Events Marketing Archives - Act-On

What Are the Best Marketing Conferences?

Act-On — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:13:24 +0000

Looking to meet and mingle with the leaders in your marketing field? Or pack in a year’s worth of learning into one weekend? Check out our picks for the best marketing conferences. From the art of storytelling to the science of data analytics, these events are endless sources of creativity, innovation, and strategic insights. Get your lanyards ready as we go through the best marketing conferences on the scene.

HubSpot INBOUND

HubSpot INBOUND isn’t your average marketing conference; it’s a full-blown immersion into the world of marketing, sales, and customer success. Held annually in September, INBOUND is one of the best marketing conferences because it calls together the world’s inbound marketers to share their expertise. Programming includes keynote speakers and breakout sessions that explore everything from content creation to lead nurturing.

As popular as the event is, the popularity comes with a price. Just like the product it spun off from, the cost can be a bit steep, especially for smaller businesses managing tighter budgets. And, with so many attendees vying for networking time and seat space, you might have trouble making it to all the events and panels you’d like.

Content Marketing World

Billed as “the largest content marketing event on the planet,” Content Marketing World is the pinnacle event for content marketers. Taking the stage every September, this conference brings a cavalcade of ideas, tactics, and strategies designed to reignite your content marketing efforts. Whether you’re a seasoned wordsmith or just dipping your toes into the sea of content creation, you’ll find sessions and workshops that cater to your needs.

This is one of the best marketing events due to the lineup of speakers. It reads like a who’s who of the content marketing scene, with practical and hands-on workshops to dig into. But beware the paradox of choice—so many sessions, so little time! Navigating the offerings can be a challenge, but if you manage to find your niche, you’ll leave armed with actionable insights. Just make sure to save a few brain cells for the inevitable decision fatigue.

Adobe Summit

Adobe Summit makes our list of best marketing conferences even though it isn’t strictly a conference. It’s more a huge promotion channel for Adobe’s suite of design and marketing products. If that appeals to you, the event showcases the latest trends, technologies, and tactics for using Adobe’s products. Held in March, this annual gathering offers a kaleidoscope of insights across the digital marketing spectrum. From keynotes about pushing the boundaries of creativity to immersive labs that let you get your hands dirty with Adobe’s tools, this conference is a playground for marketing and design nerds.

But again, you get what you pay for. The price tag might have you clutching your corporate credit card to your chest, just like many of Adobe’s products. The design and creativity angle also might not be ideal if that’s not your marketing lane.

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SXSW (South by Southwest)

Music, film, tech, and marketing, together at last? That’s SXSW. No one asked for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here to stay. Taking over Austin, Texas every March, this event is a smorgasbord of creativity and innovation, making it a must-attend for marketers who want to tap into the pulse of cultural trends. We think it’s one of the best marketing conferences for that reason, even if it’s not strictly a marketing event.

But beware that you don’t get a case of “eyes bigger than stomach.” This festival is like a buffet where you’ll want to sample everything, and the sheer volume of sessions and events can be a tad overwhelming. Plus, the marketing track shares the spotlight with other domains, so you’ll need to sift through to find what you’re looking for.

MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Looking for something a little more cozy? This gathering of B2B marketing enthusiasts brings leaders of the field together to exchange ideas, tactics, and maybe a few laughs. That’s the essence of MarketingProfs B2B Forum, a more intimate event held every October. If you’re knee-deep in the world of B2B, this conference offers a spotlight on strategies tailored just for you.

The vibe is warm and welcoming, fostering an environment where connections flourish. However, if you’re looking for a more diverse range of marketing topics, this might not be the best marketing conference for you. If B2B is your bread and butter, this forum is your platform to shine.

Tweets, posts, and likes, oh my! This event, orchestrated by Social Media Examiner, is like a master class in all things social media. Held annually, it’s a pilgrimage for marketers who want to stay at the forefront of this ever-evolving landscape. Prepare to dive deep into the realm of hashtags, algorithms, and engagement metrics.

From insightful sessions with top-notch social media gurus to networking opportunities that can turn virtual followers into IRL friends, this conference is a feast for the social-savvy. Just be aware that the social media bubble can sometimes overshadow other aspects of marketing, so if you’re looking for a broader menu, you might need to look elsewhere

MozCon

Hosted by the makers of one of the best SEO tools, MozCon is your best chance to meet the luminaries of search engine marketing in person. Held annually, this is a deep dive into the intricacies of search engine optimization and digital marketing tactics. In such a fast-changing realm as SEO, this can be a great way to catch up on the most recent trends and changes. But keep in mind this is a niche conference. Come here if you want to focus on toning your SEO muscles, not for a more well-rounded experience.

AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O

Unravel the enigma of programmatic advertising at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O. This conference is where the wizards of ad tech come together to discuss programmatic marketing. Held annually, it’s a deep dive into the world of data, algorithms, and targeting.

Expect to immerse yourself in discussions about ad exchanges, real-time bidding, and the ever-elusive click-through rate optimization. The conference is a treasure trove of insights for those who thrive in the data-driven realm. However, be prepared for a slightly tech-heavy focus, which might go over your head if data isn’t your primary focus.

The Market Research Event (TMRE)

Delve into the world of consumer insights and market research at The Market Research Event (TMRE). Held annually, this conference is your source for methodologies, trends, and case studies that can elevate your understanding of your target audience.

Get ready to unlock the secrets behind surveys, focus groups, and data analytics. The conference offers a platform to rub shoulders with market research experts and glean insights from their successes and challenges. Just bear in mind that the scope is primarily centered around research, which could be a bit of a niche topic for some.

MarTech Conference

We had to include this martech focused event in our list of best marketing conferences. Navigate the intersection of marketing and technology at this event. Held annually, it’s a voyage through marketing automation, AI, data analytics, and beyond. Meet your favorite vendors, and discover new products to help automate and integrate your marketing functions.

That’s it! So mark your calendars, pack your notepads, and get ready to embark on a journey of marketing discovery like never before.

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How to Plan a Webinar in 8 Easy Steps

Act-On — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:51:35 +0000

Do you want to know the secret to how to plan a webinar that gets better results … even if you’re a total beginner? It’s simple … don’t start from scratch!

Marketers have been planning webinars for years (us included!). And they’ve learned from experience about what works and what doesn’t. So, there’s no reason you have to go through the planning process blindfolded. You can steal what works for others to shorten your learning curve.

And in this blog, we’re going to help you do just that!

We tapped our internal webinar mentor, Kelsey Yen, to share her best hacks for planning webinars that get results, broken down into 8 easy steps.

Create and Select a High-Performing Topic

Webinar planning is heavily focused on coming up with topics that your audience loves can seem hard unless you know what strategies to use.

“I like to do a little research to understand what type of content is trending with our audience,” says Kelsey Yen, Demand Generation Manager at Act-On. “An industry podcast with high engagement is usually a clear sign of an audience’s proven interests.”

You can also take research a step further by using tools such as BuzzSumo to uncover your competitors’ best topics—just type a competitor’s main URL into the tool, and it will show the highest-performing content.

Another way to find great webinar topics is by checking internal content metrics. Use tools such as Google Analytics to find your top-performing blogs, eBooks, and other content, and then consider new angles for your webinar planning.

“I also like to track industry trends and tie them to our products,” says Kelsey. “We noticed earlier this year a trend around marketing in a recession, layoffs, and doing more with less. We used these insights to create a webinar that did very well with our audience.”

And last, pay attention to ongoing content engagement. For example, we noticed high engagement around an email deliverability article in our newsletter. As a result, we leveraged that topic into an email marketing automation strategy webinar, and it’s become one of our highest-performing webinars to date.

Choose the Right Webinar Format

When planning a webinar, there are many formatting options. We typically use a traditional format, which includes a 30-minute presentation followed by a 15-minute Q&A.

“A traditional webinar format is fast and easy to execute, which is helpful when we’re jumping on trends like marketing in a recession,” says Kelsey. “But with that said, I’ve noticed some really fun webinar formats, like roundtables, firesides, and townhalls.”

You can also brainstorm creative ways to present your information, such as a knockout webinar format. “I’ve only seen this style done once by Drift, but it’s where a bunch of SMEs from different companies present their thoughts and viewers vote on their favorites until there’s one winner,” says Kelsey. “It seems like a great way to get the audience engaged.”

^{Planning a webinar is better with friends! Start with a brainstorm and work together to select the right SMEs.}

Also, the SME you select will play a role in your format. For example, a traditional educational format with detailed slides might work best for a highly technical SME, while a more conversational fireside chat may work well for a CMO or VP. Experiment, evaluate, and see what works best for your SMEs and the audience.

Find your Subject Matter Experts

Once you finalize your webinar topic, decide who will present it. Here are a few ideas for finding the best subject matter experts.

