We’re excited to announce the availability of the new ReadyTalk API, which allows our customers and partners to integrate ReadyTalk conferencing services with other key business applications.

A couple of weeks ago Ken Molay wrote a great blog post, Conversion Features For Webinar Technologies. He expanded on a post by Brian Massey, which explores what features and experiences customers should expect from webinar vendors (among others).

Ken outlines the elements that he believes should be available to every webinar organizer and I agree. I also think the timing of this week’s launch of the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk couldn’t be better, since it addresses and expands on many of Ken’s requirements.

Here are a few of his requirements that the cloud connectors address:

Allow Customizable Registration Pages. ReadyTalk’s registration pages are pretty flexible and allow event organizers to create as many 100 custom registration questions (warning: you should be careful about the number of questions you include since as the number registration questions increases the number of participants typically decreases).  Customers, who use Eloqua, can now fully customize the registration pages to maintain a consistent look and feel with existing marketing materials.

Follow Lead Source Tracking From Start To End. ReadyTalk already had a built-in campaign tool for tracking where registrations were coming from; but this data lives outside of a customers’ marketing automation program. This is one of the reasons that the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk  are so powerful. I would also mention your registrants are cookied as well so you can track their digital body language – something a conferencing service does not offer.

Allow Total Control Of All Email. Not only does the Eloqua Cloud Connectors for ReadyTalk give you control of the look and feel of your emails, using Eloqua lets you automate the email processes so that after the event you can send emails based on actions customers took. For example, registrants that didn’t attend can receive one email and those that did can receive another….and this process can be fully automated.

One thing that neither Brian nor Ken touched on is the need for these vendors to integrate with each other. Whether it’s out-of-the-box integration or the ability connect via an open API, the ability to move data seamlessly from one platform to another is essential. Eliminating manual spreadsheet works saves significant time and ensures the accuracy of data. It also makes actionable data available faster.

What other features would you like to see incorporated into your webinar program? Are there platforms you would like to see integrated?

By Melanie Turek, Industry Director, Frost & Sullivan

Recently I was speaking with Karen Gwynne, Director of Sponsorship at the American Marketing Association, about how the AMA is using web casts to increase membership in the organization. Gwynne says that if a prospect attends three or more web casts, he or she is far more likely to join the organization as a dues-paying member, and stay loyal to the AMA in the months and years to come. Not surprisingly, the AMA is taking advantage of web conferencing to boost its brand, increase member loyalty and, ultimately, improve the bottom line.

In February, I wrote about how good web conferencing is for internal corporate and customer training. This month, I want to emphasize its value as a marketing tool. Today’s marketing professionals are faced with multiple challenges as they try to generate leads in an increasingly global and dispersed business environment. They must also develop a strong brand identity among a multitude of messages and imaging, much of which crosses the Internet; qualify leads and deliver contextual information about them to the sales team; and justify any expense with a clear ROI calculation. Web conferencing—which let’s marketers deliver interactive presentations via the Internet, easily and cost-effectively—can help with all these mandates.

Online events deliver global reach
Reaching a variety of customers and prospects can be difficult, time consuming and costly, especially as businesses extend their global footprint. With web conferencing, organizations can deliver marketing information and online training to small and large groups located anywhere in the world, with specific content designed just for them. This will help improve product and brand awareness, drive usage rates and satisfaction levels, and generate more new sales as well as cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Pre-registering attendees and gathering feedback delivers more qualified leads
Using web conferencing, marketers can increase the number, frequency, reach and quality of their marketing events, and they can expand those events to cover niche areas and target special interest groups. By using the software’s interactive features, speakers can create marketing sessions that offer valuable educational information, which in turn will increase brand awareness and loyalty, and deliver warm leads. Using conferencing’s Q&A and polling capabilities, presenters can better qualify those leads and help sales teams boost their conversion rates. Finally, sales people can use web conferencing to follow up with interested customers and prospects in a more targeted, intimate and interactive way.

Collaboration capabilities let marketing, sales and line-of-business work together to drive revenues.
Web conferencing cost-effectively enables internal communications among dispersed teams, so that sales and marketing staff can work together at every level—from research and planning to content development and account management. They can also tap the resources and expertise of line-of-business employees, to ensure marketing efforts map to broader business goals and product capabilities.

For more on how web conferencing can positively impact your marketing efforts, and your company’s bottom line, please join me for the webinar “Generate More Qualified Leads with Webinars” on the topic on April 27 at 2pm ET.

Melanie is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. Melanie writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events.

Complex sales often equal complex campaigns that are targeted at a very specific user persona. This can mean it will take a bit more effort to capture your ideal qualified lead, but it also has the potential to be a turn into the type of client you seek.

