Five ways to ruin the ROI of your webinars
Thursday, March 26th, 2009 - by Becky Sheetz-Runkle
This is the latest in an occasional series on webinar marketing. Why so much focus on webinars? Because they’re relatively inexpensive to produce, particularly when compared to road shows and other live events. Webinars are an increasingly important tool in the lead generation activities of marketing departments of tech companies. But, if they aren’t done right, the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) will be adversely impacted.
Read on for five common pitfalls to avoid in your next webinar or series.
Your customers and prospects receive lots of offers to attend webinars. How many emails and other invitations have you received this week urging you to a product or solution webinar? How many have you received today? The important question: how many have you paid attention to and why? For more on how to put together a great webinar, read Maximize the value of your webinars.
Without further ado, here are the pitfalls:
1. Poor branding.
Read more about how to brand your webinars here. This is a big deal, and often a shortcoming for too many companies. How do you measure up?
2. Lack of content
If your webinar is a thinly-veiled sales pitch or you don’t have important information to communicate to the marketplace, a webinar strategy may not be your best option. Read more about why content comes first.
3. Failing at the follow up
We all know that follow up is where a lot of our best laid marketing plans too often fall apart. Make sure the follow up strategy is in place before you launch the webinar. How many days after the webinar will sales follow up? What will be their approach? How will they further quality leads? And, importantly, what role do you expect the webinar to have in your sales process?
4. Missing the mark
It is critical, of course, to deliver great content in a webinar. Secondly, it’s just as critical to use your webinars to build and reinforce your corporate and/or product brand. But make sure the two are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to distance your topic too far from what your company does. Just because you think prospects will opt into a webinar on a hot topic doesn’t mean hosting it will further the objectives of your organization.
5. Not getting the word out
This is Marketing 101. The marketing database and/or list to attract visitors to your webinars has to be a good one. Consider a distribution strategy that includes ads and sponsorship in influential industry media, through partners and other vehicles. Some media groups saturate their readership with emails for webinars, and a small business can get lost in the shuffle. Others are more targeted to industries, verticals, etc. It usually makes sense to opt for the latter.
For more on how to hold webinars that drive revenue, contact sales@q2marketing.com.
