Or at least it should be. Generic messaging is hazardous to the health of any company or product. In this day of digital chaos, if you aren’t delivering relevant content to the right people at the right time no one is listening to you. Killing and replacing generic messaging takes a lot of effort from busy marketers who are already juggling several responsibilities – especially marketers in smaller organizations. Let me encourage my fellow multi-hat wearing marketers to grab an energy drink, dig into your approach on marketing and lead follow-up messaging and enjoy the results.
Be sure to include your webinar program strategy in this review and consider the following:
Is your target audience segmented?: If your product or service solves a problem for or serves more than one specific group, you’ll want to develop messaging specifically for each group focusing on their unique pain points. In a webinar program this may look like specific tracks within your overall webinar program targeted at each group.
- Are your invitations specific and relevant?: Take a look at your webinar invitations and ensure that you are clearly communicating what this segment of your target audience will gain by attending your webinar (briefly of course) – and then deliver on that promise.
- Are you spraying and praying?: If so, change course and start looking for ways to intelligently target each specific group in your target audience. Remember: relevant content to the right people. This might mean smaller list acquisitions and smaller events and that’s ok. Think Quality.
- Do you use the information you gather?: You collect all kinds of information from your webinar audience; their registration info, if they attended or not, whether they viewed the recording, their engagement during the webinar, feedback survey answers, and, of course, the content of the webinar itself. Be sure your sales reps have access to all of this information to use in crafting unique and specific follow up communications.
- What does your webinar content tell you?: If your program is like mine, you’ll have some webinars focused on best practices relevant to your product or service and some webinars that actually deliver a demo of the features and benefits of your product/service. Depending on the content, you can gauge the interest level and sales readiness of each inquiry. For example, if they just attended a best practice webinar that might tell you that they are the right person to talk to about your product but they may not be shopping – so avoid the temptation to send these inquires to sales. However, if they attended a demo webinar, send them on through to sales with confidence!
- Are you sending prospects down the right path?: After a target contact has responded to a program you are running, put some thought into what that person might want to see or do next. If they attended a thought leadership webinar on a particular solution related to your product, perhaps the next communication they should receive from you is an invite to a demo on how your product can benefit them in that particular solution area.
- Is Sales using the right follow up message?: Take the time to brief Sales on the marketing programs you are running and familiarize them with the information you are gathering. Then make some recommendation on the best message to use for each particular program and each response related to that program. Sales is your partner and you need them looped in to achieve your goals.