Developing A Nurturing Program To Support Your Webinar Offerings

By Ardath Albee, Author of Marketing Interactions blog

Nurturing programs have many more applications than drip marketing campaigns to your house lead list and eNewsletters sent to your customers. A webinar requires a number of steps from pre-promotion to post-event follow-up. But, when's the last time you actually thought about them as a nurturing program?

The audience has to be aware you’re having a Webinar, decide it’s worth their time to attend, and be motivated to register. Once attendees are there, you want them to stay the entire time, and continue dialogue.

Even if the audience is aware of your event, it may take several tries for them to decide it's worth their time. You may need to create differently worded invitations and landing pages for the different personalities of your anticipated audience.

Instead of sending the same invitation repeatedly, consider approaching each invitation you send from a different angle. Or perhaps test the wording of the bulleted points in several different versions to see which work best for motivating registrations.

Think of a Webinar invitation series as an example of the versatility and depth your expertise will provide during the presentation. Can you make the event more exclusive? Are you unveiling new research? Showcasing a customer story that speaks directly to their situation?

Once people register, consider ways you can create advanced participation. Can you survey your attendees to find out how to add value that is specific to these people? When people participate in creating the event they'll attend, they have a stake in the ground to actually show up.

Send reminder emails that provide a way to add it to calendars. Relate the reminder to your invitation, but add something else with value—like a white paper or eBook download special offer at the end of the event. Why not roll out the "goodies" during the nurturing campaign to drive registration?

Start your Webinar with these three things:

1. Make the first slide deliver value for them. No company blather up front. You need to create immediate engagement to lock in their commitment to stay.

2. Tell them what they'll get and why it's important. Use words your audience would use and frame the ideas from their perspective.

3. Acknowledge the advanced participation and talk about how it's being used. This creates anticipation from the people who participated and for the attendees to learnwhat their peers think.

Afterward, you need to interact and extend the dialogue with attendees. Do you have a follow-up informational offering that will help them extend the ideas you shared in the webinar? Unless they've asked you to, this is not the time to switch to sales mode.

Perhaps you've created a content series they can subscribe to, giving you permission to dole out that information in bite-sized chunks that move them into a nurturing program that extends from their current position in the buying process.

Webinars are one of the top three informational vehicles specified by BtoB buyers as providing high value. If you're going to go to all the trouble to create them, you should maximize the return on attention—for them and for your company. The better you get at short-term nurturing programs for webinars, the more you'll learn about your target markets that can be applied to your longer-term nurturing programs with other leads.

Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions, Inc, helps B2B companies with complex sales increase and quantify marketing effectiveness by developing and executing customer-focused e-marketing strategies driven by compelling content. Her clients experience results like an increased 375% of sales-ready leads in just 8 months which translate into millions of dollars added to their sales pipelines. But, marketing isn't just about generating new demand. Ardath helps clients re-engage customers and build loyalty that adds longevity to customer lifecycles. Visit Ardath’s website: www.marketinginteractions.com and find fresh marketing insights on her blog at http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com.