In an age where most of us have become desensitised to the sales process, patience is increasingly a virtue when it comes to marketing communications. In B2B especially, where a sell can be a long, drawn-out affair, marketers are having to take a softly-softly approach as they navigate their way through the buying process.
An increasingly popular means by which they are doing this is through webcasting or webinars. Most of us are familiar with webinars that are, in their purest form, live meetings or presentations conducted over the Internet that can be accessed via a standard browser.
But who, exactly, is utilising webinar technology and why? Is it to raise their profile? Is it purely as a means of lead generation? Or are there other factors at play?
Hot trend
Before addressing these issues, it’s worth putting this technology into context. A recent survey by Forrester Research into the American market found two thirds of B2B decision-makers plan to either increase or increase significantly their use of web-based events in 2009. In the same survey, 59 per cent of respondents said they use webinars in their marketing mix today. Webinars, it would seem, are becoming an increasingly integral part of the marketing mix.
“Webinars are definitely growing in popularity,” says Jeremy Hughes, IT director at eMarket2. “Many of our clients are looking at them [especially in the context of the current economic climate] because events can be very expensive to put together. Webinars are a very cost-effective way of getting together people who are simultaneously hard to obtain. They are also very interactive and enable businesses to glean valuable information from attendees.”
Tools for lead generation
This information-gathering process is fundamental to the popularity of webinars. Marketers view them as invaluable lead-generation tools simply because they enable a level of engagement and interaction with potential clients that other forms of digital media can’t match, and because they allow highly relevant data on participants to be captured.
Chris Bagnall is client services director at DWA. He says: “When you start to get into the nitty-gritty and are wanting to evaluate a product in more detail, then you tend to need something a little more explanatory. This is where webinars sit in quite well, particularly live webinars that have Q and As.
“If you don’t want to talk to a sales rep, but still want to find out a lot of information, then you can go on a half-hour webinar. You don’t invest too much time, you can put some questions to the speaker and get a pretty good overview.”
Think carefully about this from the perspective of the company staging, or indeed, sponsoring the webinar. People attend the webinar, they ask questions, they interact, they engage. Hence the obvious lead generation possibilities webinars present.
“Webinars are never going to be the most effective way of producing sheer volume of leads,” says Bagnall. “However, the quality will be that much better given that people have invested time to register for them in the first place and also because you are engaging with an audience, often on a live basis. It is the engaging side of the media that tends to weed out the time wasters.”
This ability to engage also has the effect of sifting out the tyre kickers from those warmer leads that can be passed with confidence to the sales team. Many webinar users agree the key attractions of the medium lies in the possibilities it opens up in terms of being able to converse with an audience, whether by interacting with them via polls or inviting interesting speakers to create a lively debate.
“Webinars are such an engaging medium and conversation tool,” Denise Persson, chief marketing officer with ON24, says. “On this front, they compare very favourably with other tools such as email communications, white papers and web sites.”
Cost-effective tool
ON24 makes the underlying web casting technology for webinars. That the business has been growing by 40 per cent year-on-year tells us much about this booming digital media format. Explaining this growth, Persson points first and foremost to the importance of cost-effectiveness and return on investment.
“The number one benefit is the cost and quality of the leads generated,” she says. “Second is the detailed ROI you can get. These days marketers need to ensure that the performance of their demand-generation programmes is more diligent than ever. That detailed ROI also comes through the external registration capabilities that web casting and webinars offer. With the interactivity that takes place during webinars, you can compile all that data and we now also have technology capability which can score the quality of the individual leads generated.”
When to use a webinar
Ashley Mandell-Lynn, a digital strategist with Carlson Marketing, believes some form of web casting technology can be used at every stage of the buying cycle. For instance, a business may want to either stage or sponsor a large webinar in a bid to gain trusted advisor status among potential clients – and a number of warm leads in the process. Further down the line, as these leads are closer to making a purchase, a one-to-one webinar could be used to demonstrate a product directly online.
“I actually think businesses should see them as part of the whole customer lifeline – they can be as much about building on relationships with existing customers and allowing feedback with them as lead generation,” says Mandell-Lynn.
Value-added content
Mandell-Lynn suggests a webinar has to be collaborative – as opposed to a hard sell. This ties in with Forrester’s research that shows for webinars to be effective, subject matter has to be engaging and value-adding. “We are all very cynical aren’t we?” Mandell-Lynn says. “We know when somebody is trying to sell us something, and that is fine. But there has to be some value exchange – if I am going to take time out to ‘attend’ a webinar I have to believe I am going to get something out of it. If I am an existing customer, I want the chance to air my view.”
Rebecca Kane, senior marketing programme manager EMEA of BrightTalk, agrees, saying: “When you have interesting content, including live interactions with your audience, it definitely adds more depth to your webcast.”
Of course, it’s not always easy to make subject matter interesting. Webinars have, historically, been utilised predominantly by technology companies and, as Bagnall of DWA points out, “often the technology we are talking about is very dull, matter-of-fact and technically-orientated and it isn’t appropriate or possible to get the message across in a very funky and lively manner.”
Most experts, however, agreed that webinars are becoming more mainstream in industry. “The elastic is being pulled hard at the front by technology companies, but I think it will follow through all businesses,” says Mandell-Lynn.
This process will inevitably continue as advances in web casting technology bring prices into the domain of your average SME. BrightTalk, for instance, has developed a self-service, live platform using web 2.0 principles which enables clients to create their own web casts. Many of the big technology players are also bringing the technology closer to the small business, with Adobe Acrobat’s Connect Professional lead generation solution one of many examples of where the market is heading.
“I think businesses can start on a much smaller level now,” says Mandell-Lynn. “They don’t necessarily have to sponsor a major webinar-based conference. A smaller event, which they publicise on their website and incorporate as part of their marketing mix, can be an interesting way of warming up a lead. All businesses can start to use this technology in a flexible, cost-effective way.”
Related articles
Or use our enhanced search functionality to find other related articles
