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Page 1: New Ways to Boost Webinar Attendance

Provided Courtesy Of:

Two case studies from MarketingSherpa

WHITEPAPERNew Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

Page 2: New Ways to Boost Webinar Attendance

MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

i © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

New Ways to Boost Attendance and

Maximize Webinar Content Two case studies from MarketingSherpa

Editor Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content

Production Editor

Selena Blue, Junior Copy Editor

Contributors Sean Donahue, Editor

David Kirkpatrick, Reporter

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

ii © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

Copyright © 2012 by MarketingSherpa LLC All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, faxing, emailing, posting online, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. To purchase additional copies of this report, please visit http://www.sherpastore.com Bulk discounts are available for multiple copies. Contact: Customer Service MarketingSherpa LLC 877-895-1717 (outside US, call 401-247-7655) [email protected]

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

iii © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

INTRODUCTION

Dear Fellow Marketer,

Thank you for downloading this MarketingSherpa Special Report provided courtesy of ReadyTalk.

There are many tools available to move prospects through the funnel faster, but few are more efficient at qualifying leads than webinar programs. In fact, in MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook, 92 percent of respondents indicated that webinars were one of the most effective means of generating high-quality leads (second only to website design and optimization).

A successful webinar does much more than create brand awareness and thought leadership — a single webinar adds new names to the marketing database, delivers qualified leads and provides content for future campaigns.

While no single formula works every time, there are many elements that contribute to a successful webinar:

• Promotion • Topic and speaker • Webinar technology platform • Presentation • Post-event activities

In this guide, MarketingSherpa, HubSpot and IDES share their formulas for developing, promoting and hosting highly successful webinars that drive qualified leads. We hope it will motivate you to try new tools and tactics to create your own engaging and successful webinars.

Best Regards,

Teresa Lawlor Director of Marketing ReadyTalk [email protected]

Ready to get started hosting your next flawless webinar? ReadyTalk’s webinar services were built with marketers in mind. It’s easy to schedule a webinar and tap into tools to customize event emails and web pages, promote the event, engage your audience and report on your success. Learn more at www.readytalk.com.

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

1 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

WEBINAR PROMOTION THAT DELIVERS: USE EMAIL, SOCIAL, VIRAL REFERRALS AND VIDEO TO BOOST ATTENDANCE, DRIVE LEAD GEN This case study originally appeared in the MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter.

SUMMARY

The right webinar promotion strategy can be the difference between a lackluster event and a lead generation bonanza.

We spoke with a team that's covering all the bases with a templated webinar communication plan that's driving live-event attendance and contributing to long-term lead generation. See how it combines outbound and automated email, a clever "refer-a-friend" campaign and an on-demand viewing option that captures contact info from 55% of viewers.

by Sean Donahue, Editor

The team at IDES, a search engine and materials directory for the plastics industry, hosts about 50 webinars a year with its advertising partners.

To keep up this pace while still delivering quality leads to partners and its own database, the team developed a webinar promotion and follow-up strategy that is easy to execute, yet makes the most of the channels available to reach potential attendees.

After years of trial-and-error, the team now follows a standard pre- and post-event communication strategy that combines traditional tactics, such as email promotions, with innovations like an automatic refer-a-friend email as part of the registration process. Once the event is over, the team's system gets a recorded version of the webinar online within three hours, enabling it to drive ongoing lead generation months after the event.

These efforts are delivering consistently strong performance from its webinars. For example, for the last three events the team saw on average:

• 73% of registrations coming from its email newsletter and special webinar alert messages • 24% of registrations coming from Google searches • 37% attendance rate on live webinars • 55% lead capture rate from visitors who view an archived presentation

"Like all things, the upfront investment is hardest part — creating all the templates figuring out the process," says Nathan Potter, Marketing Manager. "But once it’s a process, it’s dialed in. One person can handle it and bang it out fast."

We spoke with Potter and Josh Dorrell, Director, New Business Development, for a detailed description of the team's webinar communication strategy.

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

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It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

Here are the key steps the team follows to make the most of their pre-event promotion, registration process and post-event follow-up. Or, head directly to our “Useful Links” section at the bottom of this page to see an annotated PowerPoint presentation that features email samples, registration page screenshots and other visuals.

Pre-event promotions The team begins its promotions about six weeks before the event. It took the following six major steps.

