5 Ways to Drive Webinar Registrations At Speed

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This post is the latest in our series on scrappy marketing – an approach can help you achieve better results in less time.

With so much competition for your audience’s attention, driving webinar registrations is becoming even more challenging. How do you convince people to spend an hour of their working day with you? You’re going to need a compelling proposition, as well as a kick-ass promotion strategy.

Let’s say you have a great webinar idea that’s super topical, so you need to get it out there, fast. You know that generally, the longer the promotion cycle, the better, but what if you don’t have time? In this blog, we look at five scrappy ways to drive webinar sign-ups, and at speed.

Use email marketing to drive sign-ups ahead of time

Still one of the biggest drivers of webinar registrations, it’s important to get email marketing right. But how do you accelerate the process while retaining effectiveness?

As detailed in our guide on webinar promotions, it’s usually best to at least three emails in a webinar promo cycle – the first least two weeks before the webinar, another one week before and a final one on the day (or on the day before). With a shorter window for promotion, however, you’re going to have to keep things interesting so that your audience doesn’t fatigue.

Pull out different angles of interest for each email that follows the first, perhaps personalizing the messaging and creative to different segments of the email list. Alternatively, emphasize the appearance of one of your panel members, according to who the segment would be most interested in.

Engage in Partner Marketing to Increase Your Reach

Striking up a strategic partnership with a business with similar customers to yours – but that crucially, does not have a competing offering – can significantly extend your reach.

With more brains behind the campaign and a wider audience to target, you’ll make a greater impact. You can also take advantage of each other’s strengths – for example, if they’re great at content, have them take the reins on creating assets for the campaign, while you get busy with SEO, if that’s your thing.

As a case in point, this scrappy marketing series is a partnership between NetLine and ON24 – so you’re reading an example of this in action!

Use Your Sales Team – and Incentivize Them

When you have a webinar to promote, and at speed, it’s got to be all hands on deck. This is where the assets you create to promote the campaign really come into their own. Share them with your sales team, along with some email messaging that they can send to their prospects. Sales will have a nose for who will be most interested in the webinar, so get them involved as soon as possible.

Also consider using your marketing budget towards sales bonuses for driving registrations. That way they will have even more of a reason to reach out.

Promote via Paid Social

When time is of the essence, it may be necessary to take the paid route. First up, you need to know where your customers like to hang out. Are they more of a LinkedIn, or a Twitter crowd?

Consider sponsoring organic posts on LinkedIn so that they will be shown to a wider audience. Choose those that have already been performing well to give them an extra push. The platform also lets you target ads to specific audiences based on demographic information, job type, or what skills they’ve declared. These ads will appear in the sidebar when the user logs into LinkedIn.

Driving webinar registrations on the double requires creating a sense of urgency. In your creative, use images that include people (bonus if their gaze appears to be in the direction of the call to action), as well as the name of the webinar, the date and the time it will take place.

If you do decide to promote your webinar on LinkedIn, consider taking advantage of lead gen forms, so that when a user clicks the call to action on an ad or sponsored post, the form they need to fill to register for the webinar has already been filled with information from their LinkedIn profile – easier for the user, and more accurate information for you.

Facebook also offers lead ads, and also lets marketers build custom audiences, so that you can target ads to prospects who, say, may have attended past webinars, or have visited a few pages on your website about the webinar topic.

Use Display Networks to Reach Prospects Across the Web

For access to the widest audience the web can offer, turn to ad networks. Google Display Network as an example, which reaches more than 90% of people on the internet, lets advertisers serve relevant ads to prospects while they’re browsing websites, checking their Gmail or – which could be very useful while promoting a webinar – when they’re watching a video on YouTube.

The network also lets you target existing customers or find new ones by placing ads on sites that you have chosen, and that are relevant to the customer. It also lets you retarget customers who might have expressed an interest in the webinar, for example, by visiting its landing page but not signing up.

How to Make Your Marketing Team More Agile

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This post is the latest in our series on scrappy marketing, and follows on from some tips that can help you accelerate your marketing campaigns. This post provides ideas on how you can get your team to join you in putting scrappy marketing into action.

