Guide Archives • CMMA

Gearing Your Marketing for a GDPR Future

Best Practices

For the past few weeks, we’ve published a few items on the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The law, which took effect on May 25 of this year, is comprehensive and impacts marketers around the globe . If you interact with data stemming from a citizen of the European Union, your organization will need to accommodate it.

Acquiescing to the new standards of marketing, however, isn’t easy. Databases need to be cleansed. Marketing tactics need to be updated. Real human engagement, especially in a digital environment, needs to take priority. Webinars, as we discussed earlier , provide a GDPR-compliant foundation for organizations to build engaging campaigns on. Still, companies need to know how to craft campaigns and webinars so they fall in line with GDPR.

A GDPR-ready program has a fundamental grasp of the law and how it applies specifically to the program and its parent organization. With this knowledge in mind, marketers can make the necessary back-end adjustments to extract the most from its digital events and maintain compliance for the long run.

Before you Webinar

To start, marketers won’t find the all-encompassing legal GDPR guidance they need in a blog post, a news article or a webinar. Officers and managers must read the actual legislation to understand how it affects them and seek the advice of their legal team or legal counsel. The goal here is for the marketing, sales and executive arms of the organization to have a unified understanding of the law, its impacts, and how the company can coordinate to come into compliance.

With this foundational knowledge underarm, organizations can then plot adjustments to their back-end practices. Doing so often involves establishing a dedicated compliance officer, executing an audit of your database as well as a database cleanse, updating email and messaging preference centers and building out standards and policies for long-term compliance. As an added benefit, these back-end updates can help an organization right its marketing data ship, expunging low-quality contacts while providing an opportunity to adjust scoring models.

Getting to the Marketing

Marketers need to keep several goals in mind when they try to drive opt-in behaviors in their webinar events. For one, they must establish expertise and become a trusted advisor. For another, they must build a brand personality through their events so they can forge personable connections as the program expands. Additionally, they must educate their audiences before asking for consent – teach them what you’re about, what’s going on in your industry, what they can do succeed, then invite them to learn more from you later. Each goal, however, can be summed up in one word: help. All you have to do to engage and gain compliance is help your audience.

Re-centering a marketing program’s mission to helping prospects and assisting longtime customers is now the critical marketing philosophy that must inform all other actions. In many ways, GDPR is a means of enabling you to better understand your prospect’s pain points and cater your marketing efforts to address those issues. By helping your audience, you help your organization.

Help yourself and your webinars

The fundamental shift from “pitching to” to “helping with” also affects how webinars are conducted. Gone are the days where registration is the only goal for the webinar. Now are the days of getting attendees to engage with you and a webinar’s content.

Programmatic webinars are often the best way to earn engagement. Much like a television station, a series, or program, can build on a company’s innate expertise and personalities. Talk shows, Q&A sessions, product demos, industry trends and far, far more are fair-game for webinar programs. Putting these programs into play facilitates trust between presenter and viewer and, over time, turns trust into engagement into consent. And in GDPR consent accounts for a lot.

There are two key terms marketers must understand to master GDPR’s nuances. One is called legitimate interest, where companies can collect and use personal data so long as it possesses a “legitimate interest” for the individual whose data is being collected (organizations must be able to justify their reasoning and should not assume legitimate interest gives them carte blanche to hoover up data).

The second term is far easier to understand: consent. As in, the attendee consents to hear more from you through a newsletter, emails and or webinars. For GDPR, consent is far more powerful, far more robust and far more engaging than legitimate interest ever can be. So, when in doubt, seek the consent of your attendees and prospects during webinar events.

Getting to Consent with Viewer

When it comes to webinars, especially those seeking long-term engagement, it pays to not pitch. Even if your company does produce a relevant solution to a problem at hand, pitching can still damage your brand and your events. After all, a webinar’s goal is to help the prospect with their problems — not hear you talk about your organization.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t position your organization within an event. For example, teams can place white papers, third-party studies, and benchmark reports in webinars where hosts and guests discuss customer satisfaction and practices, industry issues and in-depth solution guides — and safely point to them for download during an event (more on this in a second). You can also match your webinar programs to stages in the marketing funnel — from deep-dive product demos to high-level thought leadership panels on regulations and more.

With a program in place, presided by subject matter experts, percolated through planned events and series, resonate with audiences needing your help — then you can begin to work on consent through multiple opt-in opportunities.

Multiple opt-in opportunities are the nebulae — or electron cloud — surrounding a webinar. They’re the blog post you wrote ages ago, the third-party studies you commissioned, the white papers, the benchmark reports, the videos, demos, eBooks, slides you make available within a webinar; they are especially the gated on-demand webinars, videos and reports you link to — these are each an opportunity to ask an attendee or visitor for consent to contact them and build a relationship.

