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.

Mid-funnel management can become fuzzy at times

Earlier in the year we sponsored the B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook with MarketingSherpa and also hosted a webinar with on how increasingly complex sales cycles make it difficult for marketers to generate highly qualified leads and create targeted campaigns. The focus was geared at the top of the funnel and increasing the quantity of leads generated. We have another webinar this month with MarketingSherpa and the focus now moves toward quality, not just volume. We’ll discuss lead nurturing and best practices for managing mid-funnel prospects. This leads me to part one of a two-part blog post.

The B2B buying process has changed. Decision makers and power users have thousands of resources at their fingertips to research their potential line-up of products online long before they engage with a sales team. In a quantitative survey of 1,900 B2B customers done by the Marketing Leadership Council they discovered that on average, customers are 57% of the way through the purchase process before they allow a sales person to enter into their purchase decision.

This means marketers must now begin to decipher which of these prospects are ready to buy and which are still in the process of researching solutions. If we are too hasty in passing these potential buyers along to our sales team, we walk the thin line of scaring them off and losing potential revenue – not to mention flushing precious marketing dollars which are tightly guarded these days.

So, how do you know when your leads are ready to engage, and how do you nurture those that aren’t there yet? Enter “The Funnel.” This funnel shapes the way us marketers do our job – who we start conversations with, who is simply researching (and what can we do to convince them of their next step), and who is ready to pull the trigger? The marketing funnel helps to create sales-ready leads and nurtures those are not. Obviously, these two sets of prospects have two different set of criteria that may keep them from moving down the funnel or staying put until they are ready to engage.

If you’re reading this from a marketing standpoint you understand that the top of this funnel is all about lead generation – getting volume in the top that funnels into quality at the bottom. Eventually there is the hand-off between marketing and sales when that lead becomes an opportunity (given that it has met the right set of criteria) and then sales can begin to bring the other pieces together and close the deal (if only it were always this easy).

Where the funnel tends to get fuzzy is rrrrright in the middle. Prospects in the mid-funnel are not the same as their predecessors (the mass quantity I mentioned earlier). Now it’s about beginning to build the right relationships with the right people. These leads have a few more pieces information that we need to capture – what are their specific needs, do they have a list of objections, how many of your competitors have they evaluated, what is their timeframe for purchase?  So, how exactly do we do this?

Glad you asked! This is exactly what we’ll be covering in our upcoming webinar with MarketingSherpa and Eloqua next week. Our guest speakers will discuss lead qualification and then dive into scoring and nurturing strategies for mid-funnel management. Both of these obviously play a crucial role in optimal ROI for your demand generation efforts.

Part 2 of this blog will cover some of the key takeaways from our webinar and focus more on best practices for optimizing the funnel (if you have one). If you don’t, do not fret; you’re not alone – neither do 68% of organizations according to the latest infographic by MarketingSherpa .  A well thought-out funnel can be a confusion-diffuser (say that three times fast). It is a planning tool that will help you to align the many facets of sales and marketing that you have to get right to close business. I hope you can join us for the webinar and take away some fresh ideas on how to update or upgrade your current approach to managing the marketing funnel in your organization!

Last week, a few people from our marketing team attended the Eloqua Success Tour. The basic function of these events is to interact with like-minded peers who are utilizing the Eloqua platform and share best practices, unique use cases, and helpful tips to avoid pitfalls. Eloqua’s regional success managers also share new functionality and present the upcoming product roadmap for discussion. It’s a great way to network and simply learn how others are utilizing marketing automation within their organization.

There were some great presentations this year including one particular SaaS company that has created progressive profiling with the Eloqua platform to continually capture and aggregate information from prospects that are visiting their site and filling out forms, hitting key pages, etc. The speaker made a great point: personalization is really the future of marketing. The idea can be attributed to all of the social networks that are embedded in nearly everything we do. Work related or not – this is how to catch someone’s attention. Call them by name, offer them what they’ve been looking for on the right day at the right time, and you  just landed yourself a deal.

When someone feels a sense of individuality, not just like another fish that’s going to get hooked, they’re more likely to foster a relationship with your brand. Today, consumers have almost come to expect a one-on-one dialogue with marketers.  The challenge to us as the marketers is to use the important data we’re capturing to strike that personal chord with our prospects.  Knowledge of past behavior is a valuable tool for predicting future purchases and crafting relevant messages that will increase sales. The key takeaway is to build plan to follow the customer – not making them follow you.

Is personalization part of your strategy and marketing automation program? Is it working?

Simone has been involved with both the sales and marketing teams at ReadyTalk and is currently the role Marketing Demand Manager and manages the monthly ReadyTalk Webinar Series, which is a free  forum for professionals to interact with their peers and other experts on topics ranging from sales and marketing to nonprofits and funding to leadership and professional development. Simone is an outdoor enthusiast – skiing, climbing, triathlons, and trail runs with her dog, Bucket, are just a few of the things she enjoys outside of the office.