The Funnelholic

The webinar is fast becoming an extremely important element to one’s marketing mix.  In my generation, guys grew up watching television.  They hated reading.  From Happy Days to Laverne and Shirley to the Cosby Show to the Simpsons: They did not pick up a book.  P.S. they also were, bar-none, the biggest consumers of Cliff Notes. The moral of the story is: Have a variety of mediums you use to reach prospects.  If you have read my blog, you know I believe in whitepapers but you can’t JUST do whitepapers and you can’t just do emails.

It is my belief the webinar is a nice “quadruple whammy”.  A vehicle where you can get your money’s worth.  Remember: 4 reasons.  When you think of you webinars don’t just think of lead minimums and cpl, think of the entire package.

Note:  I know training is a major factor in the webinar market, but is not of use to me especially as part of the marketing mix.

The 4 main reasons to have webinars be part of your marketing mix:

Brand Awareness

There are many parts to the branding exercise:
1.    From Marketing Sherpa: “Multiple touches are the killer branding app…Every effort to generate the audience is an opportunity to promote the brand.”.  Think of it this way, the promotion of the webinar whether they go to the event or not involves thousands of emails, banners, websites, and newsletter postings.  When you work with a third party credible media site or research organization, you gain even more cachet.”
2.    Webinars for product launches are a great call as well.

Thought Leadership

Doesn’t this go without saying?  You spend a lot of time and money (I hope) on working analysts, ghost writing blogs, and PR trying to create thought leadership and put simply, conveying that you are smart.  What better place than in the webinar.  Education is really a key element to getting people to both sign up and attend webinars…so your topic should be educational in the first place.  Now realize: Your organization and specifically your assigned spokesman has the chance to look really smart.

Lead Generation

Quantifiable results.  “Hi boss, we ran a launch webinar.  We rolled-out the new product to an online audience of XXX.  Thank you for my promotion”

Drip/Nurture

“…the trend we see in the marketplace is clients using webinars more and more for lead nurturing (i.e. as follow-up offer to an existing database)” Howard Sewell, President of Direct Connect.  This we see more and more.  ONE MESSAGE: GET THE MOST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK.  Run the event and market it to your database.  Net-new + another touch is a win-win for your marketing organization.

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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OK, I am not timely…but I just found out that Jigsaw is giving away company data for free. If you don’t know Jigsaw, they are a large user-generated contact database. Users can trade contacts; that is, upload their contacts into the database in order to receive contacts that are already there. If one’s contact information is incorrect, you can return the name. (Which in turn, helps Jigsaw constantly update their database). Many people don’t actually trade, but just buy the lists directly from Jigsaw. (like me, no uploading for me). Jigsaw is a service I and many of my marketing colleagues use for list building. When people ask me today: “Do you know a good list broker?”, I typically reply with “Yeah, Jigsaw.”

Jigsaw announced their company info give-away via an extremely dorky but memorable video with their two co-founders: They went with a “data independence day” promotion.

I think this is a great idea. A needed and good service that will get people to their site and signed up as members…Just a quick note: This is not real philanthropy, but a smart business move. The money for Jigsaw is in the selling of contacts. Coincidentally, the contacts and their contact information are ultimately the largest value to their user base. In sum, a great move for everyone. Props to you Jigsaw.

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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Can the B2B lead generation world accept whitepapers without reg forms?

Two pieces are talking about/with this company Docmetrics known better as the smart reg form:

1. Writing whitepapers blog article on smart pdfs
2. Podcast with Paul Dunay interviewing Vitrium Sytems CEO creator of docmeterics tool

The idea here is that these guys have created registration forms that are embedded in the PDF. Now, you don’t have to force prospects to fill out a reg form in order to access the whitepaper. Instead you can give the whitepaper and collect registration data as the reader begins to access the document. Docmetrics will tell you when the document is actually opened, how many pages were read, and how much time was spent on each page.

So now what?