Taking a scrappy approach to your marketing can transform your company’s fortunes, making it possible to bring more ideas to market, and at speed. But if your team isn’t flexible enough to take risks and start experimenting, you’ll never reap its benefits.

A word that sums up this flexibility is agile. While it’s often used to describe an approach to developing software, its broader definition refers to “having a quick, resourceful and adaptable character”. So how should you go about developing this in those you work with?

Get Buy-In for a Scrappy Approach

Resistance to change will be your biggest stumbling block when it comes to introducing the scrappy method, so before doing anything, ensure everyone in the team is on board.

According to Kotter’s Change Model, which provides eight overlapping steps for effecting change in an organization, you must first create urgency, which you might do by identifying potential threats, or opportunities to exploit.

This is followed by building a coalition, which would involve identifying who must lead the change, and ensuring the team is made of a mix of people from different levels of the business, who have different capabilities. Kotter’s model applies more to larger projects, but there are certainly some ideas that you can take from it.

Using data can be a great way to both drive urgency and build support. Look for spikes or dips in your analytics or engagement data, which can help spur on what could happen if you did something outside the norm. Share these around and ask questions to get people to think differently. Get people excited about the potential for better results while encouraging them to start taking action.

Remove Barriers to Productivity

Once you have the team on board, you must ensure they have everything they need to get started. Do they have the tools they need? Do they feel supported? Does everyone know what they’re doing, and how to do it?

You’ll also need to ensure your team is able to communicate effectively. Is everyone on board with the method? What tools will you use to communicate quickly? If they have questions, will someone be there to answer them? How will tasks be assigned, and how will everyone know they’re in hand?

To encourage the scrappy mindset, look at where people can set aside times to get stuck into the project. Eliminate any meetings that don’t add value. Look to cancel commitments that are cutting into your colleagues’ time. If some people prefer working elsewhere, allow them to be productive at a place where they feel they can get into a state of flow.

Encourage experimentation – remove the fear of failure and perfectionism

The more innovative you are, the more robust you are – you can roll with the punches that will inevitably come in a rapidly changing market.

In order to be innovative, you must foster a culture of experimentation. This means testing ideas quickly, and failing fast so you know what to do next – there’s no lingering over something that doesn’t work, and that will never work.

Testing things out on a small scale now to determine what works will save bigger failures in the future.

However, creativity in a business can only blossom if individuals aren’t afraid to fail. Sara Critchfield, founding editorial director of Upworthy, reportedly the fastest-growing media company of all time, says that in order to encourage a team to be more innovative, there must be a shift from a ‘best practices’ mentality to a dynamic ‘laboratory’ mentality, and that team members rather than managers should be made responsible for the results.

She also advocates ‘normalizing’ failure by setting a baseline failure rate and success rate, and measuring the team’s work by that baseline.

Publish and Promote at Speed

Publishing content regularly and consistently is the best way to grow your audience.

As Nick Westergaard writes in Get Scrappy, setting a consistent schedule and editorial calendar will establish audience expectations and help “develop your own content creation muscles and routine.”

This means you can’t be too precious about your work – there’s no time for perfectionism. As long as your content says what you want it to say, makes sense and is factually accurate, it’s fit to publish. Of course, the content you’re working on can always be improved upon. But resist the urge to keep tweaking and get it out there.

The same method can be applied to webinars. Rather than dwelling on might work well, producing one and getting it to market will provide an answer. Your best marketing webinars can be highlighted as always-on content, while those that didn’t perform brilliantly can be hidden further down the list of your website’s resources.

Maintain the underdog mentality to help people keep going

Keeping up a consistent and fast pace can be a challenge. To keep the scrappy marketing method alive in your business, you’re going to need a mascot. Make that mascot an underdog.

As covered in the first post, taking an underdog approach can endear you with your customers and help your team to keep going even when it’s tough.

The underdog is always looking for different ways they can win the game. They’re looking for a competitive edge, because they can’t rely on their size, or reputation, or firepower. They’re more resourceful. By definition, they’re more agile.

