Getting Started with Lead Generating Webinars - Webinar Production for Manufacturing

Editor's Notes

• #2: Bruce: Welcome – you’re signed on to the first webinar in a 4 part How to series designed for manufacturing companies to learn how to create and execute lead generating educational webinars. With the title of webinar #1 “Getting Started with Lead Generating Webinars”. The webinar series is created and produced by Knowledge Marketing for Industry (KMI for short). If you attend or listen to all 4 webinars, you will be fully equipped to create, produce, execute and measure you own educational webinar series capable of generating hundreds or maybe even thousands of quality leads for your sales funnel. In a recent survey by CMI and Adobe, an interesting bit of information was that about 2/3 or B2B marketers have tried webinars as part of their marketing mix, but then quit because they were ineffective or less effective than expected. Of those 2/3 who tried and then stopped, 75% had built their webinars around the product; training or new product launch for example. This is not uncommon in my experience as well. I worked for an electronics mfg co a few years ago. This company made measurement instruments. Product managers tried webinars – poor results Look at it from a different view point Turned it around Educational versus product 1500 compared to 15 100x improvement in engagement! That’s what we’re going to teach you in this webinar series – how to engage deeper and broader with your target audience using educational webinars. This is not theoretical – we’ve had great success with manufacturing companies using this 8 step framework. You will have great success too!
• #3: Bruce: Speaking today, my name is Bruce McDuffee, principal consultant for KMI bringing 20+ years in B2B sales and marketing primarily in the Industrial sector. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that educational or knowledge marketing outperforms product marketing by a significant margin every time when it comes to audience engagement.  And Dan Levy as my co-presenter today - Dan has worked as a marketing strategist and content developer for 25 years for myriad industry segments. His career has been shaped by helping manufacturers find their stories and tell them in a way that engages, educates and enlightens customers and prospects alike. Now we’re going to jump start your learning curve as Dan kicks off one important aspect of lead generating webinars…
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• #5: Bruce Planning for 45 minutes so we’ll end promptly at :45 past the hour.
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• #8: Bruce 5 Ps, Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance Via Chat – or just raise your hand - How many downloaded the checklist? [depending on attendance]
• #9: Bruce Start up – determine objectives, align stakeholders, specify budget Branding – decide how you will position your webinar, build all the templates – email, ppt slides, special logo, titles, etc. Team – speakers, moderator, experts, promotion manager, etc. Tools – what will you use as the webinar platform, promotion tools, follow up marketing tools, etc. Promotion – decide how you will promote the webinars – outbound and inbound – will you advertise? Email? Other? Execution – The details of the actual live broadcast and how you’ll leverage the recorded webinar. This is included in detail in the KMI webinar checklist – free to download for all attendees and registrants
• #10: Bruce Note: Best topic depends on the objective, for example if the objective is top of the funnel, new leads, re-activate a dormant database – best topic is educational and that’s what we’re focusing on today. There is a case where a specific product demo or how to use a product training is relevant, but it is for existing customers or moving prospects through lower stages of the buying process. Let’s focus on top of the funnel for this discussion.
• #11: Bruce: Identify the target audience – should be a group who will buy what you’re selling some time in the future. You should know where and how to reach them with your message (webinar invitation) You need to be able to find their pain or passion. How will you learn this information? - First party research - Third party research - sales people - customer service team
• #12: Bruce you’re looking for the intersection of their pain or passion and your firm’s expertise For example – this KMI webinar series - The pain – growing a manufacturing business through more sales – requires more leads, broader engagement, generating TOMA – more revenue and market share The expertise – creating and executing webinars for manufacturing companies that get hundreds or sometimes thousands of registrants – as a practitioner, practical experience not theoretical - the sweet spot (or webinar mission statement) for this webinar series is helping manufacturing marketers generate more qualified leads with educational webinars.
• #13: Bruce It’s important to look at it from the perspective of the audience. Who knows what WIIFM means? It stands for “what’s in it for me”. This is the question each of us asks ourselves when we decide whether or not to pay attention to a message, or attend a webinar for example. How can your firm’s expertise make their lives better, make them better. The first impulse you will have and the first reaction from your stakeholders will be to help them realize how your product is different. “We need to educate them why they should buy our widget” This is a self-centered view. Resist it to the point of not even bothering with a webinar. You want to approach the topic selection from an audience focused approach.   Another question we ask ourselves is ‘Why should I care?’. You, [name some names] as content marketers need to ask these questions on behalf of the people in your target audience. We’re going to look at a couple of examples in a few minutes.
