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It’s time to put the human back into your marketing

CMMA Blog

This September, Mark Bornstein will speak at Content Marketing World 2018. His subject? The keys to engagement-driven content delivery. If you’re heading to CMWorld 2018, take a look at Mark’s speaking session here . If you haven’t registered yet, head on over here . 

You know those movies about robots taking over the world? Ok, that hasn’t happened…yet. But our marketing is becoming increasingly robotic and impersonal. Today, we rely on marketing automation, search algorithms, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and any other number of digital technologies to scale our programs, reach more people, and be more targeted with our content. And all of that is good, but then what?

There is still a human being at the other end of our marketing and we ultimately need to engage with them in a meaningful way. Today, engagement is measured in clicks, views, and tiny digital signals that might indicate a good potential target. But where is the moment of persuasion and connection? That takes engagement. Real. Human. Engagement.

The good news is that real engagement is becoming more possible every day. Landing pages are becoming more dynamic, websites are integrating cool new tools to interact with site visitors, and there are all kinds of virtual environments where prospects can interact with you and your brand. The key characteristics of true engagement-driven technologies are:

  • Interactivity
  • Multiple content options
  • Multi-media content options
  • Social integration
  • All actions taken by someone are captured and measured

In my world, webinars are the ultimate engagement tool. What other opportunity do you have to interact with your prospects for up to an hour at a time? And, if you’re thinking of a webinar as simply a talking Powerpoint presentation, then you haven’t seen a modern webinar. Today, webinars enable attendees to ask questions, respond to polls and surveys, tweet, connect socially, chat with other attendees, download content, link to landing pages, link to key conversion offers like demos and free trials, and even self-select a sales consultation. They are also multi-media experiences that more resemble daytime talk shows then online presentations.

The real magic of these engagement-driven webinars, however, is how they capture every action that an audience member takes to help us find our best leads and learn from their behavior. By integrating this data into marketing automation and CRM systems, we can put this powerful information in the hands of salespeople. So instead of following up on a webinar, they are following up on a question asked or a piece of content downloaded; essentially continuing a conversation, not starting one.

The explosion of digital marketing technologies and their marriage to automation and artificial intelligence is great. It will help us leave a trail of tiny breadcrumbs in the digital ether for us to discover potential prospects. However, it’s what happens next that is most important. Because ultimately, there needs to be a moment…a human moment. And that is how we will turn a digital signal into a customer.

The post It’s time to put the human back into your marketing appeared first on ON24 .

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Webinar World London: A Q&A with SiriusDecisions’ Isabel Montesdeoca

Best Practices

This story, among others, will be featured at Webinar World 2018 in London. To learn more about Webinar World London, click here .

What makes for a good marketer? How can the industry adapt to a post-GDPR world? Isabel Montesdeoca, Director of EMEA Research at SiriusDecisions, will answer these questions and many, many more at Webinar World London 2018 this coming September. To get a sample of what she’ll discuss as Webinar World London’s keynote speaker, we sat down with Isabel to discuss today’s marketing environment. Here’s what she had to say:

What are you speaking on at Webinar World London, and what are you most excited about this summit of marketing leaders? 

I’m going to be speaking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, buyer-centricity. As marketers, we’ve come such a long way since the early days of digital marketing where the focus was 100% on increasing the range of digital tactics we could support in order to reach more people. Today, we recognise that in order for marketing to deliver results, we also have to deliver value in every one of those interactions. Achieving that is a tall order because what buyers perceive as valuable changes over time. To meet our goal of 100% value, 100% of the time, marketers need to develop a systematic process for listening to buyers and acting on that information. At SiriusDecisions, we love helping marketers get started down this path and one of the ways we do that is by sharing the insights we gain through our SiriusDecisions Buying Insights study. That’s what I’ll be covering at Webinar World London.

How do you think B2B marketers can better leverage webinars in order to increase engagement and drive revenue? 

