As a reader of this blog, you hear the TREW Crew talk often about the marketing funnel, from generating awareness and “getting found” at the top to nurturing your leads and creating opportunities for sales further down. At this point in the funnel, a key marketing tool small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are using is webinars and online events. Marketing webinars – one-to-many virtual events delivered online for marketing purposes – have leveled the playing field so that any business or organization can appear to be a market or thought-leader and expand their reach. A key reason for this shift is the underlying technology, which is low-cost, easy to use and widely accessible.

My name is Scott Serrano, Senior Software Sales Executive of Citrix Online Saas Solutions, and the TREW Crew asked if I’d share my knowledge via this guest blog post to help readers understand the best practices for executing a webinar and how they can leverage online meeting technology platforms, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, to effectively market their business online.

Webinars can be a robust and lively marketing tool that effectively showcases your expertise and drives further engagement with prospective customers. Attendees and businesses that host webinars love them because webinars are:

• Powerful in reaching and influencing hard-to-reach prospects or decision makers
• Interactive and social, like a real-world classroom where you can ask questions and chat with the speaker in the conference and outside the conference using social media
• Affordable to host and attend
• Effective at generating leads and qualified sales opportunities
• Re-used as other forms of content, such as blogs, white papers, podcasts, and an on-demand webinars

Want to host a webinar? Here are 10 best practices we share with our customers at Citrix to produce an online webinar event that engages your audience and compels them to take action.

1. Think about what your customers and potential customers want to learn from you. What problems are keeping them up at night? How can you help them resolve those problems?
2. Most webinars can be defined into two categories of content – inspirational and big thinking or tactical how-to. Consider starting with the broadly appealing topic to generate more awareness and leads, and then producing smaller more specific webinars after the first one that reviews how-to and implementation.
3. Really think about your lead form, and use fields that will inform who the hottest leads are to pursue after your event.
4. Show a compelling story. Create visual slides, with one idea per slide, using authentic imagery (not stock).
5. Be a responsive moderator. Good webinars have a moderator who is energetic and pays attention to the feedback of the audience.
6. Always schedule a rehearsal of the webinar before the date. Run through procedures and review the flow with all the speakers.
7. Encourage attendees to interact with the speaker using the chat panel or to chat via social media with an event-specific hashtag.
8. Record your event so you can reuse it as an on-demand webinar for those who couldn’t make the event. This way, it will continue to pay dividends for you by generating leads far into the future.
9. Follow up promptly after the event, ideally within 24 hours, and include any promised additional content, copies of the presentation, and next steps. Have one primary call to action that moves them further down the funnel, and as a result, further identifies strong opportunities for sales to follow-up on.
10. Use a reliable and easy-to-use technology platform to host your webinar event.

Finding the right webinar technology platform is extremely important in creating a successful online event. Citrix’s GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar is a leading platform, because it is:

• Easy to use, GoToMeeting Corporate enables salespeople to begin meeting with prospects and clients right away.
• Patented bandwidth-adaptive compression technology ensures exceptional performance and successful meetings over any Internet connection.
• All You Can Meet® pricing eliminates meeting duration limits and overage charges, encouraging salespeople to use the service as often as they’d like and increasing their productivity.
• Industry-standard security features are built in to ensure that confidential meeting information remains private.

In addition, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar include a full array of functionality, with:

• HD Faces Video conferencing: Share up to 6 web cams along with your desktop
• One-click meetings: By simply clicking an icon, a salesperson can begin a meeting.
•  Instantly change presenters: A salesperson can pass control to the prospect or another employee who can show what is on his or her screen.
•  Easy integration: Meetings can be started, scheduled or joined through Microsoft® Outlook®, Microsoft Office®, IBM® Lotus Notes® or various instant-messaging applications.
• Shared mouse control: A prospect can be granted the right to take over the salesperson’s mouse on his or her desktop, enabling the prospect to experience a product firsthand.

To learn more about GoToMeeting, visit Citrix’s client story video and read Citrix press and awards.

TREW Marketing is a partner with Citrix GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. To learn more about how to incorporate webinars and video in your marketing mix, contact TREW Marketing today.