• #14: Bruce What is your expertise? That is the expertise of your company and those employed by your company. Yes, you are experts at building your product, let’s just say that is a given. Think about the expertise and the experts needed to support the creation of the product. I’ll give a couple of examples in the next slide in few slides.   If your expertise is unique, your ahead of the game, but usually, it is not unique.   You want to become the ‘go to’ source of expertise for the people in your target audience.   Think about who your experts are – look at product managers, R&D team or customer service people. - avoid using sales people – they always want to sell their product and forget about education.
• #15: Bruce We’re looking for the sweet spot which is the intersection of the pain and passion of the people in the target audience with the expertise of the people at your company. The sweet spot should help the people be better at something, reduce pain or intensify a passion.
• #16: Bruce Let’s look at a couple of examples.
• #19: Results – They had given up on webinars about new product launches. The first webinar about the theory behind water vapor or humidity – 1523 registrants and went on with additional 4 webinars in the series for a total of about 3500 registrants. The concept was expanded to live seminars, infographics, and across business segments
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• #22: Dan Results – the first webinar got about 2500 registrants - over the series of 5 webinars, there were more than 8000 registrants
• #23: Bruce Based on the pain or passion of the audience, your firm’s expertise and the sweet spot where they intersect, you derive your mission statement. This isn’t a business mission statement. It’s not about your firm. It’s not ‘we teach them how to use widget A for application B’. Make it answer those questions as if you were in the target audience ‘WIIFM’ ‘Why should I care?’. As your webinars become known by executives and the sales team, you will have requests for more webinars. Use the mission statement to stay true to the sweet spot of the webinar objectives. Could become the overarching mission statement for your marketing strategy.   Here are a few examples:
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• #27: Bruce The problem is that only a very small, we could say minute, portion of the audience has that immediate need on their mind. So by advertising a product, you will miss most of the people in the audience. The chances of hitting someone in that mode of buying your product at the precise time they see your product promotion are tiny.   Now you can engage and hit the people one at a time if you have a massive marketing budget. Just keep repeating the product message in as many venues as possible, over and over. You can create an awareness and build a message in their minds.   Who in the room has a huge, virtually unlimited marketing budget?   Manufacturing companies usually are the opposite, operating on limited budgets with limited people.
• #28: Bruce If you promote your educational content, you’ll engage with a much larger portion of the audience. Consider the pain point you came up with in the workshop. If you chose it well, most of the target audience will constantly struggle with this pain point. It’s a thorn in their side. If they see an ad or a message that offers to help them with that pain, they will check it out. They will engage with your offer, your offering and your firm.   This is why product marketing fails and educational content marketing sails.   Think about it this way. You can use this analogy with anyone challenging your educational marketing strategy.   Think about your local indoor arena. Does everyone have one in mind? How many people does it hold? 15,000? 18,000? Picture an opportunity where the stadium is filled with people who are your ideal prospect. These 15,000 people will all buy the type of product you make at some time in the next 6 to 12 months. You want them to buy from you of course. You have 5 minutes to get in front of them with huge speakers, any presentation materials you want. What would you say to them?   Most executives, sales people, product people will tell the audience about what they think is the most powerful feature of their product followed by a blurb about why the company is great. The problem is that nobody cares at that moment. There might be a handful of people who happen to be in the later stages of making a purchase, but the rest just don’t care about the product at that moment.   On the other hand, if you take that 5 minutes to tell the audience how you can help them be better at something. Or solve some issue that plagues them every day. You will have most of them listening and wanting to hear more.
• #29: Dan I’m not saying product promotional material is not needed. It is very much needed later in the sales funnel. But it doesn’t work to engage with the audience. It doesn’t work to fill the top of the funnel. Educational content is what gets their attention and you need their attention to begin to build that relationship that leads to a sale. Note on use of webinars for bottom of the funnel conversion, training, customer retention, etc.
• #30: Bruce About half of those of you who registered have tried webinars in the past. According to a recent survey by Content Marketing Institute and Adobe, companies not currently using webinars as part of their marketing mix, but have tried them in the past, 75% used them for product demonstrations or training and not as a thought leadership or educational means. Many of you have tried webinars as new product launches and have been disappointed with the results. Tell the PDC story. Try a different approach – you’ll be amazed at the results. Interestingly, of the non-users who had tried webinars in the past, the vast majority (75%) used them for classic webinar purposes such as online training and education versus high-level content marketing activities (brand awareness or thought leadership).
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