Step #1. Create registration page As soon as the team and its vendor partner decide on a date and subject for an upcoming webinar, it creates a registration page for the event using its webinar platform. The registration form features: - A descriptive title, such as "How to Do Effective Color Change" - A short paragraph describing the event’s content and the insights participants will receive - Date and time of the event - Three fields of required information:

• First name • Last name • Email address

Step #2. Post advertisements and registration link on website Six weeks before the webinar, the team places ads for the event across its website. The ads include the webinar title and a large button that reads, "Register Now," to take visitors to the webinar registration form. The team also adds a link to the registration page to the "Webinars" section of the website, which features links to upcoming live webinars and previously recorded, on-demand webinars.

Step #3. Social media outreach The team creates a blog post promoting the upcoming webinar, which includes the link to the registration page. New blog posts trigger automatic updates of the team’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, so followers

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

3 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

in those two channels will also see the announcement. These social media channels currently drive only a small fraction of total webinar attendees, mostly because of the slow adoption of social media within the plastics industry, says Dorrell. But blog and social media links offer increased SEO visibility and prove to be a channel that drives additional registrations from users who might not respond to email promotions. For example, for the last three webinars the team saw:

• 2% of registrations coming from a blog link • 1% of registrations coming through LinkedIn

Step #4. Promote in email newsletters Two to four weeks before the event, the team includes a promotion for the upcoming webinar in its email newsletter. The webinar promotions are highlighted as a featured story in the newsletter, offering:

• Webinar title • Brief descriptive paragraph, typically copied from the paragraph used on the registration form • Link to the registration form

Results: - Newsletter mentions and website links account for 61% of the team's direct registrations.

Step #5. Targeted email promotion One week before the webinar, the team sends a dedicated promotional email about the upcoming event to a select segment of the house database. The team tracks users' past actions in its CRM system to match the targeted promotion to contacts’ profiles, based on:

• Past webinar attendance • Past whitepaper downloads • Specific article clicks from past newsletters

"[Targeted promotion] is pretty important, but something that we’re treading lightly on," says Dorrell. "These are message about topics that people expect and want to get. We’re being kind of careful not to overdo it."

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

4 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

Step #6. Email send to "Webinar Alert" opt-in list The team also maintains a separate "Webinar Alert" email program for prospects who request notification of all upcoming webinars. This list receives an email announcement one to two days prior to the start of every webinar, which features:

• Webinar title • Descriptive paragraph • Link to the registration form

Results: - Average open rate of 42.6% for the past three Webinar Alert email sends. - These messages accounted for 39% of the team's direct registrations.

Registration process Once a visitor registers for a webinar, they receive the following series of communications:

Step #1. "Refer a friend" option for new registrations Visitors that register for an upcoming webinar are only required to enter a name and email address. But upon registration, users are presented with an automated tool to refer a friend for the event. "That was an 'aha' moment for us," says Potter. "Here’s a great opportunity. The person is in that mode, they've just registered, so we prompt them by saying, 'Hey, do you know anyone else who'd like to come?'" Here’s how it works: - The team uses the registration system provided by its webinar platform provider. This tool allows the team to specify a redirect page upon completion of a registration. So, five seconds after a visitor submits registration info, they are automatically redirected to a special "Refer-a-Friend" webpage. - This webpage, built in an online survey tool (see “Useful Links” at the end of this case study), thanks the visitor for registering and asks if they would like to invite a friend to attend the same webinar. The page includes four fields:

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

5 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

• Registrant’s name • Registrant’s email address • Friend’s email address • Text box to write a personal note about the event

- The "Refer-a-Friend" page also includes a check-box to be added to the team’s Webinar Alerts email program Results: - Refer-a-friend invitations accounted for 5.8% of registrations for the team's last three webinars.

Step #2. Remove registered users from promotional mail program Once the team collects a name and email address on the registration form, it removes that contact from the list of future targeted email promotions about the event. "We don’t want to pound them into submission," says Dorrell. The team’s CRM system does not link directly with the webinar platform’s registration database, so the team has an intern download the registration list and manually scrub name from its email promotion lists.

