I have recently attended a few webinars on creating webinars. Both were sponsored by GoToMeeting. I don’t have a lot of experience with webinars but I am planning one for next quarter and I hope to implement all that I learned.  Here are a few good tips I picked up:

• Always stick to the time frame
• Promote through partners – make it very easy for them to add a link to a landing page. Consider co-sponsoring a webinar for increased visibility.
• Know what your goal is and don’t misrepresent it to your attendees – Don’t make it a sales pitch if it has been promoted as educational.
• 2 Speakers can be better – different speaking styles and presentation skills will engage different listeners
• Give an incentive – publicize it in all communications, make it valuable (a compelling whitepaper is always good), Reward people who listened to the entire presentation by giving the incentive at the end
• Be sure to prepare ahead of time – check all audio and technology ahead of time
• Engage your audience with polls and Q&A
• Experiment to see what dates, times and length will work best for your audience
  • Maybe we have just been conditioned but both webinars said hour long webinars Tuesday-Thursday at 1 or 2PM EST work best.
• Profile your audience when they register so that the speaker can be more relevant to the audience
• Promote that the audience will get a chance to engage with the speaker(s) – “This is your chance to ask Seth Godin anything you want” (If this is a big part of the draw be sure to allow plenty of time for Q&A, possible ask for questions ahead of time. People will tune in to see if their question is answered)

For more tips on increasing webinar attendance check out 12 Ways to Turn 300 Webinar Attendees Into 3,000+ Part I – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #105 and 12 Ways to Turn 300 Webinar Attendees Into 3,000+ Part II – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #107

Driving booth traffic at a trade show can always be challenging. With so many other booths vying for attention, how do you make sure that attendees stop by your booth? Sometimes you have to get creative to use a smaller budget than your competition, and have equal or better results.

Two years ago at DreamForce, salesforce.com’s user group conference, we utilized several strategies to drive more booth visitors. We created a theme to make sure all elements of our strategy tied together. Our theme was “No More Lists.” Being a provider of role-based contact databases, we wanted to end the use of traditional title-based list use.

Attendees knew about us before they even walked through the doors of the Moscone center. We hired temporary staff to be picketers on the sidewalk holding various signs with the No More Lists theme and chanting, “ No More Lists!” As attendees walked past, the picketers would hand them “No More Lists” buttons and direct the attendees to the ReachForce Booth to get cash.

I will note that in some ways this is a cautionary tale; we did have the cops called on us by the organizers of the event. The police actually sided in our favor, but we decided to drop the picketers for the second day of the conference to keep from ruffling too many feathers.

One of us also walked the floor to hand out more buttons and direct traffic to our booth. If an attendee came to the booth, we let them pick an envelope. Each envelope was filled with cash ranging from $1 to $50. If you are trying to figure out the most compelling giveaway keep in mind that everyone loves cold hard cash.

Our booth strategy was a success. We created lots of buzz with the picketers outside and exceeded our goals for booth traffic. We also generated enough revenue to pay for the cost of the show.

As you are developing a strategy to drive more booth traffic, keep these ideas in mind:

• Create buzz before attendees reach the show floor – this does not have to be outside the exhibit hall like our picketers. You can start the buzz on your blog, through Twitter, in a press release, a pre-show party, pre-show mailer or email.
• Have giveaways that people will tell their friends about – either have the latest must have gadget or a desirable giveaway for every visitor like cash.
• Make as many people at the show your brand ambassadors – we did this with buttons but you could also give away t-shirts or hats, anything people will wear – then reward them for wearing it.

Lots of good stuff in this chapter. Examples and case studies are mostly B2C, but the concepts work well for B2B Marketing as well.

Emanuel Rosen defines BUZZ as “the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time.” He goes on to list why buzz is powerful today – noise, skepticism, and connectivity.