Internal experts. Ask yourself, “Who internally has an interesting point of view on the topic?” Maybe you have more than one potential SME, and they can present together (each with a different perspective).
External experts. Partnering with external experts gives your audience high-quality information and extends your reach. You and the external presenter will both promote the content, driving more participants and potential leads.
Your customers. People trust their peers. That’s why involving customers in webinars is a great strategy. Consider inviting a customer to co-present a webinar, sharing how they solved a specific pain point important to your target audience.

Keep in mind that securing internal experts is often the easiest, so if you feature external experts or customers, give yourself more lead time (we typically plan an extra few months).

Pick the Perfect Time

Here’s the truth about picking the ‘perfect time.’ There isn’t one.

But some times work better than others, and you can find them by following the data.

“I send my webinar promotional emails the same day of the week and time of day I plan to hold the event,” says Kelsey. “If engagement is high, it’s an early indicator that the time might work well for the audience.”

You can also increase the odds of picking the best time by looking at your general email open rates to determine what day and time typically works best for your audience. And of course, looking at past webinar attendance for patterns is helpful too. One last note would be to consider time zones. For example, if you know you have a lot of European customers, picking a convenient GMT time will be important.

Promote Like a Boss

It’s every marketer’s nightmare. You work hard on a webinar, and registration rates are low. What went wrong?

Most likely promotion.

^{Without proper promotion, even the best webinar content can fall flat.}

We promote through many channels, but one of our favorites is email. On average, emails can drive 57% of webinar registrations.

“Where we’ve seen success is starting promotion about three weeks from the webinar start date and sending a total of three to four messages,” says Kelsey. “When we promote too far in advance, we tend to see a drop off in our live attendees.”

Other strategies to consider include:

Social media. Our target audience spends time on LinkedIn, so that’s where we focus our efforts. Pro tip: Don’t put your registration signup link in the body of your LinkedIn post. Include it in the first comment. LinkedIn wants to keep viewers on its platform, so its algorithm rewards link-free posts. Instead, say something like, “See below for the registration link in the comments.”
SME promotion. Consider asking your SMEs to promote the webinar, especially if they have influence in your target market.
Retargeting. Retarget prospects who have interacted in the past and might be interested in your webinar topic.

Email signature promo blocks. Ask your account managers and other customer-facing staff to promote the webinar directly in their email signature lines.

Create an Amazing Webinar Experience

Now that you’ve gotten your audience to sign up for the webinar, you’ve got to plan an amazing experience for them. We won’t bore you with the obvious: Pick a solid webinar platform, practice it, and get comfortable. You probably already know that! But we do suggest a couple of tips to level up the experience for attendees.

Create a high-value slide deck. You don’t want your attendees to just download your slide deck. Nope, you want them to use it. Whatever you create, make sure it’s an amazing reference.
Add relevant resources. In the spirit of creating something valuable, include a resource section with links to related content and any references mentioned during the presentation.

And one more tip while we’re on the subject of creating an amazing slide deck. Don’t forget to include a clear call to action. We like to include three key takeaways at the end (with the last one being more product-focused). And then we include a survey question asking if the audience wants to receive more information about our products and services. If they say yes, they go straight to our sales team.

Post Webinar Attendance

We’ve found that many people who register for webinars don’t actually attend the live event. But that doesn’t mean they’re not interested.

“Recently, I’ve noticed a dip in live webinar attendance,” says Kelsey. “My theory is that people want things on their own timeline. Who watches live TV anymore? Not me! We’re busy during the workday, and the odds of finding a time that works for everyone are slim. So, you need to have a game plan for your post-webinar watchers.”

Here at Act-On, everyone who registers for a webinar receives three messages, but the exact messages they receive vary based on attendance behavior. Here’s what that looks like:

Attended the webinar

First touchpoint: Receives a recording and relevant content to keep learning on the topic.
Second touchpoint: Receives a larger piece of content, such as a case study, that generates engagement and builds their lead score.
Third touchpoint: Receives an email from the presenter (if it’s an internal SME) that invites the prospect to connect and offers help. If the presenter is external, the attendee receives a more general message with an offer to help.

Registered but didn’t attend

First touchpoint: Receives the recording and webinar recap in case they don’t have time to watch it.
Second touchpoint: Receives an eBook in the same content area as the webinar.
Third touchpoint: Receives additional and relevant resources on the topic.

And here’s a bonus idea to consider. You could also include a message from the SME presenter asking for feedback on how they enjoyed the webinar and starting a conversation.

Measure Performance and Improve

Every webinar you plan is a test. It’s an experiment. And there is data that you can leverage from that experiment. What topics resonate well with your audience? What time of day gets the highest number of live attendees? What types of webinars get the highest conversion rates? (Tip: we often see the highest conversion from topics that are closely tied to our marketing automation software.)

Be curious.

Ask questions.

Then iterate and improve your performance through careful, systematic planning and execution.
Want to learn more about how to plan a webinar or additional inspiration? Go ahead, steal ours! You can view our entire webinar library here.

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The Rebel Instinct Podcast episode 3: Cody Putman

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 04:16:00 +0000

^{Cody Putman, an experiential marketer at Afresh, knows you can’t just sit around online and hope your campaigns resonate. He says you gotta bring experience to people. Here’s how he used gummy sharks to do it.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Act-On Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box. What’s good everybody? Thank you so much for breaking the mold with us. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, joined by my VP of Marketing, Casey Munck and our guest today, Cody Putman, experiential marketing manager at Afresh and Cody’s in Bend, Oregon marketing professional there who thrives on making products, ideas, and teams move.

Casey Munck:
Hey, Cody.

Cody Putman:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Casey Munck:
Oh, it’s so good to see you. Even though I see you around town here in Ben, it’s always good to see you in a professional setting as well.

Cody Putman:
Always great to get to catch up.

Casey Munck:
I love it. You’re one of my favorite people in the whole world, and this is the truth like many people have, Cody’s their favorite, but yeah, we forgot to mention talented pastry chef. I’m still thinking about that. Fruity Pebbles ice cream you made for me that one time. Do you have any fall flavors?

Cody Putman:
I do. Fall is my absolute favorite season, so maybe expect a fall treat at some point coming your way. I have to test those out on all my friends.

Casey Munck:
I cannot wait to get that doorbell ringing with ice cream.

Galen Ettlin:
We’re going to have dessert delivered to the Portland office when you visit us, Casey?

Casey Munck:
Possibly. We’ll work on it. We’ll work on. But Cody, experiential marketing, it’s a relatively newly coined term in the marketing space. What exactly is it? I know we’ve spent time together when you had field marketing manager positions and this is your new role. Tell us about what it exactly is.

Cody Putman:
Yeah, it’s interesting. It actually was pretty new for myself too when I first learned about it. Essentially at its core, experiential marketing is really helping brands create that relationship with their customers. Building that bridge from top of funnel and creating that relationship all the way through. You have the opportunity to really create positive brand experiences with folks that you’re trying to get to become customers, and there’s great ways to get to that online, offline channels, so through trade shows, events, direct mail, virtual experiences, even ABM, there’s just so many tools in the toolbox that you get to use and you get to be creative while doing it. I think it’s pretty easy to go and just show up and have a presence, but it’s really wrapping bigger ideas around that presence and making sure that folks are walking away with a really, really positive experience because they’re going to associate that positive experience throughout their entire journey with the company. So the better you can start off the bat, the more successful that customer is going to be in the future as well.

Casey Munck:
Interesting. It’s very holistic and you’re really thinking about every single encounter that a customer might have with the brand.

Cody Putman:
Yeah, there’s so many. There’s so many, and every single touch point is critical, and I think all too often those smaller interactions tend to go underlooked. So the more you can spend some time focusing on making those extremely positives the better.

Casey Munck:
I love that for you. I can’t wait to see what you’re cooking up over there. At your new role.

Galen Ettlin:
You’re mentioning you’re really using all of the tools at your disposal and it kind of seems like your field would utilize some gorilla marketing tactics, if you will. What are some of the weirdly wonderful campaigns that you’ve seen deployed successfully?

Cody Putman:
One of my favorite ones I actually I wasn’t involved in at all as an totally other area. I’m a really big fan of travel and tourism and being from Oregon myself, I really appreciate some of the work that the people like Travel Oregon get to do. I don’t know if any of you remember this since you’re based in Portland, or at least in Oregon as well, but Travel Oregon put out this incredible campaign called The Seven Wonders of Oregon.