For example, you can ask attendees for consent with every gated asset with a simple box at the bottom of a form-fill (note: never pre-tick consent boxes — an illegal maneuver under GDPR). Contact us buttons, like those in webinars, can also be used as positive opt-in opportunities. Polls, too, can be used. In fact, during a July 12 webinar on GDPR, 85 percent of all attendees opted-in and consented to hear more from ON24 through a simple webinar poll after the host offered the poll to them. The point is to surround your attendees and prospects with the opportunity to engage with you and your brand on their terms.

Putting it all together

Marketers have marketed in a way that has left them unprepared for GDPR. A symptom may be automation — a set of tools and techniques used to make the elements of communication and marketing in a digital age much more comfortable — but the real culprit is that marketers just don’t know how to engage with their audiences anymore.

With marketing automation, you could send out a dozen messages to millions of people. The benefit of this is that even if you convert two to three percent of your recipients, you still get an acceptable number of sign-ups. But it’s spray and pray marketing on an industry-wide scale. It atrophies the muscles you need to make a personal, human touch. But we have a fix. Use this checklist below to assess your GDPR readiness, and guide your engagement efforts.

Internal:

Review GDPR with legal
Establish roles and responsibilities for GDPR compliance
Audit database
Cleanse database of old, outdated, and duplicate entries
Review and update email preference center
Establish long-term policies for GDPR compliance

Preparing for GDPR-ready webinars:

Identify brand personalities, subject-matter experts for events
Plot webinar programs covering top, mid, and bottom-of-funnel needs, including:

Educational material
Industry news
Interactive product demos

Identify evergreen content to include in webinar events

Executing webinars:

Outline the event
Identify and incorporate resources relevant to the webinar
Identify and include opt-in opportunities
Outline event
Promote over email, social and more
Practice
Execute
Analyze results

For more information on how webinars can help you provide a GDPR-compliant event, check out our on-demand Webinar Best Practices Series event, “How webinars can Help You Succeed in a GDPR World .”

The post Gearing Your Marketing for a GDPR Future appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Launching an ABM Program

ABM

This post was originally published on abmleadershipalliance.com .

B2B marketing has no shortage of techniques, methods, and strategies to use at a moment’s notice. Some are new, some are old, and some are finally just now getting their time in the spotlight.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) belongs to the latter. As a concept, one which hyper-targets accounts likely to convert into revenue, it’s been around for a while — roughly 15 years or more. But, for many, it’s only just now taking off.

That’s because B2B marketing technologies have only just caught up with the concept. These new tools, in general, simplify the process of identifying possible accounts, targeting messaging to those accounts, and guiding the desired accounts through a company’s marketing funnel.

Still, the method stands on at least two core principles. First, identifying accounts with a high propensity to buy for targeting. Second, sales and marketing must coordinate to act as a cohesive unit. And that’s it. Simple principles, sure, but executing on them can be complicated.

Organizations, to simplify, need to plan their approach to ABM, understand which tools they should use and why, and prepare to experiment with the revived tactic.

Plan

The first step to execution is deciding if you should deploy an ABM program. Such programs, given their hyper-targeted nature, aren’t always a cost-efficient choice and are usually targeted towards deals approaching tens of thousands of dollars or more. Just be aware low-yield deals are not a good use of the time and resources needed in an ABM program.

As a part of aiming high, organizations need to have their ABM strategy in place well before execution. Teams, from marketing and sales to operations and customer service, will need to understand their role in the program and what the program is trying to achieve overall. Take the time to launch a small pilot program to get a better sense of what your teams will need to execute an ABM program. A pilot program will give you the opportunity to suss out ideal customer profiles, processes and more.

Tool up

The second step to running an ABM program is to tool up. Fortunately, today’s marketing technologies are sufficiently advanced enough to help identify, target and measure progress in ABM programs and more.

What should you look for in an ABM tool? For starters, flexibility. Those considering an ABM program should look for tools that provide value regardless of implementing a new method. Look for tools that provide a sturdy foundation to build your ABM program on — you’ll thank yourself later.

Organizations should also keep an eye out for tools that measure visitor engagement and interest — and we’re not talking about simple interactions like clicks. Tools that measure content engagement, prospective interaction across channels and more are invaluable for understanding the buyer’s journey. They’re also useful for measuring target interest, participation and progress for ABM programs.

Highly-specialized ABM solutions are great, but only when a program is mature enough to thoroughly enjoy and take advantage of their capabilities. Take the time to scout out some nice-to-have solutions you’d like to integrate when you feel your program is mature enough.