• Noise – “Customers can hardly hear you.” Marketing and Advertising are everywhere. There’s no escaping it. We get it in the mail, we see banner ads online, when was the last time you searched Google and didn’t see a paid ad pop up? And let’s not forget all of the email spam we dread every day. As Marketers, we must figure out a way to stand out in the crowd if we want to be heard (or seen). This creates buzz.
• Skepticism – “Customers are skeptical.” This isn’t surprising. They have been bombarded by marketing and advertising everywhere they go, all promising to the best results. Who should they believe or trust? Rosen mentions a survey that illustrates this point – “37% of the public considers information from a software company ‘very or somewhat believable’.” Wow!
• Connectivity – Today people are easily connected. We all have access to new tools that enable us to better share information. As Marketers, wouldn’t we rather them talk about us to our face instead of behind our back? Create places and opportunities for people to speak out about your products or services. Be involved.

Rosen goes on to say “If you want to create buzz, you have to know who your customers are and how you are reaching them. Start by answering these questions:

• From whom do your customers typically learn about your product?
• What do people say when they recommend your product?
• How fast does information about your product spread as compared with competitors’ products?
• Who are the network hubs?
• Where does the information hit a roadblock?
• How many sources of information does a customer rely on and which ones are most important?
• What other kinds of information spread through the same networks?”

Not only will these questions help us create buzz, they’ll also be helpful as we are launching new products or services, introducing new features, and thinking about other social marketing strategies.

Generating buzz doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes planning, seeding and well thought out execution. A good seeding program can be the launching pad to huge success. Rosen listed four rules for building a successful seeding program, these are definitely worth sharing and talking about.

1. “Look beyond the usual suspects. Identify social circles, industry segments, or academic disciplines in which people don’t talk about your product or service, and seed them.”
2. “Put products in their hands.” Let your audience touch or experience firsthand what you are offering. If your solution isn’t one you can easily experience, offer a free demo or show real results via a proven customer success story.
3. “Reduce the price barrier. Make the product free for seed recipients if you can, or at least offer a significant discount.”
4. “Listen for silence. When you hear silence, the network is dead. Pay attention to dead networks and do further seeding to wake them up.”

Remember, the goal of seeding is to “plant the seed to stimulate discussion in multiple networks simultaneously.”

At ReachForce we are rolling out new SaaS tools that enable Sales and Marketing teams to better identify and target their market “sweet spots”. Here’s how we are trying to create some buzz around these new product offerings –

• We typically sell to Marketers but with these new SaaS tools Sales teams might be a better target audience so we are doing some test messaging via email programs to a custom role-based list of Sales decision makers.
• We are offering these people free trials of the real time analytics software. We started out offering the new tools bundled with ReachForce data services and decided that stand alone, the analytics tools added value and created a sense of wanting more (data services). So we now are offering the new tools free for a limited time. We are hoping this is going to create buzz for both the software and data services.
• We are also experimenting with some very targeted advertising programs. Hoping these are going to drive some awareness as well as generate some prospect engagement.
• We are tracking our buzz program by measuring how many people actually log in and try out the free software tools. So far so good and we’re just getting started!

With all of these things we are trying to create buzz that ultimately turns into measurable revenue.

Anyone else actively working on a B2B word-of-month campaign? If so, I’d love to hear all about it.

One of the best ways to increase your SEO rankings is to attract inbound links to your blog or website.

Traditional link building efforts involve asking for links, link swapping, or link buying. This process is extremely time consuming and can get expensive if you are buying high quality links. Really, in this instance, is there any such thing as a quality link? After all, Google has made no secret that it is actively seeking ways to weed out this practice.

In contrast, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by leveraging social media to convince others to link to your content. The challenge is coming up with link-worthy material and then spreading the word via Twitter and other social media tools. Fortunately for those of us with little time and fewer resources, the process of building this content just got a lot easier. You no longer need to embark upon a lengthy research project or write a 10 page white paper. These days, successful link bait is taking the form of widgets or mashups or other forms of rich media content. The prerequisite is that the content should be helpful, clever, funny, or remarkable enough that others want to write about it or include it in their roundup of free tools.

