In today’s market place, webcasts are turning in to one of, if not the most effective demand generation tools in a company’s tool box. They allow you to extend your reach in a more cost effective, measurable way and position your company as subject matter experts, while at the same time driving awareness and demand for your solutions and services. An effective webcast on the frontend of your sales process can be the difference between won and lost business. Here are four steps that will give you the best chance of success.
- Content is King– Too many companies rush into broadcasting webcasts just for the sake of getting a webcast out in the marketplace. This is not the right approach. Putting together top-notch quality content is vital and good content takes time. Angle your content to where it provides real business value to the end user by letting them know exactly what they’ll learn and why they should take 30, 40, 50 minutes out of their day to hear what you have to say and why you’re different. In addition, we’re finding that too many organizations are leveraging webcasts as solely demo platforms. You should leverage your webcast as platforms to enhance your position as a subject matter expert in your respective field, with the product simply acting as the backdrop to how your company solves business challenges
- A Multi-Prong Promotional Effort – First and foremost, I believe you need to have a four week promotional schedule in place to drive optimal traffic. We are seeing too many companies promote their webcasts for two weeks and wondering why they aren’t getting the overall traffic and the right targets attending their webcasts. Second of all, you need to leverage multiple outlets to promote your webcasts. Don’t just send emails to your internal database. Put together a social media campaign against it, issue a press release, promote it in your monthly newsletter, find a leading industry publication whose readership is loaded with the types of people that you believe would get real value out of hearing what you have to say. Now that’s a multi-pronged approach
- Interaction and Personalization – Webcasts are no longer simply a presenter speaking to an audience. The best platforms give the viewers the ability to not only interact with the presenters, but with other viewers in that webcasting environment. This interaction can take place through live Q&A, one on one chats, surveys, live polling, and social media integration. In terms of personalization, giving your end users the ability to see your presentation the way they want to see it will not only keep them hearing/viewing your presentation for a longer period of time, but will increase the chances they that attend your webcasts down the road
- Have an On-Demand Plan – The great thing about webcasts is that you can extend the shelf life of the content you worked so hard to put together. I would argue that promotion of your on-demand webcast is just as important as promotion of your live webcast, and that you should take the same promotional approach I mentioned above. Make this on-demand content as readily available in as many places as possible, so that the people who couldn’t attend your live webcast have no excuse to not hear what you have to say in an on-demand environment
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Jason Stegent is the Founder & President of ElasticSolutions. Email him @ jstegent@elasticroi.com