The secret to great marketing of manufactured products is to stop talking about the products.
Last week, we discussed how to get started with lead generating webinars. This week, we’ll delve into the detail of the first 4 steps of the 8 step framework. You can view the webinar covering the same topic here.
The 8 Step Framework is primarily written for companies that manufacture a product. The idea behind the framework is that by moving away from webinars about the product, you will offer more useful information to the target audience. As we outlined in the first webinar and in last week’s blog post, the sweet spot topic will generate hundreds or even thousands of registrants and attendees to your educational, knowledge based webinar. As a reminder, the sweet spot is the intersection of the pain or passion of your target audience with the relevant expertise housed within your company.
By educating and/or helping the people in your target audience to be better at something that matters to them, your brand gains TOMA (top of mind awareness) and credibility in their minds. It follows what when the day comes around when they want or need to purchase the type of product you are offering, your firm gets the call and, usually, gets the order.
Here’s steps 1 through 4 (we’ll cover steps 5 through 8 next week) of the 8 Step Framework:
Step 1 – Get together with the key stakeholders at your organization to agree on these concepts:
- The objective for the webinar. This could be leads, closed business, awareness or something
else supporting the business goals. - Identify the target audience and where they can be reached.
- Select the topic for the webinar. The first ideas you hear will be to promote your wonderful
product. RESIST! Product based webinars will fail. The webinar topic should be of an
educational nature. Educate the target audience about something that matters to them and
about something where your firm has unique expertise. - Agree on the metrics used to determine success or failure.
- Agree with the Sales Team on their role in promoting and/or follow up to the webinar.
- Gain agreement on budget and personnel resources. Personnel resources are especially
important if your Subject Matter Experts will be contributing their expertise and knowledge on
top of their regular duties and responsibilities.
Step 2 – Create the concept and agree on the face you will present to the audience:
- Create a compelling name for the webinar or for the webinar series. The name doesn’t need to
be extraordinary or clever, but it should clearly explain what the webinar is about. - Choose compelling titles for each webinar in the series.
- Create 100 word descriptions to be used widely in the promotion of the webinar.
- You may or may not want to create a brand around the webinar. A separate brand could
include a logo, colors, look and feel of the promotion and webinar itself. - Create uniform looking templates for emails, registration materials and the webinar
presentation materials.
Step 3 – Identify the players. You will need this group to be willing, available and committed:
- Appoint a webinar manager or chairperson to make sure everything comes together. The
webinar manager will own the Webinar Checklist and make it all happen. - Identify potential speakers and solicit them to volunteer and commit to the webinars. You
might also need to talk to their managers to make sure they will have support to participate as
needed. The speakers must be Subject Matter Experts. It is very important that the speakers
have the authority to speak about the topic. If the speaker is not a SME, the firm will lose
credibility with the target audience. - Identify a Moderator. This position is not mandatory, but I strongly recommend to have at least
two speakers because it makes for a much more interesting listening experience. A professional
moderator can go a long ways towards improving the quality of the event. - Assign at least two people to moderate the chat interaction. These people should also be SMEs,
but you could get by with people who are not experts. I suggest one chat moderator for each
500 registrants if at all possible. - Assign one of your marketers to be the Promotion Manager who lines up all promotion activities
and monitors results. - Assign one of your marketers to be the Post-webinar Manager. Activity after the live broadcast
is critical for converting registrants and attendees into the sales funnel and ultimately to more
sales. This person is responsible for that activity happening and for it to be effective.
Step 4 – You will need to have some tools to create, produce, promote and broadcast the webinar:
- You must have a webinar platform. Don’t try to use your virtual meeting provider as the
webinar platform. Use a tool designed for broadcasting a webinar. There are a lot of options
out there with different price points and features. Some well-known providers include
ReadyTalk, ON24, WebEx. - A marketing automation platform is ideal for promoting, managing and measuring your webinar.
However, you can still produce a webinar without one of the MAP tools. - If you do not have MAP, you will need an email service provider for invitation, reminder and
follow up emails. Some webinar platforms include these email options. - Depending on the interaction of the sales team, you may want to utilize your CRM as a means to
manage leads and campaigns.
Stay tuned for learning all about steps 5 through 8 in the Smarter Manufacturing blog.
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