Webinars helped record management firm Recall educate customers and prospects, increasing brand positioning in a competitive space.
In the data management arena, there are a dozen types of personas to engage. “It’s a lot to reach out to,” said John Hansen, senior manager, mid-market marketing leader at Iron Mountain, which acquired Recall in the spring of 2016. “Finance people go out to a different watering hole to find information, than the records manager, so we need to use different tactics and channels.”
Recall was the number two brand in the space, behind their then competitor Iron Mountain. Branding was an issue—while Recall was a known quantity to its customer base, many small to medium size target companies did not.
“We had a credibility issue,” said Hansen, speaking at LeadsCon’s recent B2B Connect to Convert summit. “People defaulted to Iron Mountain as the subject matter experts, and we wanted to position ourselves as the subject matter leaders.”
In surveys, Recall saw that SMB companies wanted to see education from record management companies, to gauge their expertise. The challenge was to make a subject that could be fairly dry into something interesting. The tagline “Recall, your roadmap to total information management” was created to help showcase the range of services the company offered.
A series of 30 minute webinars were developed on various topics with the help of Arketi Group, and released about once every six weeks.
“It was all about giving potential customers something of value,” said Hansen. “Webinars are for education and awareness, not sales. All the selling happens in the packaging around the webinar, so sales isn’t so overt in the time was are with them.”
Recall looked at their different personas and what type of education they might need, and targeted webinars to meet those requirements. “Know their pain points. How you engage them is important,” he said. “You don’t want all the customers, you want the ideal customer for your event.”
Star VanderHaar, vice president, Arketi Group, warned that it is important not to bash your customer base over the head with repeated promotions for your event. Recall typically used a series of three emails, often accompanies by a pre-webinar survey to engage the audience before the event. One such survey, asking about industry concerns, got 468 responses.
“That meant in future communications we were able to say ‘Don’t you want to hear what your peers are saying? Join us,’” she said. “People want to benchmark against each other, so they like the feedback.”
Experts featured in webinars were interviewed, and supplementary materials like case studies or infographics were created to accompany the webinar content, and continue the engagement both before and after the event.
The average sale for Recall was in the $5,000 to $9,000 range, so it only took one sale to achieve a favorable ROI. “If we got five opportunities out of a webinar, we felt good,” said Hansen.
The conversion rate was typically higher for people who showed up to the live webinar, which isn’t surprising because it shows a higher engagement level. Those who watch on-demand are typically treated in more of a nurture fashion, he noted.
Related Articles:
Tapping Into the Educational Power of Webinars
Q&A: Avnet’s B2B Journey to Reach Millennials
Q&A: Aberdeen’s Gary Skidmore on Engaging B2B Prospects
Network