Related blog posts: 

Why You Need Video in Your B2B Marketing Mix

DIY Marketing Videos on a Budget

Here’s a statistic that will make your head spin: according to Pingdom , a website monitoring firm, every two minutes about 48 hours worth of video footage is uploaded to YouTube. This means that on a any given day, more than 2 million hours worth of video footage finds its way to the internet. In addition,over 800 million web visitors watch online videos per month. And, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine on the planet, just behind Google.

Why are web visitors so drawn to video? Video adds a dimension to the web that text and imagery alone cannot achieve. Music, narration, and movement provide a richer experience, which can more easily educate, entertain or inform your audience. Why peruse pages and pages of text when a video will provide you with what you’re looking for quicker and more easily?

But how does this trend take shape in the B2B world – do busy executives and engineers view online videos as much as the general public? When Google and Forbes Insight teamed up in 2010 and talked to over 500 corporate executives across the country about their web habits, they learned the following:

• 83% of respondents increased their work-related online video viewing over the previous year.
• The majority of those who watched a vendor’s online video further engaged with the company, perusing their site and searching for their products and services.
• More than one third of respondents contacted the vendor after watching an online video.

“But the people I’m targeting don’t have time to sit through a video,” you say. Not true. Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, an online video production firm, revealed in a recent article that executives’ habits are changing, and many will sit through two or more minutes of a product video, or even view it multiple times, during the decision-making process. Well-executed online videos can provide a real benefit to businesses who want to reach out to their target audience.

Video is more complex than text on a page — the timing, script writing, voice over, visuals and music bed needed for an effective, high-quality video require time and resources. Which begs the question: when does it make sense for a B2B company to invest in online video?

Let’s look at Anue Systems for some insight. Anue sells network monitoring tools to network engineers and administrators. Their innovative tools can make network administrators more efficient, and improve uptime for business networks. However, Anue’s products were such a different approach than traditional methods, they had a challenge in educating their marketplace about exactly what the tools do. And, Anue realized that a simple web page with a couple of images and paragraphs simply weren’t getting the job done.

Anue turned to TREW for help, who quickly surmised that a series of brief, yet in-depth online videos would better serve Anue in their quest to educate network engineers on the what, how and why of Anue’s products. The videos focus on a problem that all network engineers face, and then expand on how the Anue Net Tool Optimizer addresses that problem. In the videos, dynamic moving diagrams and high quality product cinematography add dimension. This, coupled with a well-written, detailed voice over, provide prospects with a very in-depth, informative look at the product.

The take away? Anue invested in online videos because they achieved a level of effectiveness in communicating the product’s benefits and details that is only rivaled by face to face sales presentations. Anue’s series of brief online product videos served as a “virtual salesperson” that could spread the word about their products faster and more efficiently than traditional avenues.

So when should you consider investing in online videos?

• When you need to educate your target audience. Like Anue, if you have a need to better explain what your products do, a video series may get the job done best.
• When you have a great story to tell. Customer testimonials lend themselves to the story-telling side of online video. They can come across more powerfully and be more attractive to a web visitor to view than a long article
• When you want to demo your product. You cannot demo your product online without some type of video. Whether you use software screens and mouse clicks with a voice over, or a complete demo with hardware and other elements, videos can give prospects a first glimpse at your product in practice.
• When you want to prospects to get to know you. Not only can online videos be used to educate, inform and pique interest in your product, but they can also be used to sell you and your company. Web visitors gain a more multi-dimensional feel for your business when they see you in action, whether it’s a video for fun and entertainment, or simply to highlight who you are.

As more and more web visitors develop a preference for videos, you can use this trend to your advantage by incorporating video into your marketing mix.

Related Blog Post:

DIY Marketing Videos on a Budget

TREW Marketing now offers a free webcast discussing how engineers and professionals in B2B technology seek information and use different media sources, and what companies must do to market to these technical audiences.

We’ve found that more than 50 percent of technical companies plan to increase marketing budgets in the next 1 to 3 years, and this new webcast gives insight as to how companies can best maximize their marketing spending to reach a technical audience.

