Matthew T Grant

My first session at the Mixer featured Todd Davison of Bulldog Solutions, Michael Hickey from Hoovers, and Jen Moeller of Humana. The main message of this session can be summed up in the soon-to-be-immortal [corrected: good catch, Paul!] words of Michael Hickey, “Think: Campaigns, not events.”

As the session moderator, Todd Davison kicked things off by emphasizing that webinars offer a continual opportunity to engage with potential customers and, more importantly, to gather data so that you can more effectively segment, target, and score the leads that your efforts generate.

Broadly speaking, this approach will allow you to use your webinar campaigns to create richly detailed customer personas. More tactically, and depending on whether or not you have the requisite technology in place, this approach should also provide you with behavioral data on specific prospects giving you an effective method for filtering the leads generated so that you are only handing the most qualified to your sales folk.

There were a number of very specific recommendations made by the panelists – such as Jen Moeller’s suggestion that you use video on your invitation landing page to supplement or further explain the benefit of the session; Michael’s suggestion that you explore your technical options and consider incorporating a live Twitter feed into the webinar itself so that participants can follow the ongoing commentary of others; or Todd’s suggestion that, when deciding on webinar themes, you seek out topics which are  interesting to your audience while remaining particularly relevant to your offerings or services – but I keep coming back to main point:

Webinars are most effective when managed as campaigns containing multiple touch-points (invitation email, invitation landing page, follow-up reminders prior to the event, post-event reminder, post-event landing page containing recorded event plus supplementary material and calls to action, etc.) and when they are integrated into your overall marketing mix, meaning that you are promoting them through your blogs, email newsletters, websites, and, most importantly, the actions of your sales team.

Image Courtesy of jon_a_ross.