What is Scrappy Marketing and Why Is It Beneficial?

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As marketers, we can be a picky bunch. In an effort to put our best foot forward, we often use brand guidelines, tone-of-voice documents, and documented approval processes. We check and double check our work, asking for everyone to go over a fine-tuned piece of copy.

In an age where a print ad, a brochure or a quarterly thought leadership article in the trade press was all that needed to happen, getting things perfect was a noble goal. There’s no way to edit a magazine after it’s been printed.

But in today’s digital age, we simply don’t have the time to do all of this. Targets don’t wait while we revise a whitepaper, and our colleagues in sales aren’t going to hold back from reaching out to prospects in the absence of perfect collateral.

And to add to this, startups and new competitors don’t wait either. Content now needs to be always on to stand above the noise. So what approach should we be taking?

What is scrappy marketing – and is it an answer?

Look up the term scrappy and you’ll see a number of definitions. Merriam-Webster defines the term as referring to “having an aggressive and determined spirit.” The Oxford English Dictionary adds that it is something “consisting of disorganized, untidy or incomplete parts.”

Meanwhile, Urban Dictionary offers “someone or something that appears dwarfed by a challenge but more than compensates for seeing inadequacies through will, persistence and heart”. It also suggests that it could describe “a person who is little but can really kick some ass.”

Nick Westergaard, author of the book Get Scrappy and someone who also quotes from Urban Dictionary, says that a scrappy approach to marketing is simply “doing more with less”.

We suggest scrappy marketing is all of the above. Standing out above the noise in the digital age requires persistence and determination – particularly when going against better-established peers and competitors. It means getting rid of perfectionism, being comfortable with putting forward marketing that isn’t polished to the finest sheen. And it’s about being creative, finding out ways to get the most out of your marketing efforts even when you don’t have all the answers.
In short – if you’re limited on time and resource but still want to achieve great results – scrappy marketing is an approach you should be taking.

Why is scrappy marketing beneficial?

Here are a few reasons why being scrappy can benefit your marketing team.

It places an emphasis on getting it done, rather than being perfect

Marketing at its heart is about putting out a message. Scrappy marketing is about doing that quickly and resourcefully.

Professionals today rely heavily on both researching their own problems and being presented with new approaches. A recent report by PathFactory and Heinz Marketing found that 92% of marketers say content is either very important or important to their decision-making process, while 48% say they have started a buying journey because they or their coworkers have come across an interesting piece of content from a supplier.

As scrappy methods are more likely to result in marketing being available more quickly and at higher volume, they fit more closely with how prospects start their own buying journeys. Any moment spent waiting to publish is a moment where a prospect could be consuming your content.

Through an always-on approach, scrappy marketing allows you to build both visibility and engagement as your prospects enter the buying journey.

Building campaigns helps you to learn by doing

One of the most common models now being adopted is that popularised in the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. The approach emphasizes that the most effective way to learn about a new product is to get it to a minimally-viable version to market, measure its performance, and apply the findings to future iterations.

The same is true for marketing. By running campaigns quickly and measuring their performance, you can use this data to improve the next time you do it.

You can also learn about the tools and technology as you do so, meaning you and your teams becomes more efficient over time.

Speed, volume and personality helps you to cut above bigger players

While the competition will loom large, if you can connect with your audience more frequently by taking a more nimble approach – and showcase your personality while doing so – you can build greater engagement with them, increasing the chance that you will be on their short list when considering a solution.

Furthermore, people love the underdog – as highlighted in a study featured in the Harvard Business Review, which demonstrated that buyers naturally gravitate towards underdog brands, particularly if they too feel a sense of struggling in tough circumstances.

Being rough around the edges makes us human

Nobody is perfect – so if we’re looking to build genuine connections with people, why should our marketing be perfect?

By demonstrating our vulnerabilities and being open about them, we can start to market in a way that makes our buyers more receptive to our efforts at building a connection.

How does this apply to webinars?