This year ReadyTalk is the official sponsor of the B2B Advanced Marketing Practices Handbook published by MarketingSherpa. This book is full of B2B marketing best practices ranging from lead generation, content creation, nurturing tactics and the most effective vehicles to use in distributing all of your information. Campaign planning can be overwhelming but when you have an in-depth study of over 900 B2B marketers to share some insight, hopefully the task won’t seem quite as daunting. You can download an excerpt from the book here.

We’ve also put together a corresponding webinar this month that goes hand-in-hand with the topics addressed in the book. Join us on Thursday, March 17^th at 2:00ET as Jen Doyle, Senior Research Analyst for MarketingSherpa and author of this year’s handbook, and Kirsten Knipp, Director of Product Evangelism for HubSpot share their approaches to demand generation. If you’ve never heard of the FUEL Methodology this is a great opportunity to learn more about how attracting, qualifying and automating your lead process can boost your sales conversion rate. Who doesn’t like that?

All webinar registrants receive a $100 discount toward the purchase of the B2B Advanced Marketing Practices Handbook through March 31st. Visit the following link to purchase your copy: http://ReadyTalkWebinar.MarketingSherpa.com. Be sure to sign up for Thursday’s webinar as well and/or follow the webinar discussion on Twitter with the hash tag #SherpaWebinar.

You know what your next webinar is going to be about; the speaker is lined up – now you need to get the word out! As discussed in one of our previous posts, you should take full advantage of social media when promoting your webinar.

Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can be valuable resources, but you can also get creative with your promotions. The following are some additional suggestions on how and where to promote your webinar:

E-Mail Signatures - Announce your webinar in the signature line of your e-mails. You  send multiple e-mails each day,  so in a way you have a captive audience. What better place to promote a webinar?

Message Boards – If you choose to promote your webinar on a message board, be  sure to review the rules for posting as each board will likely have a different set of rules you must follow.

Speaker(s) – Every speaker wants a sizable audience for their webinar, so ask them to promote it on their own website, blogs, newsletters and  within any social networks they are a member of.

Newsletters – If you already do monthly or quarterly newsletters to update customers on product changes or promotions, be sure to mention your upcoming webinar with a link to the registration page.

Utilize Your Sales Team – If you have an internal sales team, make sure they are aware of your upcoming webinar and are promoting it when they communicate with current customers or prospects via telephone, e-mail or in person. You may also consider sharing the registration link with your sales team so they can pass it along.

“Forward to a Friend” – When you create your invitation – whether it is in the ReadyTalk Conference Center or your own e-mail – consider adding a “Forward to a Friend” tag line at the end. If one person is interested in your webinar topic, chances are they know others with similar interests. Many companies are now using this option and see a nice jump in their registration as a result.

Effective promotion is key since the more people who hear about the webinar, the more people will register and attend. You have worked hard to coordinate your webinar and believe in the content being presented, so use every resource available to get the word out. The sky’s the limit!

Do you know of any other creative resources available to promote webinars? If so, please share your thoughts!

Here’s to continued success in 2011!

This post is the third and final post in a series on Creating a Service Level Agreement between Marketing and Sales.

Previously in this series, I discussed the creation of an SLA that contains a definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and a process for level of effort. In the final post on this topic, I wanted to show you how you bring this all together with reporting and what Brian Carrol refers to as Closed Loop Feedback.

As with any process change, proper tracking and reporting will let you know what needs improvement and what is not working. In the case of MQLs and level of effort, we have implemented a MQL dashboard at ReadyTalk, which tracks how many MQLs are accepted by sales, how many are won/lost and the average deal size. The most important of these is the MQL conversion rates in these areas. If a large percentage of MQLs are being rejected by sales, the MQL definition needs to be revisited and tweaked. Similarly, if a large percentage of MQLs are being accepted but the opportunity is not created, the MQL definition needs to be revisited. This is especially true in our model since all accepted MQLs should be made into working opportunities.

While the dashboard gives you a quantitative measure of how your new process is performing, the closed loop feedback system gives you a qualitative look at each lead. Brian defines this system on his blog. We have instituted weekly gatherings of pertinent parties for this closed loop feedback process. Each lead that has made it to MQL status is discussed. With direct feedback from the sales representative who owns the lead, we are able to fine-tune the process.

Any process change should be accompanied by metrics that can be used to judge the success of the new process. The MQL dashboard and closed loop feedback system are tools we use at ReadyTalk to help our sales team with more qualified leads. What are some of the processes you use? Did I miss anything?