The data from our SiriusDecisions Buying Insights study shows that in the Education phase of the buyer’s journey, live vendor-hosted webinars are the second most consumed tactic in Europe. Furthermore, European buyer’s rated live vendor-hosted webinars as the most impactful provider-led interaction they had at that early stage. That finding proves that webinars have the power to deliver real value to buyers when and where they need it most. In order to capitalise on that opportunity, marketers need to ensure they think through and personalise every aspect of their webinar experience.

It all starts by selecting webinar topics that are relevant to specific segments of your target audience. The more you sub-segment the audience, the more you can tailor your message making attendees feel as if you are answering their questions before they’ve even asked them. During the webinar itself, marketers should focus just as much on driving interaction as they do on delivering content. This can be done in a variety of ways including video, polls, quizzes, and always including time for Q&A. At the end of the webinar, link to a survey that offers attendees a choice of additional resources to support further exploration – extending the value of attending and giving you another opportunity to request opt-in consent. All of these are ways in which marketers can make every webinar feel relevant and personal to buyers.

What are some of the trends in marketing today that excite you most?

One of the trends I am most excited about is bringing together of multiple data sources – market data, persona profile data, first and third-party behavioural data, performance data, customer data, and more – to help us model and analyse more accurate views of our buyers. To really deliver value, we have to take the time to learn about our buyers more fully and use those insights to drive real-time programmatic actions. Today’s customer data platforms are starting down that path and I can’t wait to see how these will evolve and be leveraged to drive better and more relevant engagement.

What about GDPR might marketers have overlooked or need to watch for? Is there a silver lining? 

While companies have done a great job getting ready for GDPR, many have treated it like a race to the finish line on May 25, 2018. The truth is that May 25th was just the beginning. Waiting in the wings is the e-Privacy Regulation (currently going through the trilogue process) which will provide more specificity around electronic communications. And beyond that, we can be sure that data authorities around the world will continue to review and strengthen data privacy legislation.

The truth is that compliance is not a one-time clean up job and it’s not something we can edict within our organizations. Long-term sustainable compliance requires marketers, tele and sales reps alike to understand the intent behind the need to protect personal data and their role in safeguarding that data. Without that understanding, employees will always regard compliance as something that stands in the way of them doing business rather than realising that embracing consent practices actually allows us to identify who is really interested and most willing to engage. That’s the silver lining!

Beyond GDPR, what are the marketing challenges of the EMEA region? 

Many of our European clients struggle with the cost and effort of localising their marketing programs across the range of countries and languages they support. True localisation, not just translation, can be a daunting task when you have 20+ countries to cover. Once again, this is where understanding what your buyer wants and needs can help. Data from studies like the SiriusDecisions Buying Insights study can help marketers identify and prioritise localisation of the tactics buyers are actually consuming. Further upstream, it also helps content teams prioritise their content creation to ensure every asset created is activated. In a recent SiriusDecisions study, almost half (47%) of respondents told us that their organizations activate 50% or less of the content they create.

What’s your one prediction about how marketing will fundamentally change in the next decade? 

I don’t have a crystal ball handy but I think as our data insights and instincts improve, a number of things will happen. First, we will be able to identify a more granular cohort of characteristics (beyond industry, size and revenue) that uniquely define our target customers, allowing us to better map and find opportunities to engage with them. Within those organizations, we will stop hunting for single leads and start identifying group buying behaviour as an indicator of an emerging need for our services. Finally, rather than designing long and complex program flows that try to cover all the bases, we will use fully dynamic logic to select the optimal next step based on the actions of the buyer group and guided once again by insights.

What’s one piece of advice you’d provide for a young person who wants to pursue a career in marketing? 

Buyer data is important but it’s nothing without someone to interpret it. For anyone wanting to go into a career in marketing, I would strongly recommend getting comfortable with data modelling and learning how to interrogate that data. Equally, I would tell them not to hide behind the data. Grab every opportunity to talk to and understand buyers to help you interpret what you see in the data. The best marketers I know are the ones who stay curious and stay sharp throughout their career. The tools they use may change but their mindset does not.

What’s the most important change you’ve seen in the marketing industry in the past five years?