The process of building a widget or mashup used to require Web development skills or enough budget to farm out the work. I’ve been reading about a number of free tools that allow just about anyone to create their own widgets but have not found the confidence to try them. Prodded by a “tweet” from one of the more influential Twitterati (did I really just write that?), I decided to check out, Sprout, an extremely cool and easy to use site to help you build widgets or other informational tools that can be embedded in your blog or web site. http://sproutbuilder.com/whataresprouts.

Sprout looks easy enough to use and I’m ready to check it out. Now, I just have to come up with the “killer app” for our blog readers. To get ideas, the first step will be to reach out to the community reading the BreakingPoint blog at www.breakingpointlabs.com and then do a bit of brainstorming.

More on this in another post.

As we are fast approaching mid-year, it is a good time to look back at the investments you have already made this year and look for new ways to leverage these investments.

This is a time to make the invisible visible.

Most B2B Marketers have invested in either search engine optimization, paid search advertising or both this year. My guess is you were probably hoping for more quality leads from these investments. Have you considered these ideas to get more bang for your buck?

• Identify visitors that didn’t announce themselves (the companies they originated from). Your web analytics tools can help with this or check out ReachForce Convert for more segmentation level data and visitor patterns.
• Now that you’ve got the companies identified, do you have the right contacts to reach out to and play offense? Consider reaching out with an offer call to action relevant to the pages they viewed.

How about your current customer marketing? Are you doing everything you can to get more from what you already have?

• Is your customer database up to date and complete? 2% of data goes bad every month. Which 2%? Who knows. Your customer database is a great place to start a data refresh project.
• While you’re refreshing, do you have the right buying contacts for additional products or services? If not consider adding these to the customer records so you are ready when you have new or updated product offers.

Many of you invested in events in the first half of ’08. Have those leads been followed up on? According to SiriusDecisions, only 10% of trade show leads are followed-up by Sales. Are you, as a Marketer, nurturing the other 90%?

• For those leads that are non-responsive, make sure that you have the right contacts in those companies. Think about the role of the person you are targeting? Think about the multiple folks involved in a purchase process at your target and their role. You might need different offers or calls-to-action for each member of the decision making unit.
• Continue to nurture leads not ready for sales – dialog is important, it takes 5 to 7 touches to turn a lead into a prospect.

Webinars seemed to have only increased in popularity in 2008. Although the event happens live, the recorded content can be repurposed.

• Did you record the webinar and post on your website? Are you campaigning around the event even though the live version has already happened?
• Have you considered using services like Insight24 to syndicate your webcast to over 13 million viewers?
• Don’t forget about the podcasters. You can easily turn a webinar into multiple podcasts. Make sure short, bite sized content is available for those always short on time.

Summer is often “down-time” for marketing and a time to plan for the blitz of lead generation post Labor Day. This summer instead of “getting ready for what’s to come”, consider spending a little time repurposing what you’ve already done, in between the down time of course.

I’m sure all of us have read Purple Cow at some point but it was nice to revisit the high points. It is hard to believe that what Seth was talking about at the time was so innovative when it now seems like common sense, at least to us smart marketers.

Purple Cow is all about creating an innovative product (or service) and marketing it to the right influencers, or “sneezers” if you will. Unfortunately for a lot of us, we are not involved in the product planning or design or we simply are trying to market a product that was created long before there was a marketing department. I believe that many of the rules for creating a purple cow can be translated to creating marketing campaigns. Here are six ideas from Purple Cow on how to change or product (or campaign):

