Ways To Promote Your Webinars To The Right B2B Audience.

These days, webinars have become an inevitable channel of promotion for any B2B business. While the ROI from the resources invested is high, more & more business organizations are trying to use webinars as a cost effective marketing strategy to promote their offerings, and guess what it’s working. The idea here is to have a webinar around an interesting topic (not only for you, but for your audience) and have more & more registrants & attendees for your webinar.

Recently, I had an opportunity of promoting a webinar, and the results were pretty interesting. Good number of registrations, the turn-out ratio for the event was more than 50% (which is above the normal standards) & ultimately, good response from the attendees to know more about our company’s offerings.

In this blog, I have listed down few ways of promoting a webinar to increase registrations.

Ways of promoting your webinar to increase registrations.

Start with getting the basics right.

1. Always have a dedicated landing page for the webinar – this helps in grabbing the attention of the visitors on the page & serves the purpose i.e. registration. Also you have an opportunity of search engine optimizing this page for search rankings.

2.     Add facebook, Linked In & twitter share buttons on the registration page - your visitors will share your page if  the like your webinar. Also, don't forget to add the Google +1 button.

3. Leverage the advantage of having a Linked In account - Promote the webinar event on your company profile page & the company owned groups where your customers may be a part. You can make the webinar discussion topic a manager’s choice so that it reflects on the top right section of the group page.

4. Promote the webinar on other relevant Linked In groups; these groups are the right forum to promote your webinars.

5. Share it with your Linked In contacts (only the potential ones). Do not spam.

6. Ask your Linked In group moderator to send out weekly announcements to the group members.

7. Use twitter effectively - Tweet about your webinar with the hash tag. Also encourage the audience to tweet around this hash tag.

8. Google+ - Share it on Google+ page, you always have an opportunity of getting the posts indexed in the Google search ranks.

9. Google+ Communities – Just like Linked In groups you can find 1000s or relevant communities on Google + with good features.

10. Blog, Blog, Blog - Blog about the webinar using your company blog. You can also reach out to the industry bloggers to promote the webinar.

11. Emailers - Send emails to your current opt-in list (internal & external audience). Also ask your email recipients to share this email invite with their network.

12. Use the home page of the website effectively - list it under “News & Events” section on the home page. As the website home page is the most visited page, the webinar listing will get good exposure.

13. Take the help of Sales Team - Encourage the sales team to share the invite with the potential customers. They can also share it with their Linked In contacts.

14. Run a PPC Campaign – You can run a PPC ad on Google for a term Ex - “aligning sales and marketing”. By bidding on such a long tail term like “aligning sales and marketing” you can also keep the CPC costs low.

15. Opt for Linked In ads - Linked In ads give you an advantage of targeting your ad campaign to a specific set of audience.

16. Banner advertisement on other  websites - Advertise with media websites. Include an ad in their newsletters as most of your customers would be on their opt-in list. You can also advertise on other specific community & blogging sites.

17. Post event promotion – You need to also promote your webinar after it’s over. Have the webinar recording on the “Webinar Recordings” section. Add a link of this recording to the webinar registration landing page.

18. Promote the webinar recording on other video portals like YouTube.

19. Promote your webinar slides on slideshare.

Now you can promote your next webinar in many more ways.

Unleashing the Brand Marketing with the Ladoo Power.

From a fruit juice brand to a health drink brand, from a fashion retail brand to the other fast moving consumer goods brands, every brand in the Indian market wants to get associated with this Indian super hero to promote their offerings to their audiences. Guess who this super hero is.. those who guessed G-ONE (from Shahrukh’s movie RA-ONE are absolutely wrong). I am talking about the mighty kid dressed in orange dhotis from a small village called dholakpur, the super kid “CHHOTA BHEEM”.

Gone are the days when the kids used to keep their eyes glued to the televisions watching their favourite comic like Popeye, Dexter, Swat Kats, Pokemon or any other comic show? The young lad from Dholakpur is the new super star in the minds of these kids. Started almost 3 years ago by a company know as Green Gold Animation Pvt Ltd, this show has come far winning the hearts of millions of kids in India. It came up with a unique character and story line which would well go in attracting the Indian kids. The Company also came up with shows like Krishna & Balram, Vikram & Betal which have really helped it in coming up with this successful show. Considering its popularity, POGO TV also promoted this show to a greater extent.

When it comes to the rating factor, Chhota Bheem is rated as the Number 1 children’s show from India. As of 2012 it has aired over 120 episodes and more to come in the following days. Green Gold Pvt Ltd was    quick enough to take away this momentum of success and launched comics, video games, Chotta Bheem          merchandise, toys and more. After several short episodes, a full length feature film  titled "Chhota Bheem And The Curse Of Damyaan" was released in 2012 and was a surprise success at the box office grossing    over 2 crore net in its first week despite having a limited release.

From a marketing point-of-view one needs to know about what did the brands do with the success of this comic character. Big brands like Boost, Pepsodent, Knorr Soups, Del Monte, MAX fashion retail and others quickly adapted this concept in their marketing activities for the success of their brands. Pepsodent also launched a social media campaign contest for promotion. In order to reach the kids segments they bundled chotta bheem toys & freebies with their offerings to attract the kids segment. They adapted the unique positioning of this character in the minds of audiences to their brand advantage, and it worked. 