What they did is they just took some of these incredible sites that we have and turned it into a campaign that got people super interested in visiting us, but not only did it encourage folks from outside of the state to come in, but it also really encouraged people who were living in Oregon to go and visit some of those places as well, because it wasn’t just an online ad or a commercial that you saw on tv, but it was in print, it was in magazines on airplanes, it was in stores, like a checklist of sorts. I mean, you literally saw it everywhere and having a ton of family and friends that grew up here. I think every single person that I knew was really considering have I visited all seven of these? How do I get there making plans either that summer or throughout the year to go and visit that. And I just thought it was incredible to see the reaction that people had to some of these places that maybe went a little under the radar, but they made such a big splash in the travel and tourism industry that some of these places were seeing traffic numbers that they had never seen before. So truly it was just incredible to kind of see people rally around a campaign like that and to get excited about either coming to visit us or even just checking a little bit more about your own state. It was phenomenal.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, I remember you telling me about that when I first moved and I was like, I’ve got to visit all these places and I find myself introducing this list of other Oregonians and it creates such a sense of pride of all these amazing places that we have and what special day trips that you can have to just experience these amazing places. So I love that campaign too.

Cody Putman:
It was fantastic.

Casey Munck:
Well, Cody, your job connects the offline and the online world marketing experiences. So how can marketers connect these things in a way that can feel holistic and actually connected? Because a lot of times the demand gen folks will be over here running things a certain way, field marketing sales. So in your role to kind of connect these things, what tactics do you do to create that experience that’s consistent regardless if you’re interacting on the website at an event, getting a piece of direct mail? What sort of philosophies or strategies are you doing to do that?

Cody Putman:
I think intent data is super helpful and not only understanding what people are doing online, so are they engaging with certain eBooks or case studies, what specific type of content really resonates with them? Is there a topic that’s more interesting to them? But really combining that with a lot of that offline channel as well. So getting some qualitative data when you’re on site at a trade show, you really should be understanding more about what those folks are talking about, what’s resonating at that show, what’s interesting to them when they come to visit you at your booth, are you taking notes on that? Are you making sure that you understand what is actually going to be relevant to ’em as you start to follow up? And then another piece of it too is really not stopping at the MQL or SQL or sort of whatever metric you’re looking at in terms of conversion and passing it off to sales.

Experiential marketing is really encompassing all of it. So you’re really focusing in on ensuring that you have the right data across the entirety of the funnel because that helps your sellers as well sort of get the right message out to ’em at the right time too. If you’re just passing it up to sales and they don’t really have that indication of, alright, here’s what we were talking about with them, then that’s where that communication and that storyline starts to break down. So keeping that story consistent across the board is always really critical. And then I would say too, just having that connection with sales, it’s so critical. Sometimes marketing and sales teams tend to work in different spheres, but ensuring that they are fully involved and aware of where your campaign is headed, what type of messaging you’re putting out there, and providing them something more actionable in terms of follow-up is really important.

They can then combine that intent data, other assets that you’ve created and the plan you have for follow-up and start to build something out on their own to ensure that there’s that personalization in there. There’s nothing more frustrating than showing up on a trade show, talking to someone, and then you have someone else reach out to that has a completely different story or it really isn’t even hitting on some of those things that you talked about previously. It’s kind of like, are they listening to me make sure they feel like they’re being listened to and understood, and there’s so many great tools that you can leverage now to be able to do that, whether it’s intent, data, automation, what have you, it’s pretty incredible what you can accomplish now.

Casey Munck:
That’s so true, and I think in seeing you in action, I think those relationships that you have to build with stakeholders that may not be under your direct management. So I mean other than providing baked goods, how have you been able to get people to come in line with what needs to happen to create that holistic experience? What sort of things have been successful for you in your career?

Cody Putman:
I find involving every stakeholder from the get-go is really critical, even if it’s just a brainstorm session at the beginning, understanding their ideas, what they’re interested in, what they’re hearing on the grounds and incorporating that into a campaign plan is really critical. But then it’s also ensuring that everyone is in lockstep as you go throughout that entire process and the plan. I tend to find that as teams sort of feel that better or at least with the campaign and they understand where it’s heading and they start to get excited about it. And I think so much around creating a positive experience is really building that momentum and creating a lot of energy for folks if they feel that energy. If your teams are feeling it, the folks that you’re trying to work with on the show floor, they’re going to feel it too.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, you got to keep those vibrations high.

Cody Putman:
Yes.

Casey Munck:
So I’m curious, what’s the most rebellious thing that you’ve tried with your experiential marketing?

Cody Putman:
Oh gosh. It’s always fun to get to try some new tactics, and sometimes you can do it in big campaigns and make a big splash, but I like to sort of find some of those more micro moments at different either events or virtually as well. I think one of my favorite things that I ever did, it was almost by accident, but in a way it was also quite intentional. We were at the show down in San Diego, and I usually try to wrap some sort of theme around our messaging when we’re at a show and sometimes it’s based off of the theme of the conference or maybe it’s just themed off of the location we’re in. So in this instance, we had a session there, we were leveraging this leaky bucket analogy and it was down in San Diego, so I was like, all right, well let’s run with a beach nautical theme with this and just try to take it all the way there.

So in the audience of anyone who joined that session, they got this little sort of pale, like a beach bucket with a shovel in it, and we had them participate in the session itself working with water and leaky buckets. But then afterwards they had these buckets and I rolled out this pool of mini gummy sharks and everyone after the session went over filled their pails with gummy sharks and these pails had our logo on it, and I just kind of wanted it to be a nice tree at the end. So we had all these leftovers, I take ’em back to the booth, and during the next session, everyone who wasn’t a part of our original session was so intrigued by these pales of gummy sharks that we had a line at our booth of folks waiting to fill up pales with gummy sharks and around this conference, it was incredible.

We had people everywhere with pales, and I was a little nervous at first because I was like, oh, maybe the compass organizers are going to be upset passing out food and candy and stuff like that. But people were so thrilled. In fact, we had some of the organizers were coming up trying to get gummy sharks as well until we ran out, but it was like we got to meet everyone and they came and we created that positive experience for ’em. And I’ll tell you what, they walked away probably back the hotel room with a pale of gummy sharks and they probably didn’t forget it. So that was probably one of my most favorite things that we did partially by accident, but it was just incredible to see sort of how that ended up flourishing, even though I didn’t expect it

Casey Munck:
All the way to gummy candy. I remember that Cody, that’s talk about being able to bridge the gap between a content topic of leaky buckets, hotel technology in San Diego. I mean, only someone with your brilliance can have that. That was a great story.

Galen Ettlin:
That story comes back to that energy you talked about really bringing it up and inspiring people to feel excited about a moment. So along those lines, what advice do you have to give other marketers about being more rebellious in their jobs,

Cody Putman:
Getting exposure to all the different areas of marketing? So I started as an intern in marketing quite a while ago, and during that time I got to experience literally every single piece of marketing that the company I was at did. So I think my advice would be for marketers is get familiar with your teams If you haven’t had the chance already, spend some time. If you’re a creative person, spend some time working in digital, spend some time in automation, wherever it might be, wherever you feel that skill gap because I think overall, not only does it make you a better marketer, but when you’re starting to think through some of these more rebellious plays or creative campaigns, it gives you the opportunity to think through how that’s going to work across the board. And not only are you going to create a campaign that flows really nicely, but you’re also going to get your team to really buy into that idea as well because you’re going to have a better understanding of some of the work that we all have to do to get that done. You think of ABM, it’s not just one person running a b m, it’s a team play and everyone has to be involved in it. So if you each can sort of understand where each other is coming from, maybe strengths and weaknesses in all areas, you’re just going to be that much more successful in building out what your dreams look like.

Casey Munck:
Really good advice. Cody, I loved running ABM plays with you. That was so much fun. And we won a lot of business, didn’t we? Yes,

Cody Putman:
We did. Yeah, it was incredible. We had a lot of fun getting to do that as well.

Casey Munck:
For sure. Well, I’d like to know your take on this. How do you make a rebellious move at work not knowing the outcome or the consequences?

Cody Putman:
Yeah, I mean I feel like it can always be so daunting, not really knowing where something’s going to go, but it’s so much of it is about taking those calculated risks. I could sit there and string along quotes all day of like, you learn from your failures or you must try first, whatever it might be. There’s so many of those, but I think that’s truly the case, is really learning from what you do. And sometimes you’re learning from a big flop, sometimes you’re learning from something you could have improved upon and iterating it, but within those lines, it’s also baking in some tactics that you just know work. You don’t have to always go out completely on a full ledge and throw everything off a cliff and just hope it lands. You can always sort of some of those safety nets or at least ways to see how it’s going as you’re continuing along the campaign. So if you see one area is maybe not going as well as you thought it was, great, have a backup, move something else in there, swap it out, have something else for those folks. Move into if something’s not sticking, there’s always other options to get people interested.