Webinars are a great place to start with a scrappy approach to marketing. You can put yourself in front of an audience, engage with them in real-time, and learn how to do it better next time.

In addition, webinar content can be repurposed, made available on-demand, and provide a rich source of data for both sales intelligence and marketing insight.

And if you’re already running webinars, going scrappy can act as an interesting method to driving up the volume of your content and lifting your results.

Finally – is this article scrappy?

Yes, it is! As proof, find below the notes that were written in putting this together – and enabled this post to reach you in quick time.

What are the Barriers to Human-to-Human Marketing at Scale?

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Our upcoming Insight50 session will be exploring how marketers can humanize the digital marketing experience. Sign up for the session to get your questions answered, with expert speakers including Leanne Chescoe of Demandbase, Joel Harrison of B2B Marketing, and Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing.

We’ve all received those emails and LinkedIn messages that request “10 minutes of our time”. Even though they use our first name and appear to come from someone’s personal email address, they are clearly automated – and annoying.

But against tough targets – and equipped with technology that makes it easier than ever before to reach buyers at scale – it can be easy to fall into a trap where attempts at building a human connection simply fall flat.

So why is the case and what can be done about it? Ahead of the webinar, we have put together a few thoughts.

Poor quality data leads to poor quality connections

If the data is wrong, chances are that any attempt to market to individuals will also be wrong.

When creating campaigns, it’s all too easy to quickly build or use a list that hasn’t had enough thought or checking behind it. Obvious examples would be:

  • Failing to exclude existing customers or competitors from new business lists.
  • Bought data that is old and hasn’t been cleansed, appended or processed.
  • Leads that are missing information on other communications received – for example, where sales activity hasn’t fed through to a marketing automation system, meaning active prospects get new outreach.

Beyond the above, there is also the chance that engagement data – or perhaps disengagement data – hasn’t been applied effectively.

If a prospect hasn’t engaged with any marketing for several months, is your offer compelling enough for them to do so now? And likewise, if someone has been actively researching solutions, what if that engagement hasn’t been connected to a lead score and targeted outreach?

All of the above can lead to both poorly-targeted marketing and missed opportunities to build connections.

Linear buying stages don’t reflect the complexity of the customer journey

Even though the funnel is used as the foundation for much of B2B marketing, in reality, it doesn’t reflect the way that people buy.

Countless scenarios mean that it is very challenging to build automated campaigns to fit every eventuality. As such, the law of diminishing returns will come into play, meaning that there will be a point at which adding further granularity to a marketing program will not make commercial sense.

At this point, growth can only come from approaching people as individuals – which places a greater emphasis on identifying who those individuals are.

Automated marketing is yet to pass the Turing Test

The reality is that despite advances in artificial intelligence, instances where machines genuinely convince people that they are human are very rare.

And while there are some simple examples where computers have helped (such as Google Assistant being able to book appointments by phone), applying this to complex sales is still a long way off.

In the meantime, marketers might be better off if instead of using technology that pretends to be human, they use technology to prove they are human.

Obviously, webinars are one way of doing that, but there are many others. Email can be used to send messages that carefully address known (rather than assumed) needs. Dynamic creative can be used to drive prospects to account-specific landing pages that have been crafted individually. Social engagement through personal accounts can open up individual conversations.

When you compare this to marketing in the pre-digital era, it’s clear that marketing at scale can be human – as long as there is actually a human behind it.

To find out more and ask your questions, make sure to sign up to our Insight50 webinar on Humanising the Digital Experience.

Three Key Tips For Running Account-Based Webinars

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Below is a recap of our recent webinar on ‘The Webinerd’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing’, based on our account-based marketing guide of the same name. Sign up for the session on-demand to hear more.

Technology is making it possible to reach more people than ever before. However, with this greater reach comes greater challenges.

While technology is changing the way marketers market, it is also changing the way B2B buyers are buying. Their buying cycle takes longer to complete and they are doing much of their own research, only reaching out to a salesperson when they are close to making a purchase. Lastly, the average size of the B2B buying group has grown, making it necessary to impress a lot more people than before.