• Think small – “don’t try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody.” For marketers this means creating messages specific to niche audiences. Target a specific message to a focused audience. No spray and pray, ’nuff said.
• Outsource – If your internal resources can’t think outside the box for a new creative campaign, you might try using an outside vendor. If the campaign is successful, your internal resource will learn to shape up or ship out.
• Build and use a permission asset – Create a user community to allow your customers to communicate with each other and you. If you do not have enough customer to warrant creating your own community, use one on Facebook or LinkedIn. At the very least have a customer advisory board to keep you in check.
• Copy, not from your industry, but from any other industry – B2B Marketers steal from our B2C cousins all the time. Look for a company that is running a remarkable campaign and copy it.
• Identify a competitor who’s generally regarded as “at the edges,” and outdo it - Aren’t we always trying to outdo our competition. My advice, make your campaign remarkable enough that your competition can’t copy or outdo you.
• Ask, “Why not?” – Wacky ideas are good. Always ask yourself, “why not?”

Event budgets are typically pretty spongy. They are usually handed out in lump amounts with very little success measures put in place around these events. Here are a few ideas to drive real leads from event spend.

• Make sure each person attending the event has goals assigned to them. Some examples include– X # of people scanned, X # of demos, X # of conversations had outside of the company booth, # of business cards collected. Use a little budget for prizes for the winners.
• Assign someone or a group of people to visit every other company participating in the event. You obviously have something in common, you are at the same event. Challenge team members to get other companies to drive traffic your way. Again, give away prizes to the company that sends the most people your way. Good use of $$ here, not only are you getting a chance to meet people who may not have stopped by to see you, you are also starting a new relationship with your forwarding friend.
• Ask each person that stops by your booth about the person responsible for using/buying your product or service. Give away another prize here to the team member that gets not only a name but also contact information and a referral from the person attending the show.
• If you have partners attending a show, put together a program that encourages people to visit your partner’s booth and vice versa.
• Once you return from an event and are getting ready to hand the warm and hot leads over to sales, STOP. Remember if you are passing a lead on there should be some additional information that goes along with the lead. Information that deems it Sales-ready. For these leads, use a little event budget and incent the Sales team to push these leads and to keep you posted on their progress. Everyone likes to be rewarded, a little piece of your event budget for prizes and everyone wins.
• Leads that aren’t Sales ready, divide those into 2 groups – those that you have the right decision makers name and possible contact info. These people are ready for a very targeted marketing program. For those that you only have the information of the person that stopped by and visited you at the show, invest in contact discovery for these. It’s worth the extra dollars to be able to turn otherwise dead event data into an actionable lead. These newly discovered leads will then be ready for your targeted marketing programs.
• Don’t forget to keep up with your spend. You’ll need this to calculate your ROI. You’ll also want to use this info. to measure the new tactics you are trying out.
• Tag event leads in your CRM system. This information will be used for follow up, for continued marketing with relevant messaging, and most importantly it’s needed to measure ROI of the event.

Got any more creative event spend ideas? Please share.

As a student of Geoffrey Moore’s best-selling books Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend a VIP reception with Moore at the TEXCHANGE June meeting. I was particularly excited by the topic of Moore’s presentation “Provocation-Based Selling” because of my long history of launching tech startups.

Moore has made the study of disruptive technologies the focus of his books and research. His insights on marketing and selling breakthrough products have shaped my strategies for so many companies and I’m sure his new insights on selling disruptive products in a down economy will be no different.

Moore set the stage for his presentation by making the important point that when you are selling disruptive technologies there is no budget allocation for your product. Prospective customers may love your product, but when there is no money available for discretionary spending, you have to help the buyer create budget before you can sell them.

He advocates a combination of referral marketing and provocation-based selling to help startups break into markets that are structured to favor incumbents. You have to use referral marketing to get the meeting with the Line of business (LOB) executive who has the authority to move budget around. And, then, use provocation-based selling to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about the impact of “not doing” something about it.

On the Referral marketing front, Moore advises companies to directly target the company, learn about the LOB executive, then seek out a common connection to get referred for a meeting. For me, services such as ReachForce have helped me map out the LOB execs in an organization, but I augmented it with products like LinkedIn and Facebook to find common connections.

