of leads, the ways to identify your brand recognition and how it impacts demand generation needs, or you’re just fighting to the death for your budget and want to wow people into more funding, we’ve got some new stuff you’ll love to hear about!

I’m also going to take a good look at they types of social media programs you may want to have in place based on the weakest areas of your marketing program.

Now you can see why I’m super-excited about my February 3rd AMA webinar. Want to join me? Register now!

Today we are excited to announce the beta of our pre-recorded video playback feature. Pre-recorded video playback gives your trainings, sales demos, and webinars a more engaging, personal feel by incorporating short video clips into the live presentation. Your meetings will never be the same and your participants will thank you for incorporating rich video content in your presentation. With pre-recorded video playback, you can:

• Upload pre-recorded video clips to your access code
• Playback video clips during your meeting for participants to see and hear your content
• Record your meeting with the pre-recorded video content included

To sign up for beta access to pre-recorded video playback please fill out this form. You will receive an email within 1 business day providing you with instructions on how to get started.

Currently the process for uploading and playing back your pre-recorded video clip is a 4 step process (see diagram below). For more information please be sure to view the recorded demo, the Quick Start Guide, and the Best Practices and Known Issues documentation to gain valuable tips and tricks on how to use pre-recorded video playback in your meetings. When this feature becomes generally available (first half of 2012), the process for uploading and playing back your videos in the live presentation will be very similar to uploading and inserting slides into the ReadyTalk Conference Controls.

We’d love to hear about your experience with pre-recorded video in the feedback form or in the comments below. Tell us how the feature is working, if you’re experiencing any issues, or if you have any specific feature requests. If you have any questions about this feature please contact ReadyTalk Customer Care at 800.843.9166.

Paul was formerly an Account Executive at ReadyTalk gaining valuable experience with competitors and the state of the web and audio conferencing industry. Currently in his role as Product Marketing Manager, he is in charge of the competitive landscape, on-demand audio products, and the web meeting interface. Paul loves the outdoors, his pup Huck, his wife Jess, and getting to the ski slopes as much as possible.

Download the AMA and ReadyTalk's guide to planning successful webinars.

Chances are, you are very familiar with the many moving parts that go into setting up a webinar. With assistance from the American Marketing Association, we created a best practices document to offer help sorting through those details.

As a supplement to this document, the members of our Events team came up with the following additional points to consider while setting up a webinar.

• Be sure to schedule your webinar as far in advance of the actual date as possible – ideally, at least 6 to 8 weeks prior – in order to allow enough time for proper marketing of your webinar.
• If you have a custom script, be sure to send it your Event Manager at least 24 hours in advance of your webinar.
• If your participants will be listening to the audio via their phone lines, you might consider adding something similar to the text below to your invitation or confirmation email.

To ensure you are able to join this event successfully, please dial in 10-15 minutes prior to scheduled start time. You will be greeted by an operator. Please be prepared to give them your full name and company name. You will be placed on hold until the call begins.

If you are using the broadcast audio function (allowing your participants to listen to the audio via their computer speakers, you might consider something similar to the text below.

When you log into the web portion, you will automatically be connected to broadcast audio which will allow you to hear the presentation through your computer speakers. Please make sure the volume on your speakers is set appropriately to your location and is respectful to those around you.

• Prepare an introduction slide to show prior to the beginning of the webinar. This slide can include the login information and is very helpful, especially if the dial-in number is listed. Also, if the webinar uses broadcast audio, you can also use this location to remind participants to make sure the volume on their speakers is set appropriately.
• Prior to the live webinar, you might consider sending an email to all speakers with their dial-in and log-in information.
• Prepare a few “canned questions” just in case you need them to fill time during the Q&A session.
• Think about audience engagement!!! Come up with a few ways of interacting with your audience!
• Be aware of your platform’s limitations before the live webinar (participant limit, desktop sharing, video, etc.)
• Find out what type of support you have from your platform provider before, during and after your webinar.

If you use any setup best practices that are not listed here, we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to share your thoughts as others may find it helpful in their webinar setup.

The world of conferencing continues to change. First, it was bringing small groups of employees across various office locations together on the phone, followed by the need for web conferencing to show others what you were working on.  Now, those groups are no longer small, or limited to your own organization.  The use of audio and web conferencing has grown to much more than a way to cut down on costs, but as a successful way to generate leads through webinars, or train users on your product.  The use cases seem endless, and maybe even complex.  But something that should not be a brainteaser? Pricing.

ReadyTalk understands that our customers want to concentrate on the subject of their meetings, or content of their webinars, instead of the possibility of the unpredictable costs of their audio and web conferencing use.  We want to provide the highest quality, service and reliability, as part of our pricing.  With that expectation in mind, we introduce our five new web and audio subscriptions:

• Web Meeting Pro (25, 150)
• Webinar (500, 1000, 3000)

What’s unique about these? High-quality audio, included with every package.

The Web Meeting Pro subscriptions include unlimited web conferencing and a bundle of included toll and toll-free domestic audio minutes, at a flat monthly fee.

The Webinar subscriptions include unlimited web conferencing AND unlimited Broadcast Audio, enabling participants to stream high-quality audio through their computer speakers. Again, for a flat monthly fee.

So how do you know which subscription is right for you, or your company?

Do you conduct a fair amount of smaller, internal meetings or  present projects to external clients and vendors where high-quality audio is critical?  Then the Web Meeting Pro options are right up your alley.

Are you managing larger webinars for lead generation, online training, etc, more than once a month?  The Webinar subscription options can give you the cost-effective solution you are looking for.

Interested in learning more?  Contact us today to find out more about our new subscription plans!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to event services and our conference center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

Success in a marketing-driven world typically means getting actionable information (data) in the hands of the right people at the right time. 

In PR, this means connecting with a reporter and sharing valuable information that complements a story he’s already working on. In sales, this can mean giving a salesperson a qualified lead when the prospect is ready to buy.

Webinars already help marketers generate leads that can be converted into sales. Like most leads, webinar leads are time sensitive and need to be acted on quickly. For many companies, quick turnaround can be a problem that looks like this:

1. Go to CRM and pull list for invitations and create campaign.
2. Send out email invitations.
3. Collect event registrations in webinar platform.
4. Take registration data from webinar and merge it with CRM to see how many registrants are net new.
5. Host webinar.
6. Run reports from webinar platform (who attended and how long, who didn’t attend, etc.).
7. Manually merge data back into CRM. Watch out for attendees like Bob Smith who registered as Bob but attended as Robert Smith!
8. Run CRM reports and send out post-event email.
9. Send new leads to sales team for follow up.

Sounds easy right? Sometimes steps 6 through 9 can take days (yes, multiple). The leads aren’t very warm by this point, which means you aren’t getting them to the sales team at the right time.

OverDrive used to have this problem. Now they don’t. Want to know how they solved it? Here’s the answer: Webinars Can Improve Business Processes.

Want a different example? There’s a free webinar today, Convert Leads Faster by Integrating Webinar Data with Salesforce, with cases studies from Mandiant, Schooldude.com and OverDrive.