Is there a solution that addresses these? The answer is yes. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies – aided by the use of webinars – takes the impersonal out of the equation and lets B2B businesses reach the customers that matter.

Drive Engagement, Not Just Leads

One of the key attributes to a good ABM programme is personalized engagement. Forrester’s Laura Romas points out that instead of account-based marketing, we should talk about account-based engagement. Strategy and execution should not be looked at as just tactics. Instead, they are opportunities to engage in a conversation with a real person.

Webinars are a great way to engage your target prospects because they provide a two-way conversation and, by their nature, encourage engagement.

Start Small with Your ABM Efforts

ABM can seem a bit daunting, especially if you’re already using a demand generation strategy. It doesn’t have to be. By taking small steps and continuing to build on those steps, businesses can begin to integrate ABM into their existing strategies gradually. “The Webinerd’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing” provides you with six steps that will set your foundations for ABM.

Key points to remember:

  • Measure for quality, not quantity.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel — use the content you already have and curate it to your individual buyer’s needs.
  • Webinars deliver high-quality leads

In the live session, the majority (86 percent) of webinar participants reported providing false information on a lead generation form at some point. Some even confessed to using old email addresses and one even revealed that he had created a fake persona for use in lead generation forms.

With webinars, the quality of leads goes up just by the nature of the webinar process. The leads are coming to you both through any signup form, but also through interactions within the webinar itself. These actions can help tell you where your prospects are in the buying cycle.

Focus on a High-Value Offer

To be successful with ABM, you need to focus on a high-value offer. This involves identifying your target audience and then figuring out how to appeal to that audience. Remember that ABM is about the audience so you have to know what that audience is looking for and how they consume content.

The good news is, you don’t have a create specialized content for each target. Instead, try using a more vertical piece of content, but then personalize the interactivity within that content for the target.

If you’d like to hear more about how to make your ABM program scalable using webinars, you can listen to the webinar on-demand.

Three Key Questions – and Answers – From Our Latest Lead Gen Webinar

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Last week ON24 ran its latest Insight50 session on lead generation and pipeline wins – where we provide fellow Webinerds with 50 minutes of expert insight and answer the questions that are important to you.

The below is just a brief wrap up of insight from Isabel Montesdeoca at SiriusDecisions, Ryan Grable at Genesys – and of course, you the viewers! If you didn’t manage to see it, view it on-demand here.

The first month of the year is the time when targets are set, budgets are confirmed and everyone starts thinking about the year ahead.

For B2B marketers, that often comes down to figuring out how leads are going to be generated and pipeline built up. But given the constant change in the market, the approach from last year won’t necessarily work going forward.

So what should marketers focus on? Below are a few insights from our most recent session.

What’s critical for lead generation and pipeline in 2019?

In the first question for the session, Isabel Montesdeoca from SiriusDecisions stressed the fact that marketers now need “better focus and clarity on who you are targeting.”

Previously, lead generation efforts looked to cast a wide net, prioritizing quantity over quality in an attempt to keep up with the pressure to drive results – “a constant daily struggle that both marketing and sales need to deal with.”

But as the noise gets louder and inboxes get more crowded, getting through means doing your homework up front. This enables targeted messaging and helps to build a better understanding of the group buying dynamics. As Isabel added:

“If we’re not starting to look for and find those connections there as well, we’re missing part of the puzzle.”

Ryan Grable came back to some key marketing fundamentals.

“It’s about engaging with people – the right people, at the right time, through the right channel.”

Grable also stressed the importance of making sure that marketers customize their approach in the way prospects want:

“It’s not just about allowing email marketing to social to be the only types of channels you use. Use the channels that matter most to the people you want to engage with, so you can excite and engage their passion to learn more about your organization or more about your offer that you’re providing.”

How should marketers move from lead quality to lead quantity?

Many marketers now seem to be moving towards a model that emphasizes the quality of the engagement over the quantity of their leads.

For those attending live, the results of the poll showed that more than half described their organizations as either intermediate, advanced or cutting edge in their approach to lead generation and pipeline.