Step #3. Automated event reminder emails The team relies on its webinar platform to send automated reminder emails before the event. Reminder emails feature the online and dial-in connection instructions, as well as a tool to add the event to Outlook calendars. Reminders are sent:

• One day before the event • One hour before the event

Post-webinar follow-up To quickly disseminate post-event information, the team develops several pieces of collateral prior to the webinar. These assets include:

• On-demand video page • Landing page to download slides • Follow-up emails to attendees and non-attendees

With these pieces in place, the team conducts the following post-webinar outreach:

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

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Step #1. Webinar exit poll At the conclusion of the webinar presentation, attendees are automatically sent to a webpage that features a short exit poll. The online survey asks two key questions:

• Would you like to be notified by email of upcoming IDES webinars (opt-in offer for "Webinar Alert" emails)

• Are there other webinar topics that you’d like to see? Please list below (text box)

Results: - 79% of attendees completed the exit poll for the team's last three events. - 37% of attendees signed up for the Webinar Alert email program from the exit poll.

Step #2. Upload video recording of webinar and slide deck to website The team uses an online video recording tool to capture all of its webinars (see “Useful Links” below). Then, immediately following the conclusion of the webinar, a team member begins editing the raw video for an on-demand version. Post-production tasks include:

• Removing gaps or delays in the session • Removing the introduction and closing remarks • Recording a new introduction narration • Adding music to the beginning and end

The edited video is then embedded in the previously created webpage and uploaded to the on-demand webinar section of the website. Each webinar’s on-demand page also includes a link to download a PDF of the presentation slide deck. The process is completed in about three hours. "A lot of it has to do with being prepared upfront," says Dorrell. "We’ve got all the pages ready and the link built, so we can just pop in the [video] file."

Step #3. Email follow-up to attendees and non-attendees As soon as the on-demand version of the webinar is ready for viewing, the team sends follow-up emails to contacts who registered for the event.

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

7 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

Rather than using the automated follow-up email feature included with its webinar platform, the team extracts contract registration information from the tool and uploads it to IDES’ CRM system. This way, the team can create customized email messages for attendees and non-attendees. Follow-up emails include:

• An appropriate greeting — e.g., "Thank you for attending..." or "Sorry we missed you..." • A link to view the on-demand video and download the slides • A link to opt-in to the Webinar Alerts email program

The team also sends follow-up emails through its own CRM system to monitor prospects’ interaction. "If we send an email to a person who didn’t attend, yet they clicked the link to watch the video, that ups their score in our lead ranking system," says Potter.

Step #4. Promote on-demand webinars in future email newsletters The team uses archived webinar presentations as content for future email newsletters. The team includes the same titles and descriptive copy from the pre-event promotions, but change the link to point recipients to the on-demand version of the presentation. The team also goes back to archived versions of past newsletters to change the link from the webinar registration page to the archived, on-demand version. "The interesting thing about this is that our promotional emails continue to drive traffic to on-demand recorded versions," says Potter. "Newsletters can live forever."

Step #5. Ongoing lead generation from on-demand webinar pages The team makes its on-demand webinar videos free for anyone to watch. However, viewers that also want to download the presentation slide deck are required to fill out a registration form. - If the vendor partner has requested ongoing lead-generation service from IDES, the registration form is branded with the presenter’s logo. On rare occasions when an advertiser does not want to collect leads from the archived content, the IDES team brands the page with its own company information. - The first page of the form presents visitors with a set of survey questions similar to the exit poll served after the live event. Advertisers typically include questions designed to help qualify potential leads, such as questions about their plastics needs or manufacturing process. - New visitors to the site, such as those arriving from an online search, are then taken to a second page to provide the following information:

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• Email address • Name • Job title • Telephone number • Company • Address

- Visitors to a registration page who already have an account with IDES are not required to fill in contact information. Instead, they only see the survey questions. - Visitors who are registered with IDES but are not logged in are asked to provide an email address, which if recognized by the system allows them to skip the remainder of the registration form. Results: - 55% of visitors who viewed an on-demand webinar registered their contact information to download the slides.

Useful links related to this article IDES' webinar communication strategy Powerpoint (1.8MB PPT - clickable images) IDES' webinar communication strategy PDF (1.2 MB PDF - images not clickable) How to Use Fewer, More Relevant Webinars to Get Better Results: 6 Steps Lift Attendance 422% How Email Series + Personalized Landing Page Lifted Webinar's ROI by 2000% GoToWebinar provides the team's webinar platform SurveyGizmo provides the team's refer-a-friend automated email program The team uses Camtasia Studio to record its webinars IDES

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10 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

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B2B WEBINARS: HOW HUBSPOT DREW 25,000 SIGN-UPS, ALMOST 10,000 ATTENDEES, AND MORE THAN 3,500 NEW LEADS This case study originally appeared in the MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter.