Easy! It’s the shift from product to audience centricity. In the last five years, companies around the world finally started to acknowledge how much buyer behaviour has changed. While digital marketing, social media and millennial trends had been grabbing headlines long before that, it wasn’t until B-to-B companies realised these trends heralded a much deeper change in how buying decisions are made that they understood they needed to change or risk losing ground to newer and more nimble competitors. That shift in attitude paved the way for investment in B-to-B persona profiling, the growth of B-to-B content marketing, and the development of more sophisticated engagement technology, just to name a few things. Change was coming fast and furious and it hasn’t stopped since.

The post Webinar World London: A Q&A with SiriusDecisions’ Isabel Montesdeoca appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

3 Quick Tips for Buzzworthy Webinars

Best Practices

Building buzz around webinars is a process. It takes time, perseverance and a lot of internal collaboration. It also takes a bit of know-how to pull off — the secret knowledge, if you will. In this edition of our Summer Series Reading List, which runs adjacent to our Sumer Series Playlist, we take a quick look at the secrets behind buzzworthy webinars.

So what are the secrets to building buzzworthy webinars? There are a few, but first, you need to have the right webinar platform in place. You’ll need a platform that can scale, provide analytics and reporting, can issue certifications, provides attendees with downloadable resources and provide easy-to-promote materials.

1. Build Your Scale

First, you’ll need to plot out how you’ll scale your webinars to address your audiences. Included strategies should target multiple buyer personas and hyper-target vital aspects of your field such as certification, continuing education, and industry-relevant deep-dives.

For example, Paycom, a payroll, and human resource provider use some of its webinars for certification across its clientele’s different demographics. At almost any time, the company can issue certificates from HRCI, SHRM or NASBA to qualifying attendees. For Paycom, putting in the extra work to become an industry resource is a great investment. It creates advocates, increases attendance — by roughly 155 percent — and boosts their marketing efforts.

2. Engage Thought Leaders

Every industry, every vertical, every team has their celebrities. Seek these audience-pulling names out and bring them into your webinars. Good thought leaders provide with more than just a name — they provide your program with topics, co-marketing opportunities, and content.

Potential thought leaders can include your co-workers and internal experts. Product team members, internal speakers at company meetings and even department leaders — all are viable webinar presenters that can drive audience attendance and contribute to your program. Sit down with them, plan your event and practice, practice, practice.

3. Be Relevant

General topics are great and perform well over the long-run, but timely and relevant webinars catch attention and bring your expertise to the forefront. Keep an eye on any industry-related news — or even general news — and use those developments to inspire and inform your events.

For example, if your audience is affected by significant policy moves, like the General Data Privacy Regulation or The Affordable Care Act, then producing a newsworthy event explaining the policy’s impact will likely bring your audience in. Remember to coordinate with your PR and legal teams to make sure your messaging is on-point, accurate and objective. Nine times out of ten, you’re helping your audience understand an aspect of their industry — not selling.

And that’s it. Three quick-and-dirty tips on buzz-worthy webinars and how you can start building the buzzing foundations for your own program.

What else can you do to make your webinars pop? You can check out our entire Webinerd Summer Playlist right here. You can also check out our summer reading list for this track:

Reading list:

1. Increase Webinar Audience 30% with Twilio’s On-Demand Strategy

2. Using Big Marketing Event Ideas to Drive Pipeline

3. Your Checklist for a Successful Webinar Program – For Newbies!

4. Q&A with Alex Blumberg, CEO of Gimlet Media

5. Webinar Best Practices Series: Spice Up Your Webinars with Video

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To view our Partner blog, click here

Webinar World London: Q&A with Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights

CMMA Blog

This story, among others, will be featured at Webinar World 2018 in London. To learn more about Webinar World London, click here .

When it comes to content and its role in the marketplace, Dave Chaffey has a few opinions. The founder of Smart Insights — and prolific author on all things marketing — will speak at Webinar World London. Before his day, though, we sat down with him to suss out a few insights on what he’ll talk about, what he’s looking forward to and which marketing trends are catching his eye.

Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got into the marketing world.

I’m co-founder and Content Director at Smart Insights, co-ordinating creation of our marketing strategy advice. We have other 200 guides, templates and e-learning resources that are used by members in over 100 countries.