This is a picture recognized at SiriusDecisions. But there is a danger in falling back. So how can marketers either get away from the quantity trap – or stay ahead?

According to Isabel, the next steps involve both nurturing and bringing in other members of the buying group, both of which can affect overall conversion rates and how successful we are in getting to the revenue goal.

Both of these factors mean better leads and nurturing – not just filling up the top of the funnel.

For Ryan, it’s about making sure your organization doesn’t stay still – regardless of the level of maturity:

“No matter where you are in your journey, continuous improvement and growth in lead generation is good… I really see companies looking at the trust, recognizing quality over quantity, and gleaning from that the big shift of just getting the volume of leads, into the getting the right leads.”

How does data privacy impact lead generation efforts?

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR have caused marketers to rethink how they go about generating leads. But there’s also a business case – prospects that have given consent are more likely to buy.

Ryan summed up how they viewed this at Genesys:

“The reality is, if a person does not want to engage with you, or hear from you, what value does that bring to your organization? But if you go deeper into building trust, that I think is critical to an organization’s success. It enables you to move, engage and convert that account through the journey.”

Isabel added that marketing shouldn’t simply be viewed through the lens of what’s legal and what isn’t – but rather, how you treat your prospect:

“First of all, we need to be compliant, which means we need to understand and respect people’s need for privacy… but we need to understand it’s more than just respecting actual physical data. It’s about respecting a prospect’s desire for when to talk to us, when not to talk to us, how they want to engage, how relevant is every conversation, showing respect for our prospect’s time.”

On this note, technology can act as an enabler of this respect.

“Without some of the advances that technology is going to enable us to do, we probably won’t be able to get where we’re going… it starts with GDPR, it starts from being compliant and respectful, but then it will go into using things such as artificial intelligence to help us.”

Hear more on our Insight50 session

The quotes above are just a small sample of what was discussed and answered on January’s Insight50 session. Make sure to register to watch on-demand and strengthen your pipeline for the coming year.

How can you get more engagement from your webinars? Learn the tips, tricks and tactics that make webinars work at Webinar World 2019.

The 7 Sessions That’ll Turn You Into a Webimaster at Webinar World 2019 

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It’s a long way to the top if you want to get the most out of your webinar program. But shortcuts are available. Discover the quickest way to becoming a webimaster in San Francisco from March 11-13 at Webinar World 2019. Especially when you attend the Mastering ON24 track. 

The Mastering ON24 track will arm you with the insights, playbooks and tactics you need to craft quality digital experiences that drive audience engagement and deliver actionable data. Attend this track’s sessions to learn how Oracle operationalizes its webinars for the best results, how Jackson Systems uses videos to captivate its audience and how you can run a successful webinar program all by yourself. 

Check out the tracks below to learn more: 

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Integration Deep-dive with Oracle Netsuite: How to Operationalize Webinars for Optimal Results

For demand gen marketers, what happens after the webinar is just as important as promoting and holding the webinar itself. Join Oracle NetSuite’s Deniz Dondero, Director of Digital & Marketing Campaigns and Bekkah Lyman, Sr. Marketing Operations Manager, for a deep-dive into using webinars to nurture leads and convert them into opportunities. Get a glimpse into the infrastructure they built that facilitates and enables it all.

You’ll come away knowing how to:

• Integrate ON24 with marketing automation platforms

• Use webinars to convert leads to opportunity

• Seamlessly operationalize the process

Time-Saving Tutorial with Joe Oliva: How to Automate Webinar Workflows through Zapier

Ever wish you had a virtual assistant to help run your professional webinerd life? Combining the power of the ON24 Platform with workflow automation software Zapier brings producing webinars a little further into our AI-driven future by automating common tasks with “Zaps,” such as sending a calendar invite when a webinar is scheduled, or sending an email alert with registration updates. Join webinar expert Joe Oliva to get hands-on with Zapier and start saving time.