Our data for the webcast came from a recent survey targeting engineers, scientists and technologists and addresses marketing media topics ranging from web search habits to use of industry publications and social media. We surveyed more than 100 engineers and professionals in the B2B technology market to gain insight on marketing to technical audiences, media choices, news, the latest communication platforms and industry trends.

In the webcast, we share information about respondents’ use of web sites to gather information, search habits, and social media preferences. The webcast, along with a downloadable white paper on the topic, is freely available on demand and has three parts:

• Part 1: How Engineers Stay Informed
• Part 2: Search Marketing for Engineers
• Part 3: Social Media – Relevant or Not?

Watch the 3 Must-Do’s When Marketing to Technical Audiences webcast now!

Related Posts:

Smart Marketing for Engineers – a Free Guidebook

The TREW Approach- Goals and Smart Planning

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

Want to create professional-looking recordings of product demos or customer testimonials, but don’t have a high-end budget to produce them? Start by creating a company account on YouTube – a search-friendly social media channel for sharing user-created videos. Then follow these simple do-it-yourself (DIY) guidelines to produce an effective and cost-efficient video for spreading company awareness and communicating with your audience.

Figure 1. This video of customer testimonials was shot at a tradeshow and edited with Apple iMovie.

Video Objectives and Content

Before you get started, establish the goals of the film to determine if the video is worth the time and effort of producing.

• What is the point of the video? Are you selling or training?
  • Note: A sales pitch video should be much shorter (only 1 to 2 minutes) and have less detail than a tutorial video in order to keep the viewer’s attention.
• Who is the audience?
• What is your goal and how will you know if the video is successful?

Using these objectives, create a rough outline of the video’s content. For example, if the video is a product demo, the story may unfold as such:

• Act 1: a short introduction that gives a hook of why the viewer should care
• Act 2: the meat of the presentation that shows why the product is impressive via a short demo
• Act 3: an explanation of the wonderful benefits of using this product and the next steps to take

To make the recording session as productive as possible, use the outline to map out a storyboard of the necessary shots, as well as a matching script for the narrator. Choose a dynamic and exciting speaker, and consider adding a little humor if appropriate.

Equipment List

Next, you will need to have the following tools at your disposal:

• Digital video-recording device, such as a Kodak minicamcorder or smartphone
• Tripod
• External microphone
• Video-editing software, such as the free Window Movie Maker or Apple iMovie
• Screen recording software for software demos (optional)
• Audio recording and editing software, such as the free Audacity software (optional)

Nowadays, smartphones are a lot more accessible than handheld camcorders. However, to produce higher quality videos on a budget, it may be worthwhile to invest in a dedicated recording device with extra capabilities. Key features to look for include an external microphone jack, ability to mount on a tripod, and high definition (HD) quality video output.

Recording Setup

On the day of the recording, set aside extra time beforehand to prepare the environment.

• For good sound quality, choose a conference room or other quiet setting. Using an external microphone is highly recommended. For wired microphones, snake the device up through the bottom of the speaker’s shirt and pin it on the collar. If you only have an internal microphone, make sure the speaker is close enough to the video recorder and do some sound checks beforehand.
• For lighting, make sure the subject is well lit and properly color balanced (so that white actually looks like white on the video). This can be accomplished by choosing a location with good natural lighting, bringing in additional lamps for artificial lighting, or adjusting digital settings on your camera or video-editing software.
• Practice the rule of thirds. Position the main subject of your video on the intersecting thirds lines, instead of centered in the middle of the screen.

Figure 2. This Microsoft technology video uses the rule of thirds to create an interesting and well-balanced shot.

Best Practices for Recording

Keep in mind these tips and tricks when creating the storyboard and on the day of recording.

• When using amateur recording equipment, avoid moving, panning, zooming, or even touching the camera during takes to prevent shaky camera syndrome. Instead, get static shots from varying angles, as well as a mix of wide and close shots, which can be smoothly connected during the editing process.
• Get at least 5 seconds of extra video before and after each shot for editing purposes.
• Record supplemental B-roll footage to cut away from the main shot, keep things interesting, and hide any problem areas. For example, you can insert close-ups of the demo while the narrator is speaking, instead of just showing the speaker the whole time.
• Rather than fitting everything into one shot, record multiple takes if needed so you’ll have many options to choose from during the editing process.

