Just like Halloween, putting on a webinar can be scary. There are lots of variables and many things can go wrong. Here are a few reasons people are nervous to host webinars and ways to tackle those fears:

5. Mastering the Technology: Technology can be intimidating especially when your presentation depends on it. While ReadyTalk’s webinar tools are easy to use and designed to eliminate this concern, we still recommend that conference organizers and their speakers do a full dry run prior to the event. This ensures everyone on the webinar is comfortable with the technology and the content of the presentation.

4. Poor Participant Experience: We’ve all been on those bad webinars where the chairperson forgets to put all 500 participants on mute or turn off the conference entry tones. We often encourage customers to have the event organizer appoint someone that is solely responsible for running the meeting. This person doesn’t have speaking or moderating duties and can focus on the technical details as well help with queuing up the chat questions and other logistics.

3. Boring: There’s nothing worse than joining a webinar that promised interesting content that falls flat. Worse than that is when the presenter isn’t engaging. Polls and questions are a great way to engage the audience and prevent a boring webinar. ReadyTalk’s lead trainer, Shawn Cardinal, hosts free training sessions to help presenter’s learn skills for engaging the audience.  

2. No One Shows Up: So much time and energy goes into scheduling and hosting webinars—writing a compelling abstract, lining up speakers, scheduling dry-runs, invitations, reminders and more. There is nothing scarier than wondering if anyone will show up. Make sure your pre-event plan includes promotion. ReadyTalk’s integration with marketing automation and new social media tools make it easier to leverage your existing networks and reach new audiences.

1. Public Speaking: This is a common fear. However, many people find webinars to be easier because you can’t see the audience. Another way to ease your fears is to practice, practice, practice. If you’re familiar with the content and the technology it will make presenting much easier.

Do webinars scare you? Why? What have you done to overcome your fears?

For 2011, we set some partnership goals around product integration and the launch of our API. Seems lots of people are interested in integrating webinar data with their critical business systems and so far our partnership goals are right on track.

With the interest in partnerships high, we need to be quick and smart in our decisions. To streamline due diligence the partner marketing team devised a partner profile and a scorecard to rank the prospects and estimate the value of the partnership to ReadyTalk. Most importantly, we recognize that not all opportunities provide good value and classifying our business objectives will help the decision making process. For ReadyTalk we can classify current partner needs as technology and marketing.

So you may be wondering what a partner profile and scorecard consists of. Based on the goals you have established, a clear partner profile and scorecard is easy to create. Below I’ve used marketing partnerships as an example.

Marketing Partners

Set goals. Every organization should define unique goals of their partner marketing program. Is it to generate leads? Build brand? Expand into a new market? Making this choice up front will help define the partner profile. Defining goals will assist in understanding what partnerships are critical to business.

Create a score card for your criteria. Score cards help you evaluate your priorities against what a partner has to offer. Using the profile of your ideal partner, define the desired elements and rank them in order of importance. Build a scale of your choosing. As an example 1-5, with 5 being a required item.

Every business has different needs so your profile will be unique. To start, list the desired criteria, keeping in mind that not all will be viable, so be prepared to live without some of them. Companies that have multiple decision makers on the partner marketing team can have each member rate individually, then review an overall team score.

Consider issues such as:

• Not a competitor but in the same market and selling to the same decision maker
• Similar price point, unless your product is the lead or add-on item
• Complementary products/services
• Define a new market to enter

Define a rank value for criteria. Setting rank value and understanding the score applied is important. There are several ways to do this, be sure and document how you want a score applied.

Example scorecard sample where 5 is the highest ranking:

Take a two step approach to researching your prospects. First, identify prospects with the profile in mind and do preliminary research on the company. Mark the scorecard with the information available to the public. Now you have initially prioritized the list. At this point, determine if you want to go forward and make contact with the prospect. A few conversations will help you learn more about the prospect and if there are synergies.

A great example of a marketing partner for ReadyTalk is cloud based services in the marketing automation systems and in the customer relationship management space where the decision maker is a marketing executive. We can easily build criteria and rank value with this example.

You may be able to see immediately the companies that travel in your circles, if not – contact me and let’s go over options.

Taking a measurable approach to partnerships can help you prioritize your needs and build a strong partnership based on common goals.

The ReadyTalk partner programs are outlined here or you can comment here with questions and your insights into building partnerships.

Tracy focuses on channel and partner marketing at ReadyTalk, building out marketing programs to recruit partners and reinforce engagement with them. When she’s not coming up with marketing plans she likes to compete in canine freestyle Frisbee and ride her Ninja motorcycle.

Like most companies, at ReadyTalk, we have a lot of meetings. We even have the dreaded “meeting about an upcoming meeting.”

A typical meeting in the marketing department means that most of the participants are in a conference room but one or two people are usually working from home; and there’s always a launch plan being discussed and it’s usually an Excel file.

Obviously, we use ReadyTalk’s web conferencing service to share the document and make changes. Even though we are all around a conference table with a projector in the room sometimes it’s just more convenient to participate on your own laptop. Because it’s an internal meeting and it’s not a structured meeting, we never decide whose access code we’re using until we’re all on the call. Once we decide, everyone jumps out to our website and logs in that way – it doesn’t take long but it’s always a distraction.

Not anymore.

Yesterday, the ReadyTalk Quick Launcher was released. It has a lot of great features, but my favorite is “Join a Meeting.” It makes joining a meeting so fast! Here’s how:

Right click on Quick Launcher icon in the task bar and select Join Web Meeting:

Enter the access code of the meeting you want to join:

And that’s it; you’re automatically connected to your meeting.

Internally, we’ve been using this feature for weeks while Quick Launcher was in Beta. It’s so easy to use and makes it simple to get an ad-hoc meeting going quickly. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can learn more in yesterday’s blog post. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, download it today.

If you’ve already downloaded Quick Launcher, we’d love to hear what you think.

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.

“[Content marketing] is all the marketing that’s left.”-Seth Godin

If you are only using ads, press and your website to get your message out, you are missing out on a significant business driver – content marketing. If you are like us, you market to different verticals and different use cases, so you have a need to tell several stories – which leads to needing more content. And if you build content mapped to the sales cycle, the content needed multiplies again! The need for never ending content turns marketers into authors and publishers, and as you can tell, it’s a difficult task to generate the content needed to keep building the story.

The marketing buzz has been about content marketing for quite some time, and many of you re-purpose your content, but have you thought about re-imagining it?

September 21^st at 12:00 CDT, ReadyTalk is sponsoring an AMA webinar featuring Anne Handley of MarketingProfs and Becki Dilworth of Bridgeline. Speaking on the topic of re-imagining content, they will teach you how to build a strategy for sustainable content. There really is an easier way. Using these methods will create variety and help you expand your content strategy.

Tracy focuses on channel and partner marketing at ReadyTalk, building out marketing programs to recruit partners and reinforce engagement with them. When she’s not coming up with marketing plans she likes to compete in canine freestyle Frisbee and ride her Ninja motorcycle.