You’ll learn:

• How and when to use Zaps

• Set up basic Zaps

• What Zaps are coming from ON24

Using Video with Jackson Systems: How to Captivate Audiences with On-camera Presentations

You’d think adorable puppies have no place in a webinar about HVAC controls, but the manufacturer Jackson Systems proves us all wrong by showing that making content fun and relatable through video makes a big impact, no matter the industry. Join Tyler Hershberger, Production Director at Jackson Systems, for a deep-dive into video-based webinars, from humanizing your content to mastering advanced video techniques to adding new technology.

You’ll learn how to:

• Add video to your webinar strategy

• Use video to bring content to life

• Build the right tech infrastructure for video

Everlasting Webinars with S&P: How to Maximize your On Demand Strategy

Live webinars or simul-live webinars for maximum training impact? According to S&P Market Intelligence, it doesn’t matter as long as you always make your webinars available on-demand. Join Laura Lopez, S&P’s Head of Client Education, to learn how to give your training webinars everlasting life through the right mix of interactivity features, curated playlists using ON24 Engagement Hub and constant promotion across touchpoints.

You’ll learn how to:

• Multiply attendees and engagement beyond the live webinar

• Encourage content binging using ON24 Engagement Hub

• Measure your on-demand webinar program performance

Wednesday, March 13

Repurposing your Webinars with Align Technology: How to Use a Single Webinar Multiple Ways

It’s much easier to piece together a puzzle when you can see the whole picture. The same principle applies when it comes to webinar planning — once you know all the ways you want to use a webinar, then you can quickly create and assemble all the elements. Join Align Technology’s Sr. Professional Education Manager Patricia Torres to take a step back and see how to build a holistic webinar program that can be broken into several pieces of content that serve multiple use cases.

You’ll learn how to:

• Create modular content and stitch it together with simple tools

• Gain insights from content interactivity

• Integrate multiple touchpoints into a single experience

Making CPE Easy with RSM: How to Build a Painless Process for Continuing Education Webinars

With specific learning criteria to meet and thousands of certificates to issue, continuing education programs get complicated fast. Join RSM’s Allison Snyder, Senior Marketing Specialist, to learn how the ON24 Platform helps make it easy to run continuing education webinars across any industry, from reporting to tracking to self-service certificates.

You’ll learn how to:

• Build a webinar program with CE in mind

• Optimize the ON24 platform functionalities for CE

• Roll out a CE program at your own organization

Scaling Fast with Fitbit: How to Run a Successful Webinar Program Solo

Starting anything new is tough… going at it alone is even tougher. Join Fitbit’s Rachel Yarnold, Associate Digital Marketing Manager, to hear how she quickly got the tech company’s B2B webinar program up and running, from defining the content to determining the audience acquisition strategy to owning the results.

You’ll learn how to:

• Develop a webinar strategy that scales

• Set boundaries

• Establish realistic goals and measure success

Using Engagement to Accelerate Pipeline

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The pressure to make deals close, especially as the year comes to an end, is real. But what’s a marketer to do when prospects fail to progress? According to research by SiriusDecisions, an integrated webinar strategy is one of the best ways to make deals move.

Too often, teams turn to automation to try and nudge opportunities without working through if a contact needs to be nudged in the first place. It’s a spray-and-pray marketing strategy disguised in an algorithm, and it doesn’t deliver the necessary results. To get deals across the finish line, marketers need to move beyond clicks and views and start to empathize with audiences.

Empathy demands close listening, and the best way for marketers to listen today — outside of directly calling and talking with prospects — is understanding what messages connect and why. Automation cannot find these insights on its own and must take a backseat to genuine engagement. In a digital context, this means marketers need to do more than watch audience clicks and views and interact with attendees as they consume content and ask questions. Generating these meaningful interactions means gaining better insights into what they need from a solution — giving marketing and sales the fuel they need to push opportunities along.

Collecting Insights

Collecting insights is more complicated than slapping a UTM code on a link. Often, collection requires tracking a range of accounts in a vertical and how they engage with interactive content. Here, using the right tool is critical. Does it monitor downloaded resources? Questions asked? Often they visited a website or digital events? These sorts of insights are essential for identifying opportunities, especially fast-moving prospects looking to make a quick deal.