Casey Munck:
Really smart. Yeah, you’ve got to inspect what you’re expecting, right? And being able to be agile and not like this was the plan. Being able to make it work and swap things out I think is really important for marketers to learn how to be more agile.

Galen Ettlin:
So Cody, I’m curious, what rebel in our culture do you think needs to be celebrated and why?

Cody Putman:
It’s funny, we were talking about ice cream earlier because a lot of what I do is based off of a lot of the work from Christina Tosi who’s over at Milk Bar.

I have always grown up baking, creating treats. I learned a lot from my mom, from my grandma, and a lot of what we did were always a lot more of those traditional type of treats, which is fantastic. But I had seen the documentary that Christina Tosi was in and I was just in awe of her ability to take so much of the flavors, the styles of treats that we know, desserts, cakes, what have you, and put an entirely different spin on it.

So anywhere from having ice cream that’s made out of cereal, milk to pie that has corn meal in it to I think recently there’s an apple cider donut cake. It’s amazing to sort of see that creative flexibility that they have to make something new out of something really traditional. And I feel like as marketers, we have the same opportunity to take some of those traditional tactics and really start to transform them by putting a different spin on it, trying something a little bit different. And so I don’t know, she’s always not only just a great inspiration for me in terms of the baking world, I love working out of her cookbook all about cake, whether it’s following a recipe exactly or trying something different, but it’s feeling that empowerment to take convention and not necessarily throw it out the window, but put a fresh spin on it.

Galen Ettlin:
Basically a Chopped champion it sounds like.

Cody Putman:
Exactly.

Casey Munck:
Yeah. I love what she does with nostalgia in new ways. So many things that are like, give us those memories when we were kid or what our grandma made, but she turned it on its head in a way. It’s still so comforting and familiar.

Cody Putman:
Exactly. Exactly. I mean, sign me up. I wish there was one in Oregon. So if she hears this, Christina, please, we need a milk bar in Oregon.

Casey Munck:
Come our way please. We’ll help find this operation.

Okay, Cody. So now it’s time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment. You’re going to have 60 seconds to state your case for what needs to stop now in marketing or in MarTech. And Galen is going to be holding you very firm to the time and we’ll be counting you down. So Cody, are you ready for your ‘honey, I don’t think so.’

Cody Putman:
I’m ready. Let’s do this.

Casey Munck:
Cody, go ahead. Give us your ‘honey, I don’t think so.’

Cody Putman:
Alright, so what I think we need to stop doing is having useless swag. Swag is one of those things that we see at all trade shows, events, and I think it can be really helpful, but I get really, really, really tired of seeing swag that ends up sitting on tables. People pick it up, they put it in their bags and then they throw it away on their way out. It makes me so sad because I think there’s such great opportunity to build out really creative swag programs and in things that people actually want to use and leverage. Seeing it in the garbage is always a bummer because not only is it just kind of a waste of money, but it wastes the resources and the environmental impact is never great from that as well. So I think if we could all start to think through ways that we can take that swag and turn it into something that’s a bit more useful. Some of the things that I love seeing are grow kits, growing your own plants, having reusable cups or mugs, even books or donations to charities. I think there’s great ways that you can engage your audience and have them walk away with something positive from your booth without making it wasteful.

Casey Munck:
We did it, y’all. Cody, I’m with you. Congratulations.

Cody Putman:
Listen, thank you.

Casey Munck:
It is so great talking to you. I think you’ve gave and marketers so much good advice and we’ll be watching out for what you’re up to next.

Cody Putman:
It was great catching up and thank you for having me.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates in upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast with Sara Gelenberg-Field, former VP and head of marketing for Nestle for US Coffee, a former marketing director for Starbucks and current chief marketing officer of Mommy’s Bliss.

How to Drive Better Webinar Engagement with SMS Marketing

Act-On — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 21:19:22 +0000

Since the first quarter of 2020, the number of B2B webinars has grown by 162%, with over 61 million hours of viewable content available. This rapid growth has not only led to “webinar fatigue,” but has also created a choice overload for webinar registrants and attendees. In this environment, marketers are now pressed to drive better webinar engagement in a flooded marketplace.

That means potentially reaching past email as the traditional webinar reminder channel to connect with your registrants. Let’s discuss how you can drive webinar engagement with SMS marketing.

SMS Marketing: Paving the Way to Direct Customer Engagement

The SMS marketing channel is capturing the attention of the modern marketer, and for good reason. Over the past few years, SMS marketing has evolved from mostly transactional messages. It has expanded into personalized reminders, product offers, loyalty discounts, and more, all of which contribute to building better brand experiences with customers.

SMS allows marketers to reach prospective and current customers where they always are – on their mobile devices. And with a read rate of over 97% (compared to 20% for email) your reminders and notifications can cut through the clutter.

Using SMS for webinar reminders, registrations, and confirmation messages can ensure marketing messages are seen and engaged with on a timely basis. However, this doesn’t mean you can just start blasting your database’s phone numbers. Legal SMS marketing requires the user to specifically opt-in prior to receiving any communications, and industry best practices guide marketers to be clear about expectations for the type and frequency of messages.

When done right, SMS marketing can be a powerful tool in your marketing toolbox. In fact, we’ve recently implemented SMS marketing as an addition to our webinar programming efforts, and the results are too great to keep to ourselves.

Use Case: Transform Webinar Engagement with SMS Marketing

Here at Act-On, we recently implemented SMS marketing to improve the experience and effectiveness of our webinar programming. First, we included a choice to opt-in for SMS reminders when registering for any of the webinars on our ongoing educational calendar. On average 20% of our webinar registrants sign up for SMS reminders. Interestingly, even though that percentage seems small, it has brought important results for our webinar marketing program.

Our average attendance rate for webinars is between 20-25%
Attendance rate for webinars has increased by nearly 80% since implementing day-before and day-of reminders via SMS.
Overall SMS opt-ins on webinar registration forms grew from 12% to 25%.

How We Implemented SMS Marketing to Boost Webinar Engagement

As you may have assumed, it all starts with getting SMS opt-ins. To begin, we simply added the appropriate fields to our registration form, and began building our segmented SMS marketing lists.

With SMS opt-ins it’s important to communicate the expectations upfront. For example, let your registrant know how you will be using their mobile information, and include a privacy policy statement similar to what you’d provide for GDPR guidelines. These steps are actually required by law in most countries.

Once we started to build a list of webinar registrants who wanted to receive reminders via SMS, we built out a plan, and wrote up short reminder messages to go along with each of our webinar topics. We further enhance the entire SMS experience by ensuring the individual’s message is personalized. Making this experience personalized is key to enhancing the overall effectiveness and authenticity of SMS communications.

For example, our SMS reminders include the registrant’s name, title of the webinar, and unique Join URL to make it not only personalized, but convenient to join the webinar from their mobile devices. This is accomplished by using the personalization fields in Act-On’s SMS composer dashboard. This adds a thoughtful touch-point for your recipient, and makes them feel seen.

After the first event, keep your webinar audience engaged by sending future webinar invites by SMS (as long as they are expecting further communication via SMS). Instead of blending in with other webinar invites in the email inbox, you can invite them with a personalized message and shortened link to the next event’s landing page.

Reporting on SMS Success and Scoring

It’s one thing to create an SMS strategy, but it’s another to report on it. Similar to your other marketing channels, it’s important to track the performance of the SMS channel. Ensuring you understand who’s engaging with your messages, when they’re being opened, and checking the deliverability rates will only grow your SMS credibility.

Additionally, scoring your recipients on how they engage with your SMS communications can paint the full picture of your brand’s SMS success. If someone clicks on the link in an SMS message, assigning them the proper score enables you to measure their engagement with SMS and your content.

Thoughtful Use of SMS Can Boost Your Webinar Engagement and Lead to More Conversions for Your Business

SMS marketing requires a thoughtful, strategic approach, and should fit seamlessly into your marketing strategy, while also taking into account the user’s experience, interests, and needs.

As you can see from this use case example of SMS marketing to enhance our webinar program, SMS can be highly effective. Learn more about how to cut through the noise with timely, relevant, personalized, and positive messaging in our on-demand webinar on SMS marketing.

5 Takeaway Tips to Use SMS Effectively:

Ensure the individual is opted-in to receive messages from your brand
Limit the number of sends to engage your audience without overwhelming them
Schedule your messages ahead of time to ensure an efficient process
Experiment with various lengths, content, and types of messages you’re sending
Use your data selectively to create authentic and personalized experiences

Three Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Webinars to Attract and Engage New Customers

Act-On — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Have you seen the rulebook for B2C marketing?

Trick question! It doesn’t exist. And even if there was a rulebook for consumer marketing, COVID-19 has changed everything.

B2C marketing is personal. You need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, share a better story about how they can transform their lives, and keep them coming back for more.