I originally got into marketing in the mid-1990s when the Internet was first being explored as a marketing channel and have enjoyed sharing best practices, initially through my books, training and consulting and more recently via our learning platform.

What are you speaking on at Webinar World London, and what are you most excited about this summit of marketing leaders?

I’m looking forward to talking on Integrating Webinars into Modern Lifecycle Marketing, reviewing examples and best practices of integrating webinars with other inbound marketing activities

How do you think B2B marketers better leverage webinars in order to increase engagement and drive revenue?

I think all too often, webinars are treated as a separate campaign activity without the integration to get the best results from them. I’ll describe our RACE planning system which gives a framework to integrate them.

What are some of the trends in marketing today that excite you most?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning are the most exciting, but I still love learning about the latest across all content marketing techniques.

What about GDPR might marketers have overlooked or need to watch for? Is there a silver lining?

Well, the silver lining is that we have to be more transparent about how we use customer data and the customers are looking for.

Some aren’t aware of the follow-on ePrivacy Legislation which will add further details on how we communicate via website and messaging – it’s an update on the 2003 Privacy and Communications Regulations and will have much in common with GDPR.

Beyond GDPR, what are the marketing challenges of the EMEA region?

In a word, ‘Engagement’. Finding the best communications strategy to keep visitors engaged.

There’s a constant struggle for marketers trying to scale personalized, human engagement. What are the steps you’ve taken to try to make every marketing interaction meaningful?

We’re a big fan of using personas to understand our audience interests more and then using content mapping linked to Marketing Automation so that we can best customize our communications.

What’s your one prediction about how marketing will fundamentally change in the next decade?

Although we talk about automation a lot, much automation is rules-based with creative and messaging set up in advance. True automation will select the most relevant contextual communications. We’re a long way from this at the moment.

What’s the most important change you’ve seen change in the marketing industry in the past five years?

In larger businesses, many have belatedly realised the need for company-wide digital transformation programmes to determine changes to marketing operations for them to remain competitive.

The post Webinar World London: Q&A with Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

ServiceNow’s Approach to Webinar Program Innovation (Part I)

ABM

This is part one in a two-part series on how organizations can extract more results from their webinars from ServiceNow. This story, among others, will be featured at Webinar World 2018 London. To learn more about Webinar World 2018 London, click here .

Digital Transformation of the marketing function is rapidly changing how we invest, measure and manage work. As marketers, we are on a journey towards agile, data-driven, value-based demand generation.

In this 2-part series, I review our webinar program to demonstrate the impact of change and share some of the best practices ServiceNow’s EMEA Marketing team has generated since the program’s inception in 2012.

For starters, here’s the list of KPI’s we track for our webinar program, with YoY trending:

                                                                                                            18H1 vs 17H1            

·      Number of webinars                                                              +22%

·      Number of registrations:                                                        +66%

·     Number of attendees:                                                            +52%

·     Number of on-demand attendees:                                        +62%

·     Pipeline influenced                                                                 +144%

As a result of ServiceNow’s focus on webinar excellence, the webinar program’s pipeline influence in 18H1 was 538 percent higher than the next most effective campaign type.

A well-run webinar program does a number of things for enterprise marketing teams. It will:

1. Drive quality audience engagement at low cost

At ServiceNow in EMEA, we host about 40 webinars per quarter, at an infrastructure cost of $20 – so about $500 per webinar, which is low in comparison to other activity types, like seminars, event sponsorships, and even paid media. CPC leads may be cheaper, but usually produce significantly lower conversation rates. Needless to say, it takes time from well-paid experts to deliver a good webinar – but that’s true for most other activities, too.

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Figure 1 –ServiceNow-branded ON24 console

2. Create premium assets for content marketing programs

We run webinars in English, German, French, and from time to time in Spanish, Italian and Dutch. The content of the webinars is tightly aligned to our demand generation programs, including digital display, outbound email, roadshows, telemarketing et cetera. We use our best speakers, often have customers join to share their best practices, and spend ample time on quality presentation slides, technology demonstrations and pre-recorded videos.