The insights gained from user engagements can also help unstick stalled deals. Marketers and sales teams can provide slow-moving prospects with additional content based on their interests or alert them to upcoming events or articles by subject matter experts they respect. Additionally, organizations can put together highly-targeted, self-serve nurture tracks with the use on on-demand content.

The Right Content Meets a Better Channel

On-demand content hubs are particularly powerful tools for stuck opportunities. Such hubs allow you to re-engage and refocus prospects on your best, most relevant content based on industry and persona. They also enable prospects self-discover content and engage with the organization in a way they prefer. On-demand hubs also provide an opportunity for marketers to create self-qualifying triggers that move highly-engaged prospects from a nurture track to an active demand track.

Live events, too, are great for motivating and re-engaging stuck prospects. Live events give them the opportunity to interact with SMEs, ask questions and download new content specific to the event.

Fueling Reports

Time is of the essence, which means sales teams needs as much information on newly engaged and re-engaged prospects that are ready to take the next step. That’s why it’s essential for organizations to build engagement profiles – summaries of prospect or account interactions with a brand. With engagement profiles, marketing can get specific behavior reports across live, on-demand and personalized content experiences for either individual prospects, or cumulative reports on accounts, and deliver them to sales for the final push.

End-of-year pushes are never easy. But using engagement-based marketing to push stalled pipeline across the finish line can resurface promising leads and make fast-moving campaigns much more comfortable.

To learn more about how webinars and on-demand gateways help you accelerate pipeline, download this research from SiriusDecisions.

Engagement in the Age of Automation, an HBR Insight

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Marketers spend a lot of money on a lot of digital tools. In fact, according to a recent Gartner survey, CMOs report they’ll spend nearly 12 percent of revenue on new marketing technologies, a crowded landscape spanning more than 6,800 solutions, in 2018.

Such a trend suggests two things. First, that current solutions aren’t addressing underlying needs for marketers. Second, that marketers are hungry for something that finally works.

This is short-term, stop-gap thinking and it’s damaging both customer experiences and brands by turning interactions into interruptions and prioritizing tactics above strategy. This isn’t just idle chatter. A new report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by ON24, surveyed the state of engagement and technology in marketing today and found the industry largely agrees. The problem, according to the survey, is that digital technology often gets in the way.

According to the report, four out of five marketers say they value human and personalized interactions over automated, but the digital tools they use make it difficult to realize genuine human interactions. And those interactions count. According to 80 percent of respondents, the human element in a customer experience gives their organization a distinct competitive edge and nearly 50 percent of organizations with high levels of customer loyalty say they are trying to maintain the same level of customer experience across live and automated channels.

The digital tools marketers use today to make human interactions a reality just aren’t built for human engagement. For example, email and social media are critical marketing channels for any organization, but 70 percent of survey respondents say they’re not using those tools effectively.

“Our marketing technologies target people,” says Laura Ramos, Vice President and Senior Analyst, Forrester Research. “But people often play a small role in designing what the systems deliver. Many executives believe they can just plug in the technology and it will magically improve business performance and customer engagement.”

It’s time for marketers to reverse the digital tool equation. They need to prioritize tools that boost genuine human interaction. It’s not that automation doesn’t play a part in marketing today, it’s that it represents a small role in the larger goal of connecting and enabling genuine human interactions online.

So how can marketers make better connections? By taking the time to think about the digital tools they use now and how those tools impact customer interactions and experiences over the long-term. By prioritizing tools that enable engagement, marketing teams can build better experiences that treat customers as humans, not figures in a database.

One opportunity for marketers to scale the impact of human-to-human interactions is through webinars. According to the marketing technology analyst firm SiriusDecisions, webinars continue to be the highest-rated human touchpoint throughout the buyer’s journey. We know a thing or two about webinars, and we know they can build engagement, build scale and build better experiences.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll share more insights from the HBR report, examining how marketers can build better interactions in today’s digital environments. If you’d like to see how you can scale human interactions online, click here. If you’d like to review the report yourself, click here.