As you plan the future of your business in a post-coronavirus world, you need to engage potential customers on their terms. This is where B2C webinars can give you a huge advantage. B2C customer webinars are a great way to make your business more personal, form authentic connections with your community, and write your own rulebook.

Let’s get started.

Wait… Aren’t Webinars Just for the B2B Crowd?

If you want to create your own best practices for B2C lead generation, take a page from the B2B playbook. B2B companies produce webinars because more than 70% of buyers have used them to make a purchase decision in the past 12 months. And if webinars can help B2B buyers navigate complex solutions, they can definitely help new customers understand your company’s value. B2C webinars are a fantastic way to highlight your products and services, attract new customers, and grow your community.

But there are lots of ways to do webinars wrong. Here’s a quick list of what to avoid:

A non-stop commercial. People don’t like being sold to, but they love to buy. If your customer base is already carving out time in their busy schedule to learn from you, make it worth their while.
A 30-minute monologue. It’s possible to make this work, but you need to be an amazing storyteller.
20 PowerPoint slides with flashy animations. Seriously? This will send your attendees running for the hills. You can do better.

So, if the examples above aren’t the right direction, what are the elements of successful B2C customer webinars? How can you use these online events to attract people to your site, engage new customers, and drive repeat business?

Best Practices to Secure Registrations and Attendees for Your Next B2C Webinar

People crave connection. And if they’re on your, site they’re open to learning something new. Webinars merge these twin interests to tell a more powerful story. Here’s how to launch a successful B2C webinar series:

Write a list of potential webinar topics based on keyword research and your ideal customer profile.
Be consistent. Pick a day to broadcast your webinars and stick with it. Treat B2C webinars like a blog, a podcast, or any other form of content. If you’re consistent, it will be easier for you to schedule your webinar and easier for your audience to plan their schedules around it.
Practice beforehand, especially if you’re going to invite guest speakers to share the spotlight with you. Sometimes the best ideas are spontaneous; they come from brainstorming and thinking out loud. You can learn a lot just by bouncing ideas off someone in a rehearsal. Then you can take that same energy into the live webinar.
Do it live! Treat each of your B2C webinars like the blockbuster event it is. When you do it live, you can take questions from the audience in real-time and give people the answers they’re looking for.
Have fun! On webinars, people will pick up on the tone of your voice and your body language — sometimes even more than what you actually say. Your enthusiasm will shine through and punctuate your messaging, so make sure to make it exciting!

The Benefits of Webinars for B2C Marketers

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These are the basic steps to producing successful B2C webinars. But how do you get people to attend once you’ve put all the pieces in place?

Think “focus group.” Before you announce your first webinar to the masses, plan and produce one just for your top customers. You can either prepare a presentation in advance and take their questions at the end or ask them to submit their top questions and turn the whole thing into a live conversation. Offer them a coupon code in exchange for attending the webinar and submitting their comments and questions. Your biggest fans have valuable insights that can make your next webinar even better.
Treat your B2C webinar like a new product launch. Each of your webinars deserves a dedicated landing page where people can register for the big day, top billing in your B2C newsletter, a headline in your email marketing outreach, and buzz on social media. Integrated growth marketing platforms like Act-On allow you to manage all aspects of your webinar campaigns in one place.
Always bring it back to what your customers want. Again, you can draw inspiration from social media posts, keyword research, and what your competitors’ customers say about their products on review sites. Then record a quick video with the same format as your webinar, “We often get questions about ‘How do you ABC?’ or ‘How do you get better at XYZ? So we’re holding a webinar to answer your questions like this and much more! Join us next week…” You can either livestream these previews through Facebook and YouTube, or record them for playback on Instagram TV. If a guest speaker will join you, invite them to join you on the teaser video.
Be patient. The more often you do B2C customer webinars, the more you’ll understand what makes them a success. The flipside? You probably won’t get 1,000 highly qualified leads from your first attempt. But good things come to those who wait. And B2C webinars are the perfect complement to everything else you’re doing to generate demand and attract new customers to your business.

Every time you plan a new B2C customer webinar, you should map out three different email nurture campaigns:

Emails for your target audience with an invitation to RSVP
Another series of emails for people who register, so you can encourage them to share details of the webinar on social media (and also remind them to attend)
After the webinar, send an email to everyone who registered and thank them for attending. You can even write two different versions: one for attendees, one for people who skipped out. Both versions should include a link to the recording so they can watch the webinar on-demand.

Emails in the first two sequences will point people to your landing page where they can register for your email. But the third campaign transforms your webinar from a one-time event into a piece of evergreen content.

Hosting On-Demand Webinars as a Lead Generation Tactic

Anyone who visits your site is looking for ways to become a better version of themselves. And when they think of your products and services, you should think “on-demand webinar lead generation.” B2C webinars are premium content designed to address your new customers’ questions in depth. If you’ve done your homework, your webinar will be just as relevant one year from now as it was the day you recorded it.

Once you record the webinar, embed it in a new landing page on your site. Then update the original landing page with a new form to gate the embedded webinar. The same keywords still apply, which means you can add this webinar to your email marketing sequences as well as your organic & paid SEM campaigns. And when it’s time for a refresh — for example, if you have updated keyword results or you identify a new influencer who would make a great co-host — plan a new webinar and begin the whole cycle again.

Plan and Execute Your B2C Webinar Through Act-On’s Marketing Automation Platform

If you wrote your own rulebook for B2C marketing, what would be rule #1?

Allow us to make a suggestion:

“Give the people what they want!”

Remember, people do not want your product. But they do want a better story about how they can transform into a better version of themselves.

Producing a successful B2C webinar requires a lot of moving parts, so you need a marketing automation platform that’s up to the challenge. In order to produce a webinar that drives more qualified leads to your site, you’ll need…

A seamless webinar platform integration
Automated email nurture sequences inviting people to attend your webinars
Social media management tools to schedule and manage posts
Flexible landing pages and form builders to collect your guests’ information

Act-On’s marketing automation platform has everything you need to make your webinars a key part of your demand generation strategy. To learn more, reach out today and schedule a quick demo with one of our marketing automation experts!

The Benefits of Webinars for B2C Marketers

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5 Ways to Promote Your Webinar

Act-On — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Webinars are a great way to position yourself as a thought leader in your space and educate your audience about how to get the most out of your products and services. These digital events can also help you nurture existing customers and even generate new leads. But none of this is possible if you’re not promoting your webinars the right way on the right channels.

Done correctly, webinars require a ton of work from start to finish, including:

Topic ideation
Drafting/editing the slide deck
Drafting/editing your talking points
Creating in-broadcast polls, surveys, and handouts
Designing the slide deck
Creating a compelling landing page
Coordinating speakers
Promotion (more on that in a minute… much more)
Tech logistics
Dry runs
Troubleshooting
Webinar delivery
On-demand hosting
Follow-up messaging
Reporting
Transferring leads to Sales

That’s a lot, right? Especially for a small marketing team. So if you’re going to put in all this work, you might as well do it right to get the best possible return on investment. And perhaps the biggest part of doing it right is making sure you’re promoting it to the max.

Today, we’re going to review five ways to promote your webinar and ensure great registration and attendance numbers.

PPC for Webinars

Pay-per-click advertising is one of those channels that can be extremely lucrative with tons of great registrants or extremely cost-prohibitive with nothing to show for your efforts. It all depends on your level of expertise and vigilance with Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and paid social.

If you know what you’re doing and are willing to review and optimize daily, there’s a good chance you’ll recoup an awesome webinar ROI from your PPC efforts. If you’re new to PPC and don’t have the time to check in on your campaigns every day, you should skip this section and focus on the four webinar promotion ideas below.

For those of you interested in PPC as a way to promote your webinar, the first thing you’ll need to do is develop your creative assets for your display and/or remarketing campaigns. The cost-per-click for these campaign types is usually far cheaper than paid search advertising, so display and remarketing ads are especially attractive for smaller companies or those marketing teams with limited budgets.

When designing your ads, make sure to include the pertinent details of your webinar on each (use multiple panels in a gif fashion if necessary), and keep the design minimal with vibrant colors and fonts to make sure it sticks out on the page. From there, choose your display placements and audiences and drop remarketing tags on relevant pages (such as the “Events” page on your main website). Make sure that the tone, look, and feel of your ads match those of your landing page to create a more seamless experience for your potential registrants.

Paid search campaigns require thorough keyword research. The average cost-per-click varies significantly by industry, so it’s possible that the CPC for your topic keywords is simply too expensive to justify a search campaign in the first place. Performing comprehensive keyword research will also help you identify long-tail phrases that are more tailored to your target audience and likely less expensive than root keywords that might also be too broad to generate a good cost-per-conversion.

