Webinars are a very inexpensive way to gain exposure and get connected with potential leads!

(Be sure to check out the Bryley Newsletter for January where we will walk you through, step by step, how we put on our most recent webinar on 201 CMR 17.00)

Lifestyle Change Tip # 2: Harness the Power of the Webinar. Webinars are inexpensive to put on, enhance your online presence and reach, build a list of new leads, and begin your creation of content for social media marketing.  

What can a webinar or a series of webinars contribute to your company's marketing strategy?  

A webinar is a perfect tool for your business to build up its social media marketing efforts, lending quality content to your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts.  Quality webinars will give people a reason to follow you on your social media sites, especially if you cultivate a unique niche for yourself in your field with the information you choose to share; a webinar is a way for you to look like the "Expert" and "Trusted Advisor," especially on specific topics that set you apart from your competition.  Webinars in this way enhance your public image. If all goes according to plan, not only will your immediate audience be impressed with your content, but they will pass on the word to others which will ultimately generate more leads for your company. 

So how do you launch a successful webinar?  Here are a few pointers.

1. The most important thing to always remember, not just with webinars but with all marketing strategies, is that CONTENT IS KEY. You have to provide your audience, your pool of potential prospects, with top notch content: content they want to see, hear, read, information they want to learn about, content that will help them.  It is the difference between an infomercial and breaking news.  No one wants to watch an infomercial, but everyone will stay tuned for the news update. No one wants to hear about what your company does.  No one cares about your company. People only want content that could potentially help them in some way, presented to them in a manner that is intriguing, informative, easy to follow, and fun.  Remember, this is your chance to create your own unique niche in your field.  Find topics that are not really addressed, gaps in information that you could fill in, places of interest where you could become a trusted advisor.  This content is also wonderful PR for your company.  Show everyone that you are not only a wealth of useful knowledge and leading expert in your field, but that you are human as well.  With a webinar, you are literally attaching a face or faces to your business. You are already on the way to making your brand personable.  Go the distance with this; show them that you can have some fun and can empathize with their wants and needs.  Never fear; you will still look professional, but now you will also look approachable and easy to do business with.

2. A series of webinars will always be better than one.  Performing a series of content-focused webinars will bring your company more success.  It gives your audience the chance to start following you as a trusted advisor in your field.  It also gives them the chance to tell others about your series of webinars, building your fan base and potential prospect pool.  It will also give your prospects a greater chance of attendance as they are now able to pick the time and date that best fits into their schedule; here you are catering to their needs, their busy work lives, which will only make you seem more appealing.

3. Consider having a guest speaker for your webinar, someone who does not work for your company.  This will lend your webinar even more credibility, having an expert speak that is not on your payroll.

4. So when are the best times to schedule your webinars?  Do not schedule your webinars for Mondays or Fridays.  On Mondays, people are far too busy beginning their work week, and on Fridays people could be skipping out for an extended weekend or rushing last minute to play catch up.  For the same reasons, never launch a webinar near the holidays, especially the day before or after a holiday. Be sure to hold your webinar between the hours of 11 AM and 1 PM; people tend to watch them during their lunch breaks. 

5. Promoting the webinar!  You must obviously promote your webinars to secure a good audience.  So when do you begin your promotions?  I suggest 30 days prior to the event.  The 30 day mark will give your prospective audience enough time to square away that hour and add the future attendance to their schedule.  Any longer than 30 days, and people might forget to attend or simply lose interest.  Any shorter than 30 days and your prospective audience might not have enough time to secure that hour free, and you will not have enough time to maximize your webinars' attendance. Now, how should you go about promoting your webinar? 

6. Be sure to follow up with your leads after the curtain falls.  Obviously, people had to sign up to attend your webinar.  You have already captured their basic contact information.  Now use it!  Do not bombard them with offers and sales pitches, but be sure to follow up with them, sending them an email on the topic discussed in your webinar and the relevant products and services that your company offers.

Need more information on launching your own webinar?  Check out the following informative links.

