Download Online Events: A Powerful Web 2.0 Tool for Engaging

Online Events: A Powerful Web 2.0 Tool for Engaging
Audiences with Content throughout the Buying Cycle
Engagement Marketing .............................................................................................................................2
What is Engagement Marketing? ..............................................................................................................2
Why Invest in Engagement Marketing? ....................................................................................................2
Measuring Engagement Marketing Success 2
Keys to Effective Engagement Marketing .................................................................................................2
Engagement Marketing Tools ...................................................................................................................3
Why Online Events? .................................................................................................................................3
Latest Best Practices in Online Events .....................................................................................................4
Capturing Profiling Information Once ........................................................................................................4
Viral Sharing and Promotion .....................................................................................................................5
Embedability .............................................................................................................................................5
About BrightTALK .....................................................................................................................................5
For More Information ................................................................................................................................5
Engagement Marketing
What is Engagement Marketing?
Engagement marketing is a relatively new term with an evolving definition. At its core, engagement marketing is a
coordinated and continuous process of connecting, in a variety of ways, with key audiences including: existing
customers or members, prospects, the media, shareholders, community groups, educators, and students.
The goal is to build and nurture an active community around a company’s content. Engaging buyers throughout
the buying cycle—from pre-sale to post-sale and beyond—is critical, but not every interaction is aimed at closing
a sale. Many interactions have other objectives, such as building awareness, establishing thought leadership,
gathering customer feedback, and nurturing current customers.
Why Invest in Engagement Marketing?
An effective engagement marketing program offers companies more than just an increase in leads and sales—it
keeps companies much closer to their customers. The process yields a variety of insightful information that can
be used by marketing teams to:
Fine tune messaging strategies
Develop more relevant content
Communicate more effectively with different audiences
Enhance customer service
Improve product designs
Engagement marketing programs also help customers feel better understood and informed resulting in stronger
word-of-mouth recommendations.
Measuring Engagement Marketing Success
How does a company determine how well it is engaging customers and prospects? What are the metrics of
success? The answer is complex as multiple technologies and marketing tactics are involved, such as email,
white papers, web pages, brochures, trade show exhibits, and online events. Currently multiple measures are
used but some are better than others.
There are several traditional cost per action online advertising measurements. These include number of clicks,
cost-per-thousand of impressions (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost per sale, among others. Based on these
measures, advertisers pay each time a particular action occurs. None of them, however, reveal the quality of the
interaction. To address that limitation, there is a movement towards charging online advertisers based on how
involved a user is with the content: cost per engagement. Examples of engagements include: participating in a
poll or questionnaire, playing a game, rolling over an ad (to activate it), downloading collateral, watching a product
demo, and viewing a webcast.
Cost per engagement begins to address what is most important—the level of engagement (i.e. attention or time) a
prospect or customer has with a piece of content. Regardless of where in the buying cycle a particular marketing
activity is aimed (from pre-sale awareness to post-sale experiences), level of engagement is the best indicator of
a positive outcome. The more time an audience spends with a company’s content, the more their awareness of
the company’s thought leadership and offerings increases. The hottest leads and the most loyal customers are
almost always the ones who spend the most time with a company’s content.
Keys to Effective Engagement Marketing
Reaching and nurturing diverse sets of audiences requires more than just providing high-quality content.
Successful engagement marketing relies on 1) the ability to target activities to each audience’s current situation
and 2) collecting rich audience profile information. Effectively executing these two activities helps a company
develop and deliver meaningful and relevant content that keeps audiences eager for more.
Targeting activities: Identifying and nurturing highly-engaged audiences accelerates the sales cycle, fosters
customer loyalty, and encourages valuable dialogues. The key to accelerating the sales cycle is staying in contact
with customers and prospects over time, and intensifying sales efforts when they’re ready to close. A more
scattershot approach risks losing prospects to a competitor who happens to catch them when they are ready to
buy. Consistent engagement over time also helps build top-of-mind awareness and encourages customers to
share valuable feedback and ideas.
Audience profiles: Capturing meaningful profile information—such as individual and company contact information,
company size and industry, and other individual and company characteristics that help identify them as a viable
lead—is critical to understanding who, over time, is engaging with one’s content.
In-depth profiles enable marketers to more effectively time and tailor their customer engagements. For example,
strong audience profiles help inform decision makers about when to send in the sales team. A lot of money is
wasted chasing leads that aren’t ready to close. Good audience profiles also reveal customer insights that inform
other important activities, such as messaging and product development.
Engagement Marketing Tools
Engagement marketing was once the domain of large companies with dedicated sales forces that could maintain
one-to-one relationships with their top customers. Sales reps got to know the customers personally, and could
send them specifically targeted information. Web 2.0 tools, however, have changed the engagement marketing
landscape, making one-to-many engagement marketing relationships affordable and effective for organizations of
any size.
Today, engagement marketing tools are characterized by their ability to empower users. They provide content
when and where users want it, and facilitate the sharing (often virally) of popular content. Examples include:
Blogs
RSS (really simple syndication) feeds
Social networking site (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn)
Email campaigns
Online Events
It is important to distinguish between one-off use of these tools—such as a single email campaign or webcast—
and sustained engagement marketing programs using a variety of tools. The difference is the goal: engagement
marketing seeks to build and nurture a dynamic community of like-minded audience members around a
company’s relevant and timely content. One-off uses of these tools have a much more limited and immediate
goal.
Why Online Events?