Post-Production

Once you have obtained the necessary footage, upload the files onto the computer with the editing software and follow these guidelines. Once completed, embed the video on your website and upload it on the company’s YouTube account with the appropriate description and search tags.

• Shorten the film as much as possible to maintain the audience’s attention. Do not use any fancy transitions between shots; cut and fade are sufficient for most videos.
• Keep the visuals interesting by using shots from different angles, inserting unexpected images or B-roll footage, and moving static pictures.
• Do not use any music or graphics unless they are royalty-free or you have the explicit permission from the creator.
• The audio quality must be clear enough to understand, so re-record the audio or add subtitles as necessary.
• Insert a title page that can include the video title and speaker’s name and title. Insert an end page that can include the company logo and next steps, such as a website address or contact information.

Figure 3. Create an end page to provide viewers with concrete next steps to take.

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

Related Links:
5 Fast, Compelling Videos to Create Now
A How-To Guide for Creating Webcasts

If you’ve visited the Google search page today, you probably noticed some big changes. Google has updated their look with a new left-hand side panel which offers search tools to help customize and refine results. more…

One of the best ways to learn about marketing and communication is by watching and listening to others. Last month, Domino’s used video and great attention to their content to  communicate to their audiences. While this example happened to occur during a crisis, it provides lessons that marketers can use every day, including:

1. using video to communicate a message,
2. choosing words that help us seem approachable, real and authentic, and
3. remembering that content is king and timing is everything.

You may have heard about the very unfortunate crisis Domino’s faced when two employees posted a disgusting and offensive video while preparing pizzas (pizza ingredients up noses, etc – really nice stuff!). This struck at the core of Domino’s promise to their customers – that the pizza they sell is fresh, safe and prepared by clean people in clean kitchens. If you don’t have this basic trust, you don’t sell pizzas.

It would be one thing to read about this in the paper or on a blog, But, the fact that it was posted online as a video made this immediately global and very, very real and shocking. The video viralized instantaneously, and as a New York Times article pointed out, a few days after the posting, “the video had been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.” And with the masses on social media, it was accelerated even more quickly with discussions about Domino’s throughout Twitter linking back to the video.

This is not necessarily a new phenomenon – we see examples of the power of viralization every day. Think Susan Boyle But this is a very serious matter, and responding by video is a big risk AND opportunity. What is said, who says it, and most importantly of all, how it is said, has the potential to stabilize OR do even more damage to the Domino’s brand. Watch the video, and then I’ll share my opinion about how well I thought it was executed.

I personally thought the delivery was spot-on. The spokesperson, Patrick Doyle, is President of Domino’s USA, and has the high-ranking title needed to demonstrate the seriousness of the matter. He is also, by title, clearly the one responsible for the region in which the crisis took place. He apologizes within the first 15 seconds of the video, and goes on to succinctly and, in my opinion, sincerely, communicate important points including the quick and decisive action taken to dismiss and arrest the employees. Mr. Doyle also did an outstanding job of making Domino’s feel very local and personal with comments such as “this was an isolated incident in Conover, North Carolina”, “the independent owner of that store is reeling from the damage this has caused”, and mentioning that Domino’s employs “125,000 men and women [who] work for local business owners.” In addition, his use of every-day language, such as “sanitized from top to bottom” “delivering high quality food to our customers day in and day out”, and “thank you for hanging in there with us” also made him feel authentic and approachable.

For the most part, Domino’s is getting kudos for their response, as detailed in this USA Today article. The one area where they are being criticized is in the timing of the apology video, which came 2 days after the employee video surfaced – the equivalent of weeks in online crisis time. Timing is everything, especially in a time of crisis, as US Airways discovered in their lack of response following the crash of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January. In Domino’s defense, they did respond within hours on a blog where the video was first mentioned, and then on Twitter. The video then followed two days later. In the end, while the sooner they would have put out the video, the more authentic and effective it would have been in addressing the public’s trust in Domino’s, overall they responded in a very timely manner and have been applauded for their overall handling of the crisis.

This is a great example that we can all learn from. Do you have others? Please share them here. Do you disagree or have additional thoughts? Please add your comments.