SUMMARY

B2B marketers use webinars for many purposes: To provide customer information and product pitches; as live events that don’t require travel; and even simply to present material that might interest current and prospective customers. One inbound marketing company regularly utilizes webinars as an important part of its content marketing strategy. Read on to learn more about the marketing before, during and after a recent event that brought in nearly 25,000 registrants. Yes, you read that correctly — just short of 25K sign-ups.

by David Kirkpatrick, Reporter

CHALLENGE Webinars are an important tool for B2B marketers. They are used as content marketing, for product pitches, to provide customer information, as live events that don't require the expense or logistics of getting everyone in the same room, and they are even used just to present material that might be interesting to both customers and prospects. In short, webinars serve to both aid Sales with qualified prospects currently in the pipeline and to generate new leads for nurturing. And while most webinars are "free," they are actually not. They require a B2B audience to make an investment with perhaps their most precious resource — time. And there’s no shortage of competition for this time. If you’re hosting a webinar, it’s very likely that your competitors are promoting webinars as well. So, getting — and keeping — an audience is a huge challenge for many B2B marketers. HubSpot, a marketing software company, produces many webinars as part of an overall content strategy that includes:

• Blogs • In-house email list • Direct channel website content • E-books and licensed content

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

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Small webinars with 30 to 100 attendees serve as group demos, or might cover a very specific topic of interest to its customers, but the company also produces some very large webinars. One recent event, "The Science of Timing," garnered just shy of 25,000 sign-ups and included almost 10,000 attendees. Jeanne Hopkins, Director of Marketing, HubSpot, explained the appeal of this event, "'The Science of Timing' kind of combined 'The Science of Twitter' and the science of social media, Facebook and blogging because it was all about timing. When is the right time to tweet? When is the right time to send an email? When is the right time to blog? This webinar was an aggregate of some of the questions that people really had burning questions to." Twenty-five thousand registrations is an incredible number for any event, much less a webinar, but the marketing efforts HubSpot applied to this event can be applied to much smaller events as well. Read on to learn how HubSpot chooses content for, drives registrants to, and profits from the buzz of its webinars.

CAMPAIGN

Step #1: Develop the webinar topic and identify content "The Science of Timing" was hosted by HubSpot's Social Media Scientist, Dan Zarrella, and included elements of previous webinars:

• Two years ago, he presented "The Science of Twitter" with ClickZ and pulled in about 3,000 registrants

• In December 2009, he presented "The Science of Social Media" and received around 12,000 registrants

• Subsequent "The Science of..." events covered Facebook, blogging, presentations and other related topics

These events were promoted through HubSpot's in-house list — the list stood at roughly 500,000 opt-ins in 2009 — and Marketing put some paid media into the events as well. The importance of "The Science of..." series is these previous events played into the marketing of "The Science of Timing." Through past attendance metrics, they also showed that this content had interest for HubSpot’s audience. - Learn from previous efforts to determine what content your audience finds valuable After the successful series of "The Science of..." webinars, HubSpot realized there was real interest in not only the "whys and hows" of all these different pieces, but also in the "when," as in, "When should I tweet? When should I post a Facebook message?" Hopkins said marketers were interested in this information because, "it gives them (marketers) some data to be able to go back to their marketing department and to be able to say, 'Okay, HubSpot looked at the 10 million pieces of data and this is what they came up with.'"

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

12 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

She added the data mostly comes from third parties, such as the information on timing Tweets and re-Tweets from working with Twitter's API.

Step #2. Set a date and begin to build buzz Several months before the event, HubSpot determined it was going to present "The Science of Timing" at the end of March, and also decided it would promote the event throughout the entire month of March. The team began its promotions with some paid media and pushes through partners. These early efforts, such as the banner ads (see creative sample #4. "Blog clickthrough ad"), were more for building buzz around the event rather than to drive registrations. Hopkins stated the idea was to expose possible registrants to the event to the point, "everywhere you look you'd be able to see this particular webinar."

