Webinar Planning

Webinar

A webinar is a type of web conference, although the direction of the presentation more often than not is primarily one way from the presenter to the audience as in a Webcast, which is transmission of information in one direction only, like watching a concert on the internet. A webinar however can be designed to be interactive between the presenter and audience. A webinar is 'live' in the sense that information is conveyed according to an agenda, with a starting and ending time. In most cases, the presenter may speak over a standard telephone line, pointing out information being presented on screen, and the audience can respond over their own telephones, preferably a speakerphone. The word 'webinar' is a portmanteau combining the words web and seminar.

Webinar planning involves five stages:

1. Event Strategy

2. Event Design, Setup and planning

3. Event promotion

4. Live Event or During the Event

5. Event follow up

I. Event Strategy:

Strategy begins with determining the highest-level goal. Who do you want to reach? What response do you want from them at the end of the event? How many such responses are you seeking? Do you have a specific budget number to work with, or must you request your budget once you’ve assessed your needs and likely ROI? What topic is relevant and interesting to your target audience?

Select a date.

Following are the factors need to be consider in selecting a date.

1. Avoid holidays, and the days immediately preceding them.

2. Mondays and Fridays average lower attendance than Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

3. Events held in the last two weeks of your quarter typically receive less Sales support, because their focus then is usually closing business rather than prospecting.

4. Events held early in the quarter have a better chance to raise sales in that quarter.

5. Need to check if there is any tradeshows that may conflict

6. Consider the time zones of your expected audience. Since most attendees will participate at their desks, when will they be there? If you market nationwide, a good time is 1 p.m. Central time. If you market in only one or two time zones, schedule the event between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Many prospects like to attend during lunchtime.

Speaker Selection:

Who will be the main presenter? Choose a recognized expert, an author, a person who has succeeded in solving the problem presented—the more respected and known, the better your attendance. Selecting someone outside of your organization lends credence to the value of the event. Remember that the keynote presenter doesn't necessarily present the complete Webinar. Others, including you or your associates, can also participate. Big-name presenters may be easier to get than you think. Of course, you can pay them, if that's in your budget. Once they learn about the planned promotion of the event, the amount of publicity they'll get, and the exposure to an audience they want to reach, they may reduce their fee or do it for free. An offer to share the leads might be all it takes. The Webinar gives them a platform, access to an audience, a chance to be the expert and gain more recognition for themselves or their company. But a big-name presenter is not essential. Putting all your eggs in one basket may build a bigger audience for that one Webinar, but a series of content-focused events pull more and better qualified leads in the long run. Multiple events offer prospects more convenient options of dates and times.

Action Plan:

Determine the target audience, desired response from attendees, and goal number of attendees to reach

Decide the interesting and relevant topic and speaker(s) that attract enrollment and draw attendees towards the desired response

Design event promotion campaign to reach ideal target audience

Determine amount of time necessary to define, promote, design and prepare event (6 weeks is a good start).

Calculate required budget for promotion, content, web seminar & telephony costs, inducements and follow up

Optional: Calculate estimated Return on Investment to justify managing budget level up or down

• Optional: Revise spending plan to match revised budget

• Commit to event and proceed to next stage.

II. Event Design, Setup & Planning

First it is important to think about how you want to structure your enrollment page. What information is es­sential for you to gather prior to the event (name, address, e-mail, etc.). As your enrollment page is established, consider the objective of the event and what you’re looking to gather. Several of your qualifying questions will be very important to determining the quality of each lead.

Furthermore, think about how you want the description page to read and how you will describe the Webinar. From a marketing perspective, it is important that the reader is intrigued with the content and needs to be soft sold into wanting to attend. Make sure to select either a logo or a featured picture of the presenter to post in concert with the written text.

Content of the Presentation:

Use slide transitions and animations to keep the audience stimulated. Offer statistics, illustrations, real-world examples and quotes to add substance. The more credibly and concretely you can make your case, the fewer audience members will be left sitting on the fence. Real-world examples are particularly valuable for helping audience members absorb and assimilate abstract concepts. Examples often help the audience relate to the content as well. Illustrating data graphically, with a very clean minimalist approach tends to help audiences comprehend it quickly and comfortably.

In general, a 30-35 minute presentation length is optimum for marketing seminars. If the seminar is too short, attendees may not feel they’ve received a substantial value. If the presentation is too long, you may not retain as much of the audience through to your call to action at the end. Or, the audience may be so saturated and fatigued that they feel less vigorous about responding to your call to action. It is generally ideal to leave at least 10 minutes reserved for Q&A after the presentation and initial statement of the call to action.

Action Plan:

•Designate an event Host or a Producer to manage the technical aspects of the event.

• Establish elements for your Event Center site to include graphics, text and enrollment criteria

• Write compelling event title and description

• Design enrollment questions (customize to include qualifying criteria)

• Define user/attendee experience: drop-off webpage to leave attendees at after event and other touch points.

• Select and orient Host, Speaker(s), and any support Panelists

• Approve and confirm enrollees if applicable

• Develop the content for the presentation

• Review reports leading up to the session to be prepared for volume of attendees (remember, usually 50% of enrollees attend)

• Review event details again to ensure all preparations have been completed

• Rehearse for the event itself and practice the sequence of steps (typically 24 hours before event is best)

• Schedule and draft automated Thank-you-for-attending, and Sorry-you-couldn’t-make-it e-mails

• Plan how event attendee data will be parsed and quickly distributed to appropriate Salesperson (CRM – integration, batch import, manual process, etc.)