Improvise, adapt, overcome

The most detailed plan won’t survive contact with the battlefield. When it comes to ABM, you and your team will need to prepare for unexpected developments, regardless of whether they’re internal or external.

For example, while critical internal stakeholders may understand what’s going on with an ABM program, their broader team may not — meaning you have a communications problem. You can address that issue by broadening discussions around ABM. Alternatively, you might be taken aback that your program isn’t performing as expected — even when you’ve targeted key personnel on an account. Here, you may have gotten too specific, and forgot to include that account’s wider team members, from support to senior staff, in your targeting.

The point is: don’t expect perfection out of the gate. Be ready to adjust your hypothesis and broaden your experiments to see what works.

ABM programs are potentially huge in both production and results. As with any marketing technique, take the time to figure out if it’s right for you and how you can incorporate it into your marketing program — and be prepared to make adjustments. After all, for many, ABM is new and ripe for innovation.

The post A Quick and Dirty Guide to Launching an ABM Program appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Your Checklist for a Successful Webinar Program – For Newbies!

Best Practices

Webinars are a great tool for modern-day marketers and can offer a variety of ways for companies to engage with different audiences. You can connect with your customers by communicating new and exciting product information; you can give live demos to prospects; the possibilities are endless!

Before executing a webinar program, however, it’s important first to examine the goal of the webinar and where it fits into your organization’s marketing plan. Often times, program managers think too micro-level. It’s important to remember that organizational alignment is key.

Take the time to ask yourself a few questions to get a better idea of where your webinar program is heading. You need to be aware of your target audience. For example, is the goal of the webinar to inform top-level leads? Or is it to engage mid-funnel leads with a more targeted message to evoke some type of action? After answering these main questions, choose a topic (and speaker) who can engage those leads thoroughly. Finally, think through lead-flow and what you want to happen when certain conditions are met. For example, what happens when a guest is sent an invitation to the webinar but doesn’t register? What if they register for the webinar but don’t attend? What will you do after they attend the webinar? What about attendees who ask a question (how will you follow up?).

Also, be sure to formalize a plan for post-promotion of the on-demand version your event. You should have a clear understanding of how you can leverage on-demand webinars to engage inactive leads and push them down the funnel.

Once you have created your webinar marketing plan, you can formalize the details for your webinar. Here is a checklist for you to get started:

Create your program in ON24. It’s easier if you have a ‘fake program’ you can use as a template to clone from when you create your program. Remember to select your specific time zone and customize the console to fit your brand identity.
Decide if you want emails coming from ON24 or your marketing automation platform. I have always used Marketo, as it provides an easy integration of lead status and more customization of emails and landing pages.
Set up your campaign in your CRM (e.g., Salesforce) so you can track lead status and sync all of your marketing automation.
Integrate your marketing automation platform with ON24 and then sync your program with the event ID from the ON24 program you created.
Send a calendar invite to your speakers with the dial-in info for the webinar (found in the links section of your main programs page in ON24).
Set up your dry run in ON24 and send a calendar invite to your speakers. Don’t forget to book your webinar room at your organization!
Work with your marketing operations team to build the email and landing page assets, and schedule accordingly. I like to send two invitations — a day-before reminder and a day-of reminder — as well as a follow-up email to attendees and one to no-shows.
Work closely with your speakers on content and give them a branded company PowerPoint (PPT) template to work with.
Hold your dry run by going through the webinar completely with the speakers and to test the platform.
Upload the final PPT template to ON24 and do any last-minute customization such as adding a poll to the webinar.
Hold the webinar!
Download the PPT and conclude post-promotion, including adding it to your website resource section.
Brief your team on how the webinar went and arm your sales team with the recording to send to prospects who may find the content useful.

Some tips for success:

Ask the audience to submit questions before the webinar to have a backup list of questions in case no one asks any during the live recording.
Provide the PPT and webinar recording to all of the webinar registrants in the follow-up emails.
Make the PPT and speaker information, as well as relevant company assets, available in the console for attendees to download while they are watching the live webinar.
Answer any questions asked during the webinar and train your sales team on following up on those questions.
Ensure everything externally facing has a cohesive message and branding identity.

I know what you’re thinking: this is a lot to think through, especially when you couple this with all of the nitty-gritty details of program management and set-up. Don’t worry, though! All programs take time to perfect. All you have to do is start.

The post Your Checklist for a Successful Webinar Program – For Newbies! appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Launching an ABM Program

Plan

Tool up

Improvise, adapt, overcome

Your Checklist for a Successful Webinar Program – For Newbies!

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