Step #3. Execute the email campaign and test the sends To promote the webinar, the team’s email campaign consisted of three basic sends — the first to attendees of previous "The Science of..." webinars; the second to a combination of a targeted group, all leads and prospects and all "The Science of..." leads again; and the third, coming the day of the event, to all prospects and leads. The email campaign involved different landing pages (see creative samples below) and varied subject lines.

• The email call-to-action clicked through to a landing page with an 11-field form to sign up for the webinar

• All landing pages included social sharing buttons on the "thank you" at the end of the of the registration process

• Sends to all leads and prospects went out to more than 300,000 addresses

- First send

The webinar occurred at the end of the month, and the first send went out in the middle of that month to five different groups of previous "Science of" webinar attendees. The message was along the lines of, "you've shown an interest in these particular webinars," and the new event garnered around 9,000 registrants from this initial email. Each group received a different subject line for the mail. For example, one group received mail with a subject line of, "[New Webinar] What time should you blog, tweet, and email?," while another group received mail with a subject line of, "[New Data] The Science of Timing. When you should tweet, blog, email and more" The "New Data" subject produced the best results by a small margin, a result attributed to Zarrella being known for analyzing a wide variety of data. Because the send went to previous "Science of" webinar attendees, the prospect of learning about new data from Zarrella was likely more enticing than other subject lines.

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- Second send The second send went out the day after the first send. All leads and prospects were broken into two groups to test a particular attribute of the landing page — the form field. HubSpot's standard form field on these landing pages consisted of 11 elements:

1. First name

2. Last name

3. Email

4. Phone

5. Company

6. Company website

7. Number of employees

8. My company primarily sells to business (B2B) or consumers (B2C)

9. What is your role at the company?

10. Does your business provide marketing services such as PR, Web Design, SEO or other e-marketing?

11. What is your biggest marketing challenge? (this field is optional)

One group was sent to the standard 11-field form, and the second group was sent to a landing page with 12 fields. The tested field was "industry." After the field test send, HubSpot realized there was a problem because the call-to-action test on the two treatment pages was slightly different, turning a basic A/B split test into a two-variable test (new call-to-action text and the additional form field.) Concerned this could skew the results, the data was thrown out. A week later, HubSpot repeated the test with landing pages that were identical except for the extra form field, but the clickthrough was too small to determine a statistically valid winner. HubSpot plans on running the "industry" field test again at a later date. The email send to all "The Science of..." leads produced the best results of the entire campaign with an open rate of 28.82% and a clickthrough of 11.07%. One possibility for this result is that group had shown previous interest in similar webinars and this send was the second touch the group received asking for a clickthrough to registration. The entire second send brought in an additional 5,500 registrants.

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- Third send The third send was fairly straightforward and was distributed the day of the webinar as a, "last chance to sign up" email sent to all leads and prospects. This send pulled an additional few thousand registrants, but had the lowest open rate of any send in the campaign at 12.31% with a clickthrough rate of 1.19%. Another aspect of managing the email around the event was developing an email template for Sales to send to prospects inviting them to the webinar.

Step #4. Encourage the webinar host to create event buzz Even though Zarrella is a HubSpot employee, he also has a popular personal blog and Twitter feed. His blog has around 20,000 subscribers who receive an email every time the blog is updated. So when Zarrella blogged about his upcoming webinar, the information and invitation went out by email to his subscriber base. This effort created another thousand registrations. Sign-ups from Zarrella's personal blog posts and emails were tracked by sending them to the main webinar landing page, and not those used for the targeted email sends. Another way Zarrella contributed to creating buzz for the webinar was by creating a Twitter widget — a small Web tool that interfaces with Twitter's API — called TweetWhen that could be used to find out the best time to tweet and when most people retweeted the user's messages. HubSpot bought the domain TweetWhen.com. Zarrella created this widget about two weeks before the event, sent it out internally at HubSpot to fine-tune the tool, and it went public a week before his webinar and had a sign-up of about 1,400 during that week.

