Marketers are Finding Themselves Trapped between a Rock and a Hard Place
Getting noticed on traditional channels is becoming increasingly difficult as a result of shrinking audiences and securing attention on digital channels is becoming rapidly more competitive. Today, the amount of content produced online in one second is more than any person is capable of consuming in an entire lifetime.
Confronted with these issues, what is a webinar marketer to do? The most straightforward answer is to make your content more engaging and compelling, but that is only one half of the solution. The other half rests in the ability for marketers to develop actionable insights on the methods they use to ensure a specific audience attends their webinar.
Framing the Conversation around Working and Non-Working Spend
Lets pause briefly to frame this conversation around the concepts of working and non-working spend. Non-working spend can be thought of as your webinar’s production investments, or their hidden costs. Everything from licensing images, to creating interactive videos, polls, and games can be bucketed in this way. Understanding how content pieces perform in the context of specific webinars’ objectives will allow you to allocate these investments more effectively, and ultimately leave more on the table to put towards working spend activities.
Working spend is more discrete, it is what it takes to make sure your webinar is not only consumed, but consumed by the right people. Renting and segmenting an email list to send invitations to, display ads, and paid social media campaigns driving to the webinar are examples of this. Optimizing both working spend and non-working spend is key to ensuring the success of your webinar program.
Unlock Working Spend Data with Adobe Connect’s Engagement Dashboard
The use of Adobe Connect’s engagement dashboard tool unlocks the non-working spend data necessary to drive strategic optimization. Perhaps your in-house design team creates content for several different polls and games you leverage during your webinar campaign. Looking at the engagement data when this content was used across multiple occurrences of the same webinar will help derive insights on how effective this non-working spend was. Furthermore, you can also analyze the way specific content types come to influence the generation of qualified leads. Unlocking insights on what drives engagement versus leads will better shape the content strategy used in specific webinars and also helps demonstrate whether the content investment is aligning with the webinars’ goal.
Working Spend Attribution Insights made Easy
While email marketing has proven historically to be the most effective type of working spend activity in driving webinar registration, the digital landscape is changing rapidly. Email inboxes are getting better at sorting out promotional messages and new targeting capabilities on mobile devices, display ad networks, and social channels are disrupting promotional strategies. Adobe Connect’s integration with Adobe Analytics gives you the necessary intelligence to begin strategically experimenting and testing these new channels in real time. The ability to model registration attribution across disparate promotional channels will allow you to more effectively allocate future incremental working spend on each.
Demonstrate Value Across the Organization
Using working and non-working spend is an effective way to analyze a webinar’s content investments against investments in its promotion and delivery. Providing these granular insights helps solve for whether production and distribution efforts are balanced and efficient. While these concepts are not new, analysis through their lens can help move webinars away from operating on an island, display their value as a part of the broader marketing mix, and secure confidence in their impact across the organization.
Wondering what to read next? Here are a few suggestions:
3 Steps to Map Webinar Content to your Customers’ Buying Journey
New To webinars? Seven steps for getting Started