Another advantage is that you’ll lower the risk of wasting your efforts on leads that are simply not a good fit. To improve your chances of success, your search ad copy should include your focus keyword(s) and also messaging about what the potential registrant can expect to learn by attending your webinar.

Email Your Existing Prospects and Customers About Your Upcoming Webinar

Based on the topic of your webinar, you should have a good idea of which audience segments you want to attend your event. Group your existing email marketing list to identify which of these segments you want to send email invites to.

When crafting your emails, follow standard best practices, including:

Create concise, compelling subject lines
Include relevant details (date, time, topic, benefits) in your email copy
Add detailed presenter bios with headshots
Include multiple calls-to-action redirecting to the same page
Encourage employees to include a banner invite to their email signatures
A/B test subject lines, CTAs, preview text, and copy (one at a time)

For best results, you’ll want to send multiple invites. The core of these emails should remain the same (details, benefits, presenters), but feel free to focus on specific pain points and challenges in each email, along with how the webinar will help the attendee overcome this obstacle. If possible, include stats or testimonials that reinforce your main points. Consider sending 3-4 email invites in all, and shorten the time between messages as you get closer to the date of the webinar.

Email #1: Two weeks prior
Email #2: One week prior
Email #3: Two days prior
Email #4: Day of

According to ON24, the average marketing webinar attendance rate across industries is only 36% (1), which means you have to nurture your registrants after they’ve committed to the webinar in order for them to attend. Once the individual registers, send a trigger email to thank them for registering. Then, stop the invite cadence and drop them in a new automated email nurture campaign that reminds them of the date, time, and benefits of the webinar over a similar timeframe as the one above.

In addition, you could consider adding a high-value collateral asset to these nurture emails. Informative collateral will prove your position as a thought leader, establishing trust and motivating the registrant to attend. We’ve recently started doing this here at Act-On, and the early returns are through the roof!

Lastly, you should send a thank you email that includes any content that was promised (slide deck, link to the on-demand webinar, handouts, content assets) within 24 hours. This will significantly increase the overall average webinar attendance rate and ensure better post-webinar marketing success resulting in more sales-qualified leads.

How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships

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Whether through paid or organic campaigns, promoting a webinar on social media is another effective channel — if for no other reason than the sheer volume of people surfing their social networks every hour of every day.

Despite the potential for a significant amount of impressions, you still want to make sure your social campaigns are highly relevant for your target audience (especially on paid campaigns). This means focusing your social media efforts where they’re likely going to make the biggest impact. Dig back into your personas to discover where your different audience segments are most active and place your emphasis on these platforms. A/B test the messaging of your posts to include multiple tones and different benefits of attending the webinar. In addition to sharing links to your primary webinar landing page, you can create LinkedIn or Facebook events pages for easier signups and more registrants.

Again, your copy and collateral assets need to be reflective of your destination landing page, but you might also consider including adding Easter eggs to the content your sharing. For instance, if you’re posting a blog that addresses the same topic as your webinar, you should include a prominent CTA in one of your content blocks or at the end of the piece (or both). In fact, you might want to update your editorial calendar to include relevant blogs solely for this purpose!

Include Webinar CTAs on Your Website

If you host, attend, or sponsor a lot of events, you need to have an “Events” section on your website, and you need to update this page regularly with working links to optimized landing pages where your target audience can learn about and register for your event. Further, you need to make sure your website visitors can easily find this page by including it in your primary navigation and also linking to it in your monthly newsletters and other outbound communications with prospects and customers alike.

You also need to include webinar registrant CTAs throughout your website, especially on your home page — ideally above the fold as a vibrant button or callout to draw the user’s eye. As mentioned above, you should also consider writing new blogs related to the topic of your webinar and including links and callouts that redirect to your webinar signup page. In addition, you should review your web analytics to identify top-performing blogs related to your webinar and swap out the existing CTAs to link to your upcoming webinar.

Lastly, you should include CTAs on relevant product and service pages. You know that people who visit those pages are already interested in that content, so why not take it a step further and invite them to learn more in an interactive setting? In addition to a button or callout, you might consider adding an exit-intent pop-up ad to capture new registrants before they leave the page.

One word of caution, though. While it can be tempting to plaster your webinar CTAs all over your website, it’s wise to show discretion in some instances. For example, don’t include any additional CTAs (webinar-related or otherwise) on your hand raiser pages (Contact Us, Book a Demo, Take a Tour, Pricing, etc.). You don’t want to distract from the central purpose of those pages, as the existing CTAs have a defined high-value purpose.

**Promote Your Next Webinar on Your Current Webinar**

Your work is never done. Even as you’re finally producing and broadcasting your webinar, you should be actively planning and promoting your next online event — even if it isn’t closely related to the topic of the webinar your guests are attending. If you’ve done your job correctly, you’ve established trust with your new prospects, so they’re likely interested in what you have to say on other topics in your industry.

Be sure to let your attendees know about your next webinar early on in the session, during any built-in breaks in the action, and at the end of the presentation. And when you send out the webinar deck after the event (to attendees and non-attendees alike), you should include a slide with a CTA inviting your viewers to click through to register for your next event!

Use Act-On to Plan, Promote, and Host Your Webinars

So many companies are producing such engaging webinars that they’re quickly becoming the go-to content asset for many marketing departments. Not to mention that producing a webinar is usually extremely cost-effective, so you’re very likely to generate a great ROI if you follow the tips we’ve just outlined.

Or, if you’d like to learn how to optimize your own webinar process, planning, promotion, and production, please click here to read more about the webinar automation features in the Act-On platform. Better yet, book a demo with one of our digital marketing experts today to see our webinar promotion services in action for yourself!

How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships

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Improve Webinar Success With These 5 Tips

Act-On — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 07:00:00 +0000

You probably know that marketing webinars are one of the best ways to educate your audience and promote your organization, but do you know how to get more registrants? What about creating the best possible user experience for all your attendees? Follow-up and lead nurturing after the webinar?

These are all essential steps to producing the best possible webinar for your organization and your attendees, but many marketers aren’t aware of their value or don’t know how to address these critical webinar components.

If you’re dedicated to producing more online events but want to improve your webinar success moving forward, please keep reading to learn five great tips for proven webinar results.

Create Demand Gen Campaigns to Secure Webinar Registrants

This probably goes without saying, but there’s no point in hosting a webinar if nobody bothers to show. So you need to create effective and efficient demand generation campaigns to get more people to reserve their seats.

Before launching these campaigns, however, you need to create a dedicated landing page for your online event with an easy-to-complete form and clear and concise copy listing the following:

The primary topic and your main talking points
The date and time of your marketing webinar
Who will be participating and their expertise

Your form on the page should include less than five fields (and ideally no more than three) and a prominent “Submit” or “RSVP” button.

Once your landing page is complete, you can begin leveraging it to secure webinar registrants. Here are a few different ways to get your target audience to commit to your webinar.

Link to your invite landing page in your marketing newsletter.
Create Google Ads and paid social campaigns using highly targeted keywords aimed at specific demographics.
Enlist all team members to promote the webinar in their email signatures and via the appropriate social media channels.
Depending on your audience, write a blog on the same topic as your webinar and create a call-to-action that links to your invite landing page.
Link to the webinar on your form submission “Thank You” pages.
Create an organic social media campaign.

Encourage your target audience to join your webinar any way you can, as long as your efforts align with your brand guidelines and don’t break the bank.

Increase Webinar Attendance With Lead Nurturing

Before you launch your demand generation efforts, you should create a lead nurturing campaign to ensure that your registrants actually attend the webinar. This should consist of a series of 3-4 emails reminding registrants of the upcoming event and also include a link to different content assets that are related to the webinar topic.

Copy should be brief and reiterate the topic, presenters, and date and time of the webinar and say something to the effect of:

“We’re excited for you to join us at our webinar next month on {date and time}. If you’d like to learn more about {Topic X} before the webinar, please click this link to read an eBook we recently wrote on the subject!”

Short, informative, and to the point.

Different content assets you can use include:

Blogs
eBooks
Infographics
Success stories
Videos
Podcasts
And even previous related webinars

At this point, you already have your registrants’ contact information, so the links to these content assets should be ungated whenever possible. You want to balance your lead generation efforts with the user experience, and the best way to do that is to collect information slowly over time and provide valuable content that keeps your users engaged. And don’t send too many nurturing emails; you don’t want to alienate your audience and motivate them to unsubscribe before they even have the chance to attend your webinar!

How to Use Online Events to Build and Strengthen Lasting Relationships

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Use Webinar Polls During Your Event to Improve Engagement

Most marketers are used to sending follow-up surveys after a webinar, but you should also be posing questions throughout your event to keep attendees engaged and collect valuable information along the way. Additionally, many of your attendees might be reluctant to participate during the Q&A portion of your webinar, so polling them throughout the event is a great way to field questions and learn more about your audience in real-time.