The Company Green Gold also came up with various offerings for the kids segment in order to attain additional revenues. Sales have seemed to have gone up after this marketing initiative. Games and App developers have already come up with their Chotta Bheem games & apps for the customers.

Truly kids too have their space & role in making a purchase decision and brands have clearly won in gaining their attention and came out successful with their strategies.  

Google Plus Business Page & it’s benefits for Businesses.

Google is becoming better each day with it’s new kind of features & services which have an impact on it’s search functionality.

With the launch of a new social networking platform it’s intentions were clear that it wanted to over power & over take the much hyped social media website Facebook & guess what, it did manage to achieve this popularity & viral ness from the initial days of the launch of Google Plus.

As we all know online marketing has become a very important aspect of each brand’s highly impact ful marketing plan it’s very important for a marketing person to analyse the various platforms of online marketing to achieve the desired level of ROI & impact on it’s audiences. One such area we need to focus is Google Plus business pages.

Apart from the stunning new features on Google Plus, it did come up with the business pages for brands, celebrities etc (much like the facebook business page) so as to provide a direct option of interaction between the brands & its clients and fans. It’s much like facebook fan page but have some extra facilities which facebook fan page doesn’t.

Benefits’s of having a business page on Google Plus :

• Google search engine indexing - Google pulls out the search result from Google Plus business page too & hence you have an option to rank for a search query from you GooglePlus page posting too.
• Google’s service - for the google Plus page, users will get a broad array of services like search, Gmail, Chrome and Android which other SMM providers like facebook & twitter can’t provide.
• A platform to connect with your fans & followers - lot of fans are spending their time on Google Plus connecting with their likes & interests.
• Unique functionality of hangouts (live video chats) - Not only can you talk with your customers via text but now you can have video talk sessions with them. An effective & low cost option to connect with your followers & get instant feedback on your offerings. The system is very responsive and the audio video quality is fine.
• Build your brand - Branding your business helps people to become familiar with your products and services. Having a Google Plus business page enables you to interact with others who also have created accounts.

Apart from these there are many other benefits of having a Google Plus business page:

Google Plus Button

The Plus1 button helps your website visitors to recommend your content or products, and share that content with their circles on Google Plus.

Google Plus Direct Connect

You can find a desired page on Google Plus very easily from its simple search feature. With Google Plus Direct Connect, searchers can insert a “Plus” before their query and land directly to a business’s GooglePlus page. For example, Type “+PCQuest” into a Google search box, and Google will take you straight to PCQuest’s Google Plus page.

Google Plus Badge

This badge is an enhanced version of the Google Plus icon. It allows visitors to directly connect your site to your Google Plus page and find and engage with you on Google Plus.

With day by day Google making a new change to it’s search functionality, it’s very important for brands to have a Google Plus page & reap the search engine & other benefits from it. So why wait it’s time to have your’s. 

Brand Wars, inspired from the history – a new era to be written

From those sweet tasting colas to those shiny shampoos, from those healthy health drinks to those luxurious airlines, each brand had their own style & strategy of competing with their rivals though their interesting yet innovative campaigns. It seems that after all that controversy & calmness the brands have again risen to comparative advertising.

It all started with the cola brands, the arch rivals – Coca Cola Inc & Pepsio Co’s series of comparative advertising well know as the cola wars. Both the brands successfully cashed in on this concept to be in the spotlight. This effect was also seen in when Coca‐Cola became the official cold drink of the1996 cricket World Cup & Pepsi greeted coke with the campaign ‘Nothing official about it’. Later, Coke had to reply with another campaign - “Eat Cricket! Sleep Cricket! Drink only Coca‐Cola!” This continued many times before it became stable.

   

Then came the era of detergent wars between Tide & Rin which was taken to court to sort out legally. We have also seen this effect spreading in other industries to other brands like Head & Shoulders and Pantene face-off, Horlicks v/s Complan tussle, & not to be forgotten Sprite v/s Mountain dew panga.

To quote the latest rivalry between The Hindu & TOI, it all started when The Times Of India (TOI) had recently, around November  taken a dig at The 

Hindu with its campaign ‘Wake Up Chennai‘ where they had clearly targeted 

The Hindu. The Hindu commands to be holding the number 1 spot in Chennai, though a late reply it was a awesome reply. It has come up with its ‘Stay Ahead Of The Times’ campaign making an aggressive counter attack at the TOI with it’s different patterned print ads & TVC. Well unlike The Hindu, the TOI had an immediate say on the counter attack with a cool & calm reply in its ad – We congratulate the competition fpr finally waking up.

To conclude, comparative advertising might be good at times to pull the competitor’s leg & be in the spotlight but it might also tarnish a brand’s own image & hurt entire product segment. It is good only to an extent with the campaign being creative & not attacking the rival brand directly.

Woah look at this, the latest buzz is Bajaj Discover targeting it's rival Hero Honda Splendor in it's latest TVC - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyp1QECfas4