How to Drive Marketing ROI with Interactive Events

The umbrella term “Interactive Events” encompasses several platforms and names: Webcasts, Webinars, eSeminars, virtual trade shows, etc. When it comes to marketing your company to business-to-business buyers, driving ROI, and generating sales leads, these platforms account for some of the most effective strategies available. Not only do they allow marketers to present compelling, useful content to their current customers and prospects, they also lend to reliable ROI measurement for the companies who produce them.

Almost any marketing organization can incorporate interactive events into its overall marketing strategy. There are several very good technology solutions available to host the desired platform, as well as many media companies who will partner with clients to produce custom events.

But the most important factors to consider are content and audience development. Relevant and compelling content is what will drive the prospective buyers to your door. Audience development is critical because you need a universe source to draw from. It could be your own customer and prospect database, or a third party list from a broker or media partner.

Interactive events rely on the power of permission-based marketing, which means prospects actually choose to spend their time engaging with your content and message. Self-selection of the subject matter is a critical component because it is the first of many steps in qualifying the prospect. Once someone has chosen your topic and committed up to an hour of their time, they are highly qualified to buy your product or solution. If you follow a few smart steps you can further qualify the lead, fill your sales pipeline with high quality prospects, and shorten your sales cycle.

Top tech companies such as IBM, HP and Dell produce dozens of Webcasts per year, and generate tens of thousands of new leads in the process. Webcast results usually vary by industry and size of the target universe. For instance, in the IT professional market it’s common to get between 250-600 registrants with a modest audience development budget of $8K – $12K.

There are several ways to invite people to your Webcast, ranging from HTML email blasts deployed to rented lists to more innovative lead generation programs from media companies that take advantage of outgoing communication to their readers and subscribers. The lead generation programs can be purchased on a cost-per-lead basis, which is preferable.

A good rule of thumb is that from 30-40% of the registrants will attend the live event, and you can keep promoting to the others to get them to watch it on demand. The people who watched the live Webcast are better prospects, but the other registrants are still valuable for your sales pipeline because they have raised their hand as being interested to your product or solution.

Once a marketer knows his/her registration stats, he or she can evaluate the Webinar’s success by calculating the cost per lead (to do this, divide the total cost of the Webcast by the total number of registrants). However, you really need to go further to get an accurate assessment of your ROI, because acquiring the leads is just the first step. Next, you need to nurture them to turn them into sales.

The first step in nurturing your leads is to devise a lead-scoring mechanism for your registrants. The purpose of lead scoring is to assign weight and rank, as well as to prioritize incoming leads. High-priority leads will include those that have either asked to be contacted or have demonstrated they are further along in the buying process. Low-priority leads are prospects that are clearly in information-gathering mode, or have no purchase authority.

There are a few ways to collect the data that will enable you to score and rank leads. Lead scoring begins during the registration process where you can ask the questions such as job function and specific buying authority/budget level to factor into your weighting. Then, you assign weights to actions taken during the Webcast, i.e. the downloading of slides and answering of poll questions. You should run a survey at the end of the Webcast and ask how close they are to purchasing and whether the prospect wants to be called by your company.

The prospects generated via interactive events have, hopefully, given you permission to send them messages and have shown a willingness to invest time in learning about your company. These prospects need to be nurtured and communicated with via relevant content. From there, the marketer can diversify his/her communication tactics and customize the message depending on where they are in the buying process.

At Nuance, a leading provider of speech solutions for customer service, marketing director Lynne Esparo says “Webcasting is one step of the qualification process and part of a larger marketing and sales program”. After qualifying the prospect with a Webcast, Nuance invites them to a live event to better educate them about their speech recognition enterprise solutions. And, interactive events are not just for new prospects. “Webcasts are also a great tool for cultivation and customer care” Esparo added.

When you know where each prospect ranks, you can send them relevant messages via email marketing, live events and your sales team. If you build an ongoing interactive and customized dialog you have a much better chance of turning them into customers– that is the true final test of ROI for Webcasting. Interactive events are a great tool for getting qualified prospects into the beginning of your sales pipeline. However, it is not the whole job; to really see a return on your investment you must build a permission based, content-rich relationship to eventually turn them into a sale.

Gordon Plutsky is the Director of Marketing and Research at King Fish Media, a custom media solutions company based in Boston.