Recent research shows that decision makers are increasingly relying on web-based events to inform their
purchasing decisions. This trend—combined with social networking’s role as the new word of mouth in business—
means the Web 2.0 evolution has given marketers new ways to reach these savvy customers.
Most people’s first experience with online events is as a participant in an internal meeting with a small and
specific invitation list. Engagement marketing online events are different. They are half-hour to multi-day events
aimed at a much larger and public audience and are typically available live or on-demand, which allows viewers to
watch on their own schedule. Speakers include subject matter experts—both internal and external to the host
company, and can include industry analysts, representatives from academia, government agencies and
associations—with impressive credentials and proven expertise.
Interactive online events help companies meet potential customers where they are: online. They are also ideally
suited to engaging prospects during all the phases of the sales cycle with specifically targeted content. Other
digital marketing tactics rarely capture much, if any, information about the individual that’s engaging with the
content.
Online events offer a number of advantages over other types of customer engagement mediums:
1) Significant audience interaction: Before the event, registrants provide important profiling information.
During the webcasts, participants can type questions to the speaker and vote in online polls. These
interactions allow online event hosts to learn a great deal about what issues are driving their target
audiences and who may be closest to buying. Some online event providers also offer survey functionality
to ask audience members about their interests, buying patterns and desires.
2) Creation of an on-demand asset: Archived webcasts are an excellent way to provide target audiences
with relevant content whenever they want it. Over 75% of webcast viewers watch archived, as opposed to
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live, webcasts. This extends the utility of a company’s content and subject matter experts. Online Events
also add depth to marketing websites and can showcase thought leadership.
3) Ability to align content with buying cycle and corporate needs: Online events can be designed to
incorporate a company’s branding and adhere to corporate and product marketing messaging and
objectives—from driving demand, to launching a new product, or demonstrating thought leadership to a
broad community. They also help marketers map marketing tactics internally and externally.
4) Ability to measure attention: Online event reports collect detailed statistics about who participated in
which events, which content they engaged with, and for how long. This information can be tracked over
time and monitored to identify peaks in interest.
5) Portability: Online events allow live and recorded content to be made available on any web page owned
by the company or on third-party sites. They are also easily shared via social media sites and other Web
2.0 tools.
6) Cost effectiveness: Recreating content (particularly presentations) is expensive and inefficient. It also
consumes too much of a company’s thought leaders’ time. Webcasts can be recorded and made
available for on-demand viewing in their entirety, which saves human and financial resources and
maximizes the utility of existing content.
Latest Best Practices in Webcasting
The following best practices make online events a powerful tool for reaching and building audiences and focusing
marketing activities.
Capturing Profiling Information Once
Registration pages and “required field” asterisks are among the least popular calls-to-action on a website, even
when there’s no fee required. It is where visitors are most likely to leave for another site.
Asking visitors to register multiple times for multiple assets compounds the problem and is inefficient. These
speed bumps interrupt the engagement flow and risk stifling further interactions. Most content provider sites make
this mistake.
It’s far better to ask visitors to register once and then give them access to a multitude of content, visit after visit.
Beyond encouraging further engagement that advances the selling process, capturing profile information once
allows for the aggregation and reporting of audience engagement statistics for each visitor over time. It provides
important visibility on how engaged the audience was with each event including attendance and viewing duration.
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BrightTALK’s experience
Embedability
Requiring your audience to visit an online events site to view content limits a webcast’s reach. In the Web 2.0
environment, it’s much more powerful to take content to the viewers, not visa versa.
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Technologies like Adobe Flash make it easy to embed live and archived webcasts into any web page and are
already widely accepted. Offering webcasts on corporate websites, blogs, media microsites, industry association
sites, and sales or industry partners’ sites increases viewership and promotes the webcast author’s brand.
It’s also easy to create a landing page for multiple webcasts that includes additional content such as white papers,
newsletters, product information pages, and other digital assets.
Viral Sharing and Promotion
“Going viral” isn’t just for outrageous video clips. Interested online event audience members are eager to share
content with like-minded colleagues. It’s crucial that these events include easy-to-use tools for promoting content
on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, Delicious and Twitter. These sharing capabilities help quickly
promote events, increase audience sizes, and encourage return visits. Online event providers can also support
the growth of audiences to your company’s event by making all of the content available through a search function.
This can potentially add thousands of new viewers who are able to find the information they are interested in.
About BrightTALK
BrightTALK is unique in its ability to engage customers using Web 2.0 tools. We are currently the only online
events service provider that offers: one-time registration and profile information collection, embeddable events
channels, and simple sharing tools. We’re one of the few that offers on-demand online events and audience
survey functionality to learn more about an audience’s interests and opinions.
BrightTALK is not a technology—nor is it just a tool for delivering one-off webcasts. BrightTALK is a creator of
ongoing, interactive communities of self-selected members with common interests—and that’s what separates
engagement marketing from traditional marketing activities. A sense of community and consistent access to
timely and relevant content keeps an audience coming back—and referring others.
We’re devoted to making online events the ultimate business tool for transferring knowledge. We create a vibrant
exchange of ideas between presenters and viewers featuring live, interactive access to industry thought leaders.
Our approach generates strong returns on investment and highly measurable engagement, awareness, and lead
generation results by enhancing our customers’ reputation as a thought leader among audiences of relevant
decision-makers and influencers.
For More Information
To learn more about how to use online events to generate thought leadership, awareness, and guaranteed leads,
please call (415) 625- 1517 to speak with a BrightTALK representative or visit the following links:
Attend the BrightTALK Online Events Academy
Attend our Weekly Demo
Start a Free Trial