"How to Setup and Run a Webinar with DimDim for Free" written by Alexia Petrakos for eHow

http://www.ehow.com/how_5323489_set-up-run-webinar-dimdim.html     

"How to Produce a Free Webinar to Gather Leads and Make Money" written by Marcelo Lewin for Center for New Media Studies

http://www.centerfornewmediastudies.com/2009/12/29/how-to-produce-a-free-webinar-to-gather-leads-and-make-money/ 

It is a new year.  Let's keep our business resolution and generate even more leads in 2010.

But I warn you! No crash diet! Yes, analogous to the crash diet, where one goes out on January 2nd and joins a gym and purchases far too many diet shakes, wasting valuable time and money only to find themselves abandoning the entire endeavour by February, there is the crash marketing strategy, and it is equally as pointless.  Ringing in the new year by spending all of your marketing budget and allocated time on a few flashy, splashy campaigns that, once over will not yield you any further leads is as frustrating and as self-defeating as an unused gym membership. 

So, like the diet gurus recommend, let's make 2010 our year by embracing a "lifestyle change." Instead of starving our marketing efforts for the entire year after a few gorges, let's make small, inexpensive, and effective changes to our daily business lives.  The result will be a steady stream of new leads that do not dry up once your budget does. We shall begin by making our website into a continuous lead-generating machine.     

Part 1: Make your website work for you utilizing the TCM approach!

What exactly is the TCM approach? I was reading this wonderful article by Online Marketing Consultant Bob De Stefano entitled "How To Make Your Website a Lead-Generation Machine" and he cited what he termed the TCM approach: Target, Convert, and Measure. First, you must Target your desired audience, those who would be your ideal prospects and leads, enticing them to visit your website.  Second, once they are there, you must capture their contact information and Convert them into leads.  And third, you must Measure your results, lest you find yourself with an expensive treadmill clothesline in your basement.  Breaking down the TCM approach, we begin with step one.   

Target

In order for your website to work for you, you must first work for it.  You need to make sure that your targeted audience will find and visit your website. Studies show that over 80% of prospective customers begin the process of finding the product or service they are looking for in search engines. Therefore, in order to target your audience, those people who would need your products and/or services, you need to utilize search engine optimization (SEO).  A quick review: SEO is the designing, writing, and coding of your website so that it will get found organically in search engines, preferably at the top of the results page. The top two ways search Engines like Google rank websites is by keyword relevance (how relevant are the keywords used in your site's copy and code) and link popularity (the quantity and quality of third party sites linking to your website). Always remember, when choosing keywords, think of which words your target audience would be searching for, not you the expert in your field.  You can also use Pay Per Click (PPC), where you are only charged when someone clicks your ad on a search engine, delivering them to your website. At only ten cents per click, this method of targeting is quite affordable as well. If your company has social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook this will also help you rank higher organically in the search engine results.  We will discuss in further detail maximizing your social media sites in Part 2 of this New Year/New Leads/"Lifestyle Change" series.    

Convert

Now that you have a steady stream of targeted visitors coming to your website, you need to convert them into real leads you can deliver to your sales team. Do not simply rely on your Contact Us page to do so.  Make Calls to Action available at every turn on your site, but in a manner that does not remind your visitors of the gym game Bombardment. Entice your visitors with valuable information and special offers in exchange for some basic contact information. Examples include ordering online, signing up for upcoming events, and subscribing to a newsletter. 

Measure 

Remember to always measure your efforts, every step of the way.  This is in fact the most important and yet least utilized aspect of the entire marketing process.  If you aren't measuring your results, then how will you be aware of your return on investment (ROI)?  Be sure to measure everything! What landing pages are pulling in the most traffic to your site? What methods are converting the most visitors into leads? You can set up a web analytics system for your metrics.  I suggest Google Analytics.  It is very simple and a free service.    

So remember:

Target the audience that you want and pull them into your website.

Convert your visitors into leads.

Measure the entire process to see what is and what is not working for you!

Want to learn more?  I suggest reading Bob De Stefano's article "How to Make Your Website a Lead-Generation Machine."

www.inddist.com/blog/profile/15176-Bob_DeStefano.php