Webinar Resources

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Everyday we are encountering more social media tools that allow you to quickly share information with others.   Today we launched an email campaign for one of our customers that contained a personalized video for the recipients.   Each customer received a PURL, a personalized URL, that embedded the customer's name in the video.   It was a pretty slick application.

Using ExactTarget, we launched the email movie clips through personalization strings that contained the PURLs.   This was an effective lead generation process for driving customer acquisition.   Through personalized marketing campaigns, you can capture your reader's interest and move them to take an action.

We are using Brainshark presentations to personalize on demand presentation content and further honing our abilities to deliver a Webinar for ONE.
 

Like everyone, we have some customers who come and go across our desks a couple times a year, and then we have some who are there a couple times a day to drive lead generation.

Recently we drove customer acquisition for one of our frequent customers for an event through a personalized marketing campaign.  Through a lot of work, the event sold out in two weeks and our customer was thrilled.

Because we work with this customer on an almost daily basis, we decided to go the extra mile and support the event locally, though there's nothing in our contract that defines our work in that way.  I found myself pulling what props I could from my children's closets so that I could dress like a pirate and take pictures at the event.

My thoughts were, "OK, just give me a salad at the customer dinner in exchange for these services, and we'll call it a draw."  What our team got in return was much more than a salad.

Yes, I dressed like a pirate and managed to draw enough smiles from our client's customers to create a spiffy memory book for the occasion.  We also managed to meet with no less than 9 cricital contacts in the span of 2 business days.  As a result of these meetings- some scheduled, some by chance, we are better positioned across our client's corporation, and we were able to schedule new business.

So - while the salad and the meal were really good, what was even better was the unexpected developments with existing and new contacts.  It's definitely worth it to partner with your clients in ways you might not consider "your area"- - it was well worth our while!


 

I just had the great opportunity this past week to attend one of my customer's events onsite in NY.   My events team spent a great deal of time setting up online tools to support customer acquisition including the use of a Brainshark presentation for customers.

Through specially designed personalized marketing campaigns, we were able to draw a record crowd of customers in less than three weeks.   The event also had a "pirate-theme" and we produced personalized pirate maps with the customer's names on them.

I attended the event and was able to participate in the festivities which included wine, grog, spirited networking and the opportunity to meet my customers and their customers.   I also repurposed one of my old pirate tunes from college and added new lyrics to fit the event.   I will share the song in a future post.

What I didn't expect was that I would run into other contacts from my customer's account that I have been trying to meet for over two years.   The success of the customer event established my company's credibility for building lead generation conferences like this one and our dialogue was both positive and productive.

So next time you put a lot of effort into setting up an event or campaign for your customer. make sure you participate in the event as well.   You will learn more about your customer's business, their customer's business and you may just meet that key contact/decision maker that will influence additional business in your customer's account.   You also will be considered more of a partner than a vendor and your business relationship will continue to grow.

In today's world, we cruise through video web conferencing, webinars, and email embedded movies with the confidence of a navy captain.  But that confidence is sometimes quickly shattered when we just can't get what we want on screen.

It doesn't matter if you're on a laptop, desktop, mac, or pc, we've all been so frustrated with the technology that we ironically love so much that we yell at the screen asking, "Why won't you just DO IT?"

As in any heated situation, the key to getting back to your happy place of sailing along with your presentation, project, or planning your next trip is to keep a cool level head and know it will be OK.

First - eliminate the "unknown but temporory possibilites."  This could be a momentary blip in the network, a glitch in the program, or your own "fat finger."  How do you know if this is the simple cause of your frustrations?

Try it again.   But don't just keep hitting "send" "submit" or "download."  Log out.  Close your browser and all browser windows that may be open.  You may even need to reboot.  Then walk away and get a cup of coffee.  Fresh java in hand, now try it again.  More times than not, you're back in business and not on the road to the helpdesk. 

The key is to keep a clear head and know that many perceived program failures are actually just momentary glitches.

And for the record - ironically - as I was writing this blog, my screen went gray and I had to re-boot, losing everything.  There is no explanation - I just moved on and tried  not to mourn the eloquence lost from the first version.  :-)

It's hard to believe that webinars and internet marketing tools are still relatively new concepts in some companies.  Just before my 7-year maternity leave back in 2000, I was helping my sales team at MCI Conferencing introduce the concept of "web-based data conferencing" to our customers which included Xerox.  Ironically, though we never met, within a few months of my leave, my boss, Mark, was working at Xerox on the team that was developing the Xerox Webinar program.