By recording all broadcasts, we establish a library of on-demand webinars to go into local websites, online communities, as well as our outbound email and email nurturing programs.

At the end of 2017, we introduced the ON24 Content Gateway to better market on-demand webinars. Within the first 5 months of 2018 alone, on-demand webinar consumption went up 90 percent.

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Figure 2 –  Long-tail engagement with our on-demand webinars

3. Support Account-Based Marketing initiatives

As an extension of the previous point, digital marketing and targeted marketing go hand-in-hand. The superior control of data and content that comes with a modern webinar program, allows marketers to tailor an engagement strategy into highly-targeted database segments based on industry, job level, or account grade or name. As part of an offline touch plan consisting of Direct Mail, Industry Events, Seminars and Outbound calling, the webinar program keeps the target audience engaged by offering relevant, highly-personalized content.

ServiceNow recently adopted ON24 Target, a way to populate a landing page with on-demand webinars and other video assets hosted on our content gateway, the digital asset management system at the heart of the ON24 platform. Although still early days, we have started experimenting with co-branded landing pages for target accounts in Financial Services – and first feedback and results are quite positive.

4. Provide strong behavioural analytics of the audience

The unique quality of webinars: they offer an extensive content experience and are digital from start to finish. Therefore, from the minute the target contact opens the email invite or engages a promotional tweet to the moment they download the slides from the follow-up message and all that’s in between; everything is recorded, tracked, scored, reported and followed up.

We integrated our webinar platform with our website – the ON24 content gateway displays in an iFrame, so that both upcoming and on-demand webinars automatically drive engagement online –, with our marketing automation platform (scoring, nurturing), which in turn is connected to our CRM platform, where marketing qualified leads are handed off to sales teams. So, any engagement with the webinar program, be it live or on-demand, via email, the website or forwarded by a colleague, we track in order to continually improve the program, tailor content to the audience’s expectations, and deliver ever better MQL’s to our outbound callers and sales teams.

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Figure 3 – ON24 Engagement dashboard

5. Create an online platform for customer and ServiceNow speakers

Although not a primary goal of the webinar program, it did help establish a strong speaker pool for other ServiceNow events large and small. Because of the solid reputation and continuity of the program, our internal speakers are eager to contribute. It’s a high-quality podium on which to showcase their expertise. Customers usually join webinar panels before presenting at large ServiceNow events, like Now Forum or Knowledge.

In 2018, our webinar program is an indispensable part of ServiceNow’s growth engine and the single largest lead generating program in EMEA. In Part II, I will review our first experience adopting ON24’s Target module as part of our Account-Based Marketing Program.

 

The post ServiceNow’s Approach to Webinar Program Innovation (Part I) appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Announcing Webinar World 2018 London

CMMA Blog

September is almost on us, which means it’s time for Webinar World London . The annual two-day conference, held from Sept. 11 to 12, is stuffed with the latest engagement-driving strategies and tactics sure to drive ROI — as well as some thorough discussions on GDPR and its continued impact on marketing.  

Taking place at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel, Webinar World London will bolster webinar practitioners with actionable insights from the world’s leading brands, ranging from AutoTrader and Oracle to Polycom and Ericsson and more.

The conference will feature Isabel Montesdeoca, Director of EMEA Research at SiriusDecisions, as the keynote speaker, where she will share her formula for a marketing mix that resonates with modern B2B buyers. Other tracks will highlight achieving ROI, how webinars enhance ABM programs how to realize pipeline heaven.

During this event, attendees can take advantage of:

  • Three learning tracks, including Webinar Best Practices, Webinar Execution and the Genius Theatre
  • Peer-to-peer networking with digital marketing leaders and webinar practitioners
  • Live case studies, sessions and panels from top brands

As the cap on 2018’s global Webinar World series, the London event will provide an excellent venue to bring 2018’s lessons into one place and prepare for the coming year. We can’t wait to see you there.

To learn more about Webinar World London, see the full agenda, and save your spot, please visit the Webinar World Site right here .

 

 

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