Often, your business partners will be the key to getting a referral. Building out a referral program for these partners has always been an excellent way to motivate them to make the introduction or even take you along on a sales call. Of course, it’s always helpful if you can provide those business partners with a compelling reason to put you in front of their buyers. For example, maybe you could offer training or educational materials on a topic that helps them sell more products as well.

Once you’ve nailed that all important meeting, Moore advises that you sell them on the fact that they have a serious problem and determine what type of buyer they are:

• conservatives: convince them you can save them money
• pragmatics: give them the symptoms you believe they might have in their company of a serious problem your product solves
• visionary: show how your product will set them apart and open up tremendous new opportunities to pursue

Then, ask them to make a commitment that if you show them that your solution can benefit them, they will take the action to make budget available. Press them for a commitment. If you’re not convinced, then disqualify them.

As I was reading this chapter, I kept thinking of online user communities. I don’t know if we are ready yet here at ReachForce, but I am intrigued by Metcalfe’s Law. “According to Metcalfe, the usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of users. Whatever you create becomes more valuable as more people use it. And the more valuable it it becomes, the more users it attracts.” This is obvious when you look at online social and networking communities like Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook would have no value to me if none of my friends had profiles, but as more and more people join the value increases for each user, causing more users to join.

Being a marketer at a small company, I am curious how this law translates to B2B customer communities. The number of users for a B2B company community is limited by the number of customers. It cannot grow as organically as a community site like Facebook can. Should then small companies create user communities within a larger community? Have you had success starting a user community within Facebook or LinkedIn? Do you as a marketer belong to any online marketing communities?

As I was getting ready to start building out a few landing pages for some newsletter advertising I decided to Google landing page best practices. As expected, lots of both organic and paid options came up. I noticed Marketo had an ad out there, so I clicked on it. I’ve seen their stuff before and was very impressed, so I thought I’d start here with my landing page inquiry. After a few clicks I got to an eBook – “Building Effective Landing Pages”. This eBook had some great tips that were B2B Lead worthy so I wanted to share and give Marketo a shout out too. You can get this great eBook as well as others at http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/best-practices.php.  For now, here’s a few tips that really stood out:

1. Focus on a single call to action, such as a download or a demo. Distractions kill conversions.
This is really important; offering too much information muddies the waters. You want your call-to-action to stand out. Remember we are not trying to complete a sale via an email program. We are educating our prospects and highlighting pain points in bite size chunks. Warming leads up to better qualify them for Sales.

2. Content – Give it to them straight.

• Make it clear and to the point, but give your prospect a reason to give you his information.
• Setup the problem
• Talk about the solution (your offer)
• Deliver the goods (such as a white paper, video demo or webinar registration)
• And use bullet points – they are easier to read

Emails seem to be most effective when they are 2-3 short paragraphs with a link to a landing page/offer as close to the top as possible. Remember a lot of people view emails in a preview pane. This may be your only opportunity to present your message, so make sure you get straight to the point.

3. Call to Action – Forms – Remember not to ask too many questions up front.
You don’t need everything they first time a prospect engages with you. Remember you are building a relationship. Collect more information as the prospect continues on the journey with you.

4. Confirmation/ Thank Yous – It’s just plain good manners to say thank you. Do you have something else they might be interested in? Make another offer.
I think this might be one of the most important tips on the list. Saying Thank You never goes out of style. And, I agree with Marketo, put another offer out there, see if they bite. Taking you up on a second offer could be a sign of a cold lead moving to warm.

5. Page URLs – The name of the page, along with the rest of the URL path, is weighed fairly heavily. You can use 1024 characters, so you don’t have to be stingy. And use dashes between words, not underscores – search engines like that better.
Marketo example: www.marketo.com/building-effective-landing-pages.html
Don’t forget your Google juice with every landing page you build. Remember to use your PPC keywords here too.

Again, thanks to Marketo for the list of landing page tips. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the list at Marketo’s B2B Marketing Best Practices.