Step #5. Manage the event in real time Webinars of any size require planning and, of course, execution. When you start getting into large events, or very large events in this case, as Hopkins put it, "It's all hands on deck." The day of the webinar, Marketing sent out an email to everyone in the company about an hour and a half before the start of the event to let everyone know it was happening, and to give everyone answers to the problems that are likely to come in from registrants:

• I can't get in • I can't register • I don't know what the telephone number is

Because HubSpot produces so many webinars, they actually have a soundproof webinar room on-site for producing the event. For this event, HubSpot had four or five marketing team members monitoring tweets, and attendee

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questions coming in through the webinar platform. These marketers worked to answer questions in real time, but because of the very large number of attendees, it was not possible to answer every question asked. To fully address the attendee questions, once the event was complete, all the questions were put into a spreadsheet to find the overall themes of attendee questions. This crowd-sourced information was then distilled into a blog post that went live the day after the event providing the key takeaways from the webinar as defined by the users' questions. To continue marketing the event, and driving leads, the webinar is available on a permanent landing page (see “Useful links” at the end of the article) and can be viewed after filling out the 11-field lead form.

Step #6. Throw a Twitter "after party" During another large webinar from February, HubSpot noticed there were enough tweets to get the event trending on Twitter, and they wanted to find a way to keep that buzz going. The result was a Twitter "after party" for 30 minutes following the webinar where people could ask questions. To help promote this event, HubSpot offered a free one-hour telephone consultation with Zarrella for the best tweet. This promotion has been previously used by HubSpot for several contests. - Handling negative feedback Interestingly, Hopkins found during the Twitter party people began complaining that the company was only retweeting positive messages, so she began actively retweeting complaints. She attributed the complaints to people just not understanding the scale of tweeting during the event to, and with, HubSpot's more than 105,000 followers.

Step #7. Turn attendees into leads Marketing at HubSpot is responsible for generating a large number of leads. For example, 35,000 in March and 40,000 in April. HubSpot’s sales team has about 55 representatives covering different territories — from geographies (like an international team) to partners (like value-added resellers). Its target is companies with less than 200 employees looking to transform their marketing by considering inbound marketing as a platform. Webinars, such as "The Science of Timing," are part of an overall content strategy, and new leads generated by webinars are funneled into a lead nurturing program. Not all webinar registrants are considered leads. Previous webinar attendees who sign up are considered "reconverts," and are highly prized by HubSpot because of the interest they are showing in HubSpot's content. Registrants who have never filled out a HubSpot form are considered new leads. These leads get converted to opportunities by a decision from the sales rep who reached out to the new

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

16 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

lead. To become an opportunity, the lead must qualify for BANT — Budget, Authority (is the lead a decision maker), Need and Timeline — and meet internal criteria that the lead would be a good fit for HubSpot's software.

RESULTS About the final results, Hopkins said HubSpot was very pleased. The internal goal was 25,000 registrants, and the final numbers came only 39 short of the goal. HubSpot's goal for a webinar from February was 20,000, so these already impressive numbers are actually trending upward.

• 24,961 registrants for the webinar

• 9,386 attendees, 37.6% of registrants

• Five landing pages for event ranged from 38.12 to 56.43% conversion rate (a conversion was a registration)

• Event Twitter hashtag, #timesci, trended as high as #2 worldwide

• The event created 3,529 new leads, the remainder of registrants were reconversions

• Within two days of the event: - 37 leads were converted into opportunities - 2 leads were converted into customers

• The day after the event, the presentation was featured on the homepage of SlideShare, thanks to a higher number of views and social media activity. When the webinar hit the SlideShare homepage, Marketing received this message: "'The Science of Timing' is being tweeted more than anything else on SlideShare right now. So we've put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net [in the "Hot on Twitter" section]. Well done! - SlideShare Team"

Useful links related to this article Creative samples: 1. Email 2. Landing page #1 3. Landing page #2 4. Blog click-through ad HubSpot Permanent webinar landing page

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MarketingSherpa Whitepaper New Ways to Boost Attendance and Maximize Webinar Content

17 © Copyright 2000–2012 MarketingSherpa LLC, a MECLABS Group Company.

It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions contact [email protected].

Blog post with top questions Mixtapes created for the event TweetWhen Vcall — Webinar platform Webinar Promotion that Delivers: Use Email, Social, Viral Referrals and Video to Boost Attendance, Drive Lead Gen Internet Marketing Research: A behind-the scenes look at MarketingExperiments Web Clinics New to B2B Webinars? Learn 6 steps for creating an effective webinar strategy Optimization Summit 2012

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