It's 8 years later, and we have been working together for almost a year in a much different technology and a much different world than we had in 2000 and early 2001.

What better time than now are we all positioned to make the most of this technology!  Want to really partner with your customers?  Let them know that their success is important to you!

In your customer acquisition, build a reliable and approved list of customers, and give them information, presentations, and tools to help them grow their own business while you grow yours.

Look for synergies between your customer's industry and your own, and build a presentation series around it.   Back in 2000, my VP of sales partnered with one of my customer's VP of Sales to conduct a short webinar series at both companies.

Today, we have customers who do the same, and then also bring in industry experts to a "round table."  The presentation is then broadcast on a webinar, and provide the Brainshark replay later as an on-demand "webinar for one" for those who missed the live version.

Every company should have a regularly scheduled presentation series designed to help their customers grow their own base. Your monthly or quarterly newsletter should have a dedicated space for your webinar news. 

Our customers always provide live links to register for upcoming webinars, and to go directly to the Brainshark replays of webinars that have passed.  We are also developing personalized landing pages for key customer contacts. These are like a little mini-reference books compressed down to a singular web page that provides the customer with all the tools and reference points he needs for past, current and upcoming web events.

Mark and I marvel at how closely we missed each other back in 2000, when our entire business was a budding technology.  With the tools of today, we'd be much less likely to miss each other, now.

Every year we come up with a creative way of greeting our customers and prospects for the holidays.   Our traditional use of a Brainshark presentation has been well received and has been easy to deploy.

This year, our Creative Director suggested we send out printed holiday cards to our growing list of customers, partners and prospects.   We discussed the idea and decided this would be a good opportunity to create and execute a cross-media campaign linking personalized print media with interactive, personalized digital media on the web.   We also wanted to test the effectiveness of this method as a customer acquisition strategy.

Using specialized image personalization software from XMPie, we produced the image below with our recipients names on the images.    The image was printed on a post card and sent through the U.S. Mail (amazing how fast the mail really is) to our list of recipients.   On the back of each card was a "call to action", a URL to run a customized Brainshark presentation.   When the recipient entered their name in the Brainshark guest book, a personalized ornament appeared with music playing in the background.

Now your name may not be Steven, but if you visit http://www.brainshark.com/webinarresources/holiday and enter Steven as your first name, you will see how the application works.   You can enter your own first name and we might just have your name on the list.

This was the first application ever used to mix printed media with personalized, interactive media in a Brainshark presentation.   We were surprised by the recipients that did visit the link after receiving the post card.   Some of them were prospects that we have been trying to get in front of.  Imagine how your customer might react if they saw their name on a wine bottle or a sail on a boat in an online media application.    Would it catch their attention?   Did we capture yours?  

It is amazing to witness how quickly blogging can drive activity.   One of my team recently blogged about the Discovery Light project that we supported at a recent trade show.   Using our webinar service, we posted a Brainshark presentation about how we marketed the show and our lead generation conference exhibit.

As we were using a combination of email and personalized landing pages to drive customer acquisition, our reference to the words "landing page" triggered a Google Alert for another company, ExactTarget.   Within one week of posting our blog, ExactTarget contacted us after visiting our post.   They had set up a Google alert for the words "landing page".   ExactTarget recently released their Landing Page feature and we have been putting it to good use for our demand generation marketing programs.   Make sure you opt-in to receive our next newsletter to see a great example of a personalized image marketing campaign.

Quite often we receive a Google alert after posting a blog as we also monitor keywords.    We have heard Chris Baggott, of Compendium Blogware, a number of times comment on how Google likes old content, recent content and frequent content.   We produce Webinar for ONE replays of their webinars and we hear these words in every presentaiton.  

Chris is right on target.   You can drive effective lead generation through frequent and relevant blogging.    We are witnesses to the process and we are becoming evangelists for compended blogging.    The combination of blogging and Google Alerts is another step to helping you achieve that "virtual knock" on the door and another step away from no more cold calls. 

Other people are watching and waiting for their Google Alerts to trigger a message about keywords they monitor.   The more you blog about a particular subject, the more chances you have of driving effective lead generation.