• Assemble event-specific talk tracks and sales collaterals to assist sales reps converting attendees to purchasers

• Optional: Schedule calling campaign by sales force for 1-3 days after the event to qualified attendees and enrollees

• Optional: Create PDF version of final presentation for making available to attendees

• Optional: Schedule marketing offer e-mail one week after event

• Option: Assign numeric weightings to each possible answer for enrollment qualifying questions to allow automatic scoring and ranking of leads

• Option: Consider creating a program of related events to promote at once (additional perceived value, mindshare and cost savings)

III Event Promotion

Event promotion is crucial to your overall success. You will have a variety of tools to choose from, and constraints to counterbalance. Your limiting factor may be a small target population, in which case you may opt to use multiple techniques focusing on that target to get the highest possible yield. Or, your limiting factor may be budget, in which case you may opt to use only the lowest cost promotion techniques targeting the easiest to reach prospects. Whatever your parameters, the following tips are intended to help you manage and achieve your goals.

Events frequently use some combination of the following promotional vehicles:

• Home page placements

• E-mail invitations

• Newsletters

• Banner ads

• Press releases

• Partner co-mar­keting

E-mail campaigns

E-mail campaigns are frequently used to promote web seminars. There are some common assumptions about response rates, enrollment rates, attendance rates and lead ratios you’ll consider when deciding how many invitations to send to reach a certain audience size goal

Your response rate will vary depending on a variety of factors including the:

• Richness of your purchased or owned e-mail list

• Use of unsolicited lists versus known leads

• Resonance of your event title and description to your target audience

• Quality of your invitation copy

• Ability of your invitation to get past spam filters

• Appeal of your brand and any guest speakers

• Amount of advanced notice you provide your invitees

• Time and day of the week your event is scheduled at

• Ease of filling out your enrollment form

In general you get a better response rate from lists of people who already know your organization than from “cold” lists you buy or rent from 3rd parties. The following numbers assume a “cold” list.

If you make reasonable efforts to account for the above, on average you can assume you need to send 100 invitations for each enrollee. Typically 40-60% of enrollees will attend. Typically 5-15% of attendees will qualify as “A” (likely to buy soon) leads. A similar fraction will also qualify as “B” (interested but with a less urgent need) leads. A lesser percentage of those who enroll but do not attend will likely qualify as “A” and “B” leads, as well. Your sales conversion rate is highly dependent on your product offering, marketplace and sales team. That said, 15% is a common rate. A gross assumption suggests you’ll close 1-5 sales per 10,000 e-mail invitations. There are many steps you can take to optimize these ratios for your unique situation. Your results may vary.

Whatever promotional vehicles you use, each should include a unique tracking ID as part of its HTML link to the event enrollment page. This will allow you to analyze which promotional vehicles are getting the greatest response.

Reminders for registrants are an important part of delivering the largest audience to your web seminar. Sta­tistically, reminders e-mailed 24 hours and 1 hour in advance of the event seem to have the greatest benefit. For some event topics and audiences, it may make financial sense for you to leave telephone reminders a day or two in advance of the event. Yes, this includes extra cost and time. The benefit is generally that it adds an extra psychological dimension, which seems to make a noticeable increase in attendance rates.

Action Plan

• Design event promotion campaign to reach ideal target audience

• Promotion usually begins 3-4 weeks prior to event

• Select combination of e-mail, home-page placements, web ads, banner ads, newsletters, direct mail, Sales invitations, PR, and viral marketing you will use to promote event

• Specify lead-source tracking ID’s to measure which sources are most effective and efficient

• Execute the campaign and drive enrollment traffic

• Send reminders (1 week and 1 hour in advance) to your enrollees

• Optional: Call enrollees the day before to orally remind them of event

IV During the Webinar:

Action Plan:

• Review event details and follow-up campaign readiness

• Open event 30 minutes early to streamline attendees’ join process

• Control and minimize last-minute changes to presentations

• Prepare Record and Playback File, polls and seed questions

• Have attendees submit text questions via Q&A which you’ll selectively answer out loud

• Acknowledge questions submitted by attendees by immediately responding, even if with a deferral

• Save Q&A

• Save Polling answers for marketing data

V: Post-Event Follow Up

Following the event, you should have a few key objectives; disseminating leads, spurring Sales team follow up, leveraging the event recording, and executing follow-up communications to your enrollment list.

First and foremost, is using the information and data derived to direct your Sales team to follow up with the most-primed opportunities. You will want to sort the information as quickly as possible and deliver it to your Sales team. Typically this means grading the leads and sorting them by territory or whatever other criteria your organization uses to divide leads. In addition, you want to effectively position and promote access to the recorded file of the session via e-mails and other avenues.

A targeted campaign of “thank you’s” and “sorry we missed you” e-mails will be executed to those that at­tended and those that enrolled, but missed the event— respectively. With ongoing reporting tools monitoring those that access the record and playback files, you can continue to derive leads. Moreover, by effectively using the automated e-mail functions, communication with those that enrolled and those that enrolled and attended is easy.

Action Plan

· Send automatic event follow up e-mails (sorry-we-missed-you to non-attendees and thanks-for-attending to attendees)

· Export your customized event report data to disburse to your sales force, prioritizing leads with highest scores.

· Post the event recording file with its own enrollment questions to gather more leads going forward

· Draw on your post event reports to continue to communicate, and convert, attendees to customers.

· Measure which lead sources yielded highest enrollment, attendance, and requests for 1:1 consultation or sales.

· Hold more events, further amortizing startup costs, and adding experience-based refinements for even better ROI

· Optional: Convert Q&A into edited FAQ

· Optional: Edit your event recording to remove “live” foibles and remove extraneous information that is not pertinent to on-demand format