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when creating your webinar polls:

Only ask one question at a time to avoid confusion.
Use plain language and simple questions to get the most accurate answers.
Write questions that benefit your attendees as much as they do you.
Don’t ask too many questions on top of one another (one question every 7 minutes seems to be the sweet spot).
Introduce your questions before asking them, and show your attendees where and how to respond.
Keep your audience invested by showing them the results.

The right webinar polling questions will increase user interactions and provide valuable data that you can use to improve your products and services, develop new content, and even perfect the way that you speak to your target audiences.

Create and Distribute an On-Demand Webinar

Just because you already filmed your webinar live doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue to reap the benefits of your hard work. By creating an on-demand version of your webinar and then distributing that content to multiple channels, you can get more out of these online events over the long haul. Maybe your attendance for your webinar was in the 30% range, which isn’t bad, but could definitely be improved. By posting a recorded version of the event, you can actually exceed your registrant totals and market to an entirely new audience!

Some innovative ways you can use on-demand webinars include:

Create a “Webinars” section of your website and host your recordings there within days of recording.
Add your on-demand webinars to existing automated nurture programs with similar topics.
Develop organic social media campaigns to highlight your on-demand webinar series.
Write blogs on related topics and then embed your webinar as a prominent call-to-action on the page.
Send it to all registrants as part of your “Thanks for Attending” email, along with social links to encourage advocacy sharing.
When it’s time to present your next webinar, you can include a link to this on-demand webinar as an extra incentive to join and as proof of the value of your webinars.

On-demand webinars should be gated, as these are premium content assets and are likely being viewed by users who did not sign up for the original event recording. The best practice here is to allow your audience to watch about 5% of the webinar and then present a brief form they must complete before they can continue watching.

Create Automated Programs to Follow-Up With Attendees

Now that you have established a real relationship with everyone who viewed the live and recorded versions of your webinar, you should create automated email campaigns that allow you to email your webinar leads.

Similar to the lead nurturing campaigns you launched prior to the webinar, your post-webinar automated programs should consist of about 4-5 emails that continue to showcase your organization as a thought leader in your space. This time, however, you should include messaging and content that begins to explain how your products and services can help solve your email recipients’ primary pain points.

For instance, our automated programs usually follow a format that begins with content usually found very early on in the customer funnel and then slowly narrows to more middle-of-the-funnel content before delivering a hand-raiser CTA:

Blog closely related to the webinar topic — perhaps with the on-demand version of the webinar embedded on the page to jog the reader’s memory and give them another chance to share to their social media channels.
Infographic that presents detailed statistics in a visually engaging way. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience, but you do want to make them aware of the issues you’re discussing as well as how their peers are discovering solutions to their main problems.
eBook that delves deeper into the same topic you’ve begun to address with your blog and infographic. The eBook should be focused on how to tackle the issue it’s addressing, but there should also be an entire section near the end that is solely focused on how your organization helps your customers to overcome the challenge.
Success story that illustrates how your customers are getting the most out of your offerings to solve their issues and generate better ROI. This offers real proof of your company’s worth to your new prospects.
The final email should be a tidy summary of everything you’ve sent so far (with links to each content asset) and a friendly invitation to book a product demo, take a virtual tour, or contact a sales rep — whichever hand-raiser CTA is most applicable to your business model.

If these leads aren’t yet ready to speak to a salesperson once they have completed the entire automated program, you can place them in related programs based on their interests, demographics, company size, etc. This way, you always remain top of mind without having to hassle them with too many promotional emails or sales calls.

Act-On Can Help You Deliver Better Webinars

Now that you know the proper strategy to host, execute, and leverage your marketing webinars, you should look into Act-On’s webinar management functionality. Act-On simply and seamlessly integrates with Zoom Video Webinars, GoToWebinar, and WebEx so you can spend less time organizing your webinar and more time building great registration and attendance lists.

With Act-On, you can:

Easily manage the process from start to finish using the Act-On Dashboard
Create a timeline of activities prior to and after your webinar
Develop all emails, landing pages, and registration forms related to your webinar
Track, analyze, and report your webinar data and results

For more information on how to deliver the best possible webinar, please download our eBook, “How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships.” Or, if you’d like to learn how Act-On can help you improve your online event management, please book a demo with one of our marketing automation experts today!

How to Use Online Events to Build and Strengthen Lasting Relationships

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Webinar Planning Fundamentals That Will Set You Up for Success

Act-On — Thu, 23 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Webinars are a powerful but underutilized marketing tactic that can help you ramp up your demand generation and retention efforts. These events are extremely effective because they allow you to serve up fresh content, interact with your audience, go deep into what sets you apart from competitors, and learn first-hand what troubles your customers so you can further personalize your marketing efforts. Furthermore, when used wisely, they allow you to attract, educate, and nurture your target audience at every stage of the customer journey.

At Act-On, webinars give us an opportunity to connect with both prospective and current customers. These live web events don’t only allow us to share our expertise and offerings with our audience, they also provide an opportunity to learn what’s keeping them up at night and what questions they’re hoping we can answer to get them back on the path to marketing success. In short, webinars benefit us just as much as they do our customers because they allow us to learn more about what they expect us to deliver.

Convinced yet? If so, keep reading for a few essential tips to help you plan your first event or help you make your current structure even more effective.

Pick a Topic That Will Entice Your Audience

The possibilities are endless when it comes to choosing webinar topics, but not every subject will guarantee you an audience. If you want to attract current and future customers to sign up for your event, you have to offer them something of value that provides them with answers to some of their most pressing questions.

Luckily, figuring out what your audience wants to learn about can be fairly easy, and there are a variety of ways in which you can mine topic ideas to continuously fuel your webinar marketing efforts. To start, you can survey your audience via email, social media, and even at in-person events to find out what they would like to see you present on in a future webinar. You can also look at your analytics to gain a sense of keywords searched by your target customers and formulate your topics to match those pain points and interests.

Landing on a topic that piques the interest of your target customers is the first step toward ensuring that your webinar is successful. The great thing is that once you’ve got the ball rolling on webinars, you can even ask attendees to suggest ideas for future events so you’re never stuck contemplating your next webinar topic.

Choose a Presenter Who Brings Credibility to The Table

Webinars are a great way to establish your company as thought leaders in your industry. To do that, however, you have to choose a presenter who instills trust and credibility in your audience. Choosing a presenter who brings a great amount of expertise will not only enhance your audience’s perception of your brand and what you have to offer in your webinar, it will also motivate them to engage with your content in the future.

When choosing a presenter, start by looking at qualified leaders within your organization. Getting your target audience acquainted with the main players at your company is an excellent way to show them that your entire team knows what they’re talking about and are qualified to solve their problems.

How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships

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Partnering with an influencer within your field is another excellent way to build your credibility and also expand your audience. Your target customers are likely to turn to these influencers when looking for recommendations on a product or solution, so this is the perfect way for you to get on their radar.

Promote Your Event to the Right People

When formulating your webinar promotion strategy, keep in mind that casting a wide net won’t always get you the most bang for your buck. For example, if you are planning a webinar intended specifically for individuals working in the retail sector, your resources will be better spent and your marketing efforts will yield more conversions if you specifically target people affiliated with that industry.

For optimal engagement, create targeted lists and personalize your emails to match the interests and industry language of the individuals you are hoping will attend your webinar. For paid ads, make sure to get as specific as possible about who you expect to view your promotional efforts, and make sure you are investing in channels that appeal the most to your target customers.

Don’t Forget to Continue to Engage Customers After Your Webinar

Very few attendees are likely to immediately convert to being customers after attending your webinar, so you should have a game plan of how you plan to stay in touch and keep them engaged once the event is done and gone.

Following up with individuals who signed up is also a great opportunity to capture potential customers who couldn’t make the webinar due to a scheduling conflict or who were absent on PTO. A follow-up email is a subtle way for you to get back on their radar and continue to nurture a relationship with them that will eventually make them want to learn more about what you’re all about.

For best results, we recommend segmenting your audience and entering them into targeted automated nurture email campaigns so you are able to engage your new contacts with relevant and targeted information. This will enable them to see value in what you have to offer past the webinar, motivate them to engage, and hopefully get them on the path toward becoming loyal customers.

How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships

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These Tips Will Help You Make Your Next Trade Show a Success

Act-On — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Marketers are always looking for the next online strategy to enhance their marketing efforts, but there’s more to moving the needle than just digital tactics. Direct and in-person marketing can have incredible business benefits.