First let me say, I love the massive innovations taking place today in the marketing world. This is an interesting idea that would seem to have tremendous benefits to marketers and, as such, I will watch closely.

Right now, the buyers potential frustration worries a bit:
1. Is this going to be a bad buyer experience? I mean, I personally will be really bummed having to fill out forms all the way along my reading experience, I wonder what buyers will say?
2. Whether it is eco-friendly or not…most people print the whitepaper and read it in the spare time including the toilet.

From the vendor point of view:
1. This concept is worth the test, primarily for sophisticated marketers who are doing dynamic lead scoring (ie scoring leads not merely when they enter your system but continually scoring after the lead has entered you system and has “interactions” with your various sales and marketing actions). Conceivably the disposition data you receive from docmetrics can be fed back into your marketing automation that will trigger the following:
a. A change to the dynamic score of the prospect.
b. An action like an email or a call

2. The concept that these leads are more sales-ready will lead to disappointment. This tool should be used to help a Lead Development/Inside Sales rep whose job it is to qualify leads before they go to bag-carrying reps. In other words, the “I don’t remember downloading it” or “I haven’t read it” issue may go away but another objection will arise. Lead Development reps overcome those types of objections, sales reps use them against the marketing folks. So YES this is a great tool, but NO this doesn’t open the flood gates to send white papers to sales reps.

3. On the other hand, what about using this as a post-contact tool for sales reps? That is, passing a docmetrics whitepaper for followup…Half the battle on the sales side is the connect and as part of the connect, figuring out where to spend your best time. If we know a guy read what you sent and when, that has real strategic value to both lead development and sales.

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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Believe it or not, some INTERESTING stats on white papers.

I found this great blog that I read ALL the time, Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers. As you can imagine, the premise of the blog is about the art of creating and marketing whitepapers which he calls the Educational Marketing Revolution. He is really smart and writes some great stuff. People ask me what I recommend all the time, and I for one still recommend whitepaper syndication. (By the way as part of a marketing mix along with webinars, etc).

One thing about whitepaper marketing is that it is actual a bit ‘old school”, its been around for awhile and whitepapers certainly continue to face new lead generation types such as webinar, video, etc. Nonetheless, marketing spend continues to support whitepapers. Stelzner’s blog excerpted a quote from Don Hawk of TechTarget: “The number of orders for white paper-related programs increased by over 60% in Q1 ‘08 versus the first quarter of last year. “

Does this surprise you? When I was in lead development and inside sales management, I HATED Bitpipe and Knowledgestorm whitepapers leads. Those were the old days. If you or your sales people are still complaining about whitepaper leads, it is likely because you are processing them wrong and/or under the wrong expectations for these types of leads. What you need to know is that the best technology companies in the world ALL spend millions annually on whitepapers for lead generation and awareness, and that nurture marketing programs and lead qualification processes have given these companies the confidence to invest in whitepaper programs heavily. If your sales guys complain about whitepaper leads it is because you are actually sending them straight to them instead of nurturing them - and that my friends, is the bottom line.

I grabbed some cool statistics off his site about whitepapers:

A study by KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa found that users and marketing folks rank whitepapers as content they would register for. In fact, 79% of users said they will register for a white paper. That’s number #1 in the marketing mix according to the study.

Here is the breakdown. Nearly 2400 readers ranked their willingness to register for items as follows:

• White paper (79%)
• Case study (62%)
• Analyst report (56%)
• Product literature(45%)
• Demo (38%)

Interesting but not surprising, 72% of users said they were lured by a detailed pre-reg summary of the paper. Only 25% of the marketing professionals agreed. (Hello disconnect. By the way, Mr. Marketer, that statistic better be equal next survey or that proves that whatever one thinks about you, you live in La-la land)

What does this mean? Whitepapers still work as a form of lead generation. So when you say a “program didn’t work for us”, I hope it is measured after having gone through the proper lead qualification/nurture processes.

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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