According to the Event Marketing 2018: Benchmarks and Trends report, the overwhelming majority (80%) of marketers believe live events are critical to their company’s success (1). There’s a prevailing misconception that every marketing initiative can be executed online, but building personal relationships with customers can prove a major differentiator — and trade shows are great opportunities to connect with your target audience.

If you’re new to this world, you might not be aware of the trade show marketing best practices you should be following to maximize your impact before, during, and after each event. These tips will help you attract people to your booth, make a great first impression, and successfully follow up with leads after the event is over.

Capture Your Audience’s Attention at Every Step of the Way

Each and every interaction with each and every attendee is important — whether they’re a potential lead, existing client, or possible new partner — which is why you need to make a good impression that will capture and hold your audience’s attention before, during, and after an event.

Trade shows are a great way to connect with your audience, but you need to focus on promoting each event through a variety of tactics to ensure a good turnout. Developing and implementing multi-channel campaigns for each event might seem overwhelming — especially if you’re attending more than one trade show in a given timeframe — but the right marketing automation platform (such as Act-On) can make the process of building landing pages, automating email programs, and promoting your event on social media efficient and effortless.

Once you’ve got a captive in-person audience, you need to grab and hold their attention. Invest in clean, crisp, eye-catching booth materials, stock up on useful and memorable swag (more on that here), and make sure your team is enthusiastic and ready to answer questions and interact with your visitors.

Send Your Best Personnel to Each Trade Show

Your trade show success will ultimately depend on your employees’ efforts. Today, merely sending a couple sales reps isn’t going to cut it. Consumers are savvier than ever and will resist blatant attempts at being sold — regardless of how great your products or services are.

So, along with your sales personnel, send one or more team members who are skilled at making people feel at ease and receptive to your messaging. Customer success personnel are usually great candidates because they’re inherently skilled at nurturing prospects and love working with people.

Sending the right people to staff your trade show booth will help you stand out from other exhibitors and help you create lasting connections with awesome prospects.

Don’t Forget to Follow Up After the Event

Once the show is over, your representatives must be proactive about following up with new contacts to let them know you appreciate their valuable time and their willingness to interact with your brand. This will open the door for you to nurture those relationships and educate new leads about your offerings.

To ensure strong follow up, lead data is paramount. Capturing this data in-person can happen in several ways — including lead retrieval systems, badge scanners, and lists provided by the promoter or association.

Regardless of how you collect data, it needs to be relevant and accurate. Using an email verification service like NeverBounce on your signup forms will guarantee you’re getting legitimate data at the point of entry. Further, uploading a full list of all the visitor data you acquired at the show will help ensure your event-triggered email marketing efforts reach their intended inboxes, allowing your customer success representatives to continue the conversation in the digital realm.

About the Guest Author:

Nick Harley is the Senior Content Specialist for NeverBounce, the leading real-time email verification and cleaning service. With a background in journalism, public relations, and social media, Harley is interested in helping organizations and brands understand the importance of storytelling and the channels where those stories are delivered.

Tradeshow Tips We Learned in 2018

Act-On — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a marketer in the B2B space, you’re probably planning on hosting a booth at a few trade shows in the upcoming year. If not, you should plan on adding one or two to your 2019 marketing strategy because chances are that they will lead to big opportunities. And the numbers are there if you don’t believe us, with stats claiming that 77% of decision makers discovered a new supplier while attending a trade show.

But while there are plenty of blog posts out there about the benefits of exhibiting at a trade show, today we’re focusing on tips to help you be successful. Our team has been on the road this past year and have gathered a few tips to share. We sat with our very own Marketing Programs Manager, Kristin Foster, who is in charge of driving our trade show strategy, to talk about lessons learned in 2018. Keep on reading to learn a few insights from her on what you should be doing to maximize your trade show marketing efforts in the new year.

Use Trade Shows As An Opportunity to Establish Yourself As A Thought Leader

While many years ago we saw speakers at trade shows leave the floor once their presentation was over, that trend is over. Nowadays you can expect your trade show exhibitors to also act as thought leaders within their industry. Kristin notes that you are more than likely to see the same faces on stage as you do while navigating the booths at the venue.

And that’s what seems to be bringing in the crowds and making trade shows successful. Part of the appeal of these events is you can learn from the speakers and then touch base with them at their booth. Therefore, when possible, try to snag one of those coveted speaking spots to give your people an opportunity to share their expertise, and reap the reward of capturing a larger audience.

Ditch the Hotel Swag

Did you know that 90% of trade show attendees have not had direct contact with the companies exhibiting a year before the event? That is why trade shows are the perfect opportunity for you to chat with your target customers in person. But you have to make sure they visit your booth to make that happen.

Kristin recommends that you stock up on swag that will entice your ideal customer to visit your booth, such as food items. “People at trade shows usually visit a venue without knowing what’s around and don’t have many opportunities to leave throughout the day. That is why having treats like soda, cupcakes, and popcorn at your booth is better than giving away swag like fidget spinners, which will probably get thrown away.”

But if you think that because people will eat your swag it’s useless, think again. Kristin points out that part of the appeal of food is it requires your target audience to visit your booth, allowing you to have face time with them so you can tell them all about what it is you do. And with 80 percent of trade show attendees deciding to purchase a product/service because they liked a presentation or the product itself at a trade show, taking advantage to meet your clients in person can lead to huge results!

Don’t Wait Until the Last Minute. Prepare to Launch Your Trade Show Strategy 3-4 months Before Each Show.

While trade shows provide an opportunity for you to touch base with your customers in person, you’re never guaranteed an audience. “People don’t show up at trade shows at the last minute, so you want to start getting the word out about an event as soon as you book it,” says Kristin.

Launching your trade show strategy 3-4 months before the event is crucial if you want to make the most out of your trade show investment. But what should your strategy look like? Kristin notes that companies should focus their strategy on outreach. “I recommend being proactive and connecting with exhibitors before the event and setting up as many meetings beforehand as you can,” says Kristin. She also suggests that businesses take advantage of social media through automated campaigns that employ hashtags relevant to the event and audience, and by tuning into what others are saying so you can engage them in conversation and invite them to your booth.

Remember That Your Work is Not Over After the Show

Patience is key when it comes to following up after trade shows. Depending on your industry, the sales cycle can last weeks, even months. That is why maintaining an open line of communication with your new contacts is key to keeping them moving from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.

After the show, you should expect to have an 8-9 touch point system in place to help close the deal. This starts with a thank you email after the event and outreach from your sales team, whether it’s an email, phone call or demo. Kristin also recommends for you to enter your contacts into an automated email campaign related to the event and their particular interests. “We’ve generally found that the sweet spot for people to remember who you are after the event is two months, and that’s if you continue to reach out and engage them in conversation.”

We hope that you’ve gathered some useful tips to help you launch your trade show strategy in 2019. If you’re interested in learning more about what we do and chatting about trade shows with Kristin, make sure to catch us in person at one of these events in 2019.

Act-On 2019 Trade Show Schedule

2/11 -2/12 – Digital Summit Phoenix – Phoenix, AZ

3/21 – Get Stacked – London

3/26- 3/27 – The Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit Toronto – San Francisco, CA

4/10 – 4/11 – Digital Summit LA – Los Angeles, CA

5/5 – 5/8 – Sirius Decisions 2019 – Austin, TX

5/28 – 5/31 – MAC 2019 – New Orleans, LA

6/11 – 6/12 – Digital Summit PDX – Portland, OR

6/25 – 6/26 – Digital Summit Denver – Denver, CO

7/8 – 7/9 – B2B Marketing Ignite – London

8/28 – 8/29 – Digital Summit Chicago – Chicago, IL

9/25 – 9/26 – Digital Summit Detroit – Detroit, MI

9/25-9/26 – Technology for Marketing – London

10/13 – 10/18 – CRMUG – Orlando, FL

11/13 -11/14 – Internet Summit – Raleigh, NC

12/3 -12/4 – Dallas Digital Summit – Dallas, TX

Events Marketing Archives - Act-On

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Attended the webinar

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How to Use Online Events to Build and Strengthen Lasting Relationships

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How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships

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Don’t Forget to Continue to Engage Customers After Your Webinar

How to Use Online Events to Build Lasting Relationships

These Tips Will Help You Make Your Next Trade Show a Success

Capture Your Audience’s Attention at Every Step of the Way

Send Your Best Personnel to Each Trade Show

Don’t Forget to Follow Up After the Event

About the Guest Author:

Tradeshow Tips We Learned in 2018

Use Trade Shows As An Opportunity to Establish Yourself As A Thought Leader

Ditch the Hotel Swag

Don’t Wait Until the Last Minute. Prepare to Launch Your Trade Show Strategy 3-4 months Before Each Show.

Remember That Your Work is Not Over After the Show

Act-On 2019 Trade Show Schedule

**Promote Your Next Webinar on Your Current Webinar**