How an enterprise-level digital security brand filled the marketing pipeline with timely webinar content

It’s easier than ever to host a webinar these days. Yet, there’s a big difference between a webinar that actually helps drive business outcomes and one that falls flat. Many industries, including tech, have traditionally relied on shaking hands and reading a room to generate business. Some organizations would have never considered taking their business development online, and others have been running virtual events like webinars for quite some time. One thing that the 2020 coronavirus pandemic taught us as marketers, however, is that it’s crucial to be equally, if not more effective at generating leads in a digital-only capacity. 

The question then becomes, how can we effectively go all in on digital events like webinars? Perhaps you’ve tried before with limited or mixed results. Learn more about how NetStrategies was able to help one of our clients, a leader in the enterprise-level digital security space, launch a webinar to inform publishing and ad-tech executives about how they can protect the user experience on their website during COVID-19.  

A Novel Problem for Ad Publishers and Media Brands

Due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak, a new challenge in policing ad quality was emerging. Opportunists were using high interest levels for these topics like COVID-19 for their own gains. Regardless of whether ads are truly scams or merely created in poor taste, publishers needed to guard their users’ experience and their own credibility first-and-foremost. 

Since our client knows that ad quality and relevance can make or break a user’s experience, they wanted to give publishers and ad tech firms a better way to audit advertisements according to their unique preferences. This enterprise-level tool puts publishers and ad-tech firms in the driver’s seat, allowing them to create their own definition of what’s “appropriate” on their website. By creating a webinar around the trends, challenges, and opportunities the global situation posed to ad tech and media brands, the company aimed to create an entry-point for future conversations about their unique product.

All the Moving Parts of the Webinar Machine

Our client needed to generate interest and drive new contacts into their marketing pipeline through this webinar initiative. In order to achieve this, we needed a strategic, multi-channel plan. 

Utilizing Email as a Tried-and-True Channel
The backbone of our strategy included compelling emails that would be delivered to internal lists as well as through key partners. By taking a targeted approach, we were able to reach over 12,000 recipients with a customer-centric message regarding the current trends around policing ad quality. 

In addition to developing emails to drive registrations, we developed automated emails including key information like reminders, instructions, and calendar invites. By giving attendees multiple reminders leading up to the event and the ability to save a note on their calendar in one click, we increased attendance rates.

Finally, we also armed the sales team with the emails and other materials they needed to promote the event, including channel-specific social graphics and email templates. With these added tools, the entire sales team was able to push a consistent message and focus on outreach.  

Expanding Reach Through Paid Placements and Social
To cast a broader net, we targeted specific partners to promote the webinar through display advertisements. As most marketers know, display ads can often go ignored, in an age where users often suffer from content fatigue. Having a time-sensitive topic helped here, as well as focusing on visuals aimed at “stopping the scroll.” 

In addition to paid reach, we expanded our audience by creating posts to share via owned channels such as LinkedIn. Again, we gained traction here by taking a customer-centric copy paired with visual creative designed to stand out in cluttered news feeds. At 6.62% click-though, these posts outperformed benchmarks for similar posts by 120%.  

Sticking the Landing 

An entire multi-channel approach can break down if a landing page falls flat. Functionally, it would serve as one, unified place where prospects could choose between dates and times, sign up for the event and get more information about what would be covered. More importantly however, while our marketing was intended to pique interest, the landing page would drive home the reason why prospects needed to attend. Based on this, we designed a compelling, easy-to-use, landing page for use in all of our marketing efforts.  

We’ve Got Your Back (Ground Support)
While the client’s team fine-tuned their slides and presentation skills for webinar day, NetStrategies made sure the technical aspects in the background went off without a hitch. We selected and set up the company’s webinar tool, developed a comprehensive written guide to presenting with the tool, and scheduled team practice runs that familiarized the team with their role before the big day.  

Integrating Technologies
Promote, get attendees, host a webinar. Seems simple enough? If the above hasn’t already proven the number of moving parts required to execute a successful webinar, consider this: when a person registers for your webinar, will reminder emails automatically go out? Will they automatically funnel into your CRM? Will their activity be recorded in your CRM so that sales staff doesn’t have to toggle between multiple platforms to understand a prospects activity history?

Part of ensuring that this company would be able to make the most of the new contacts generated from the webinar, was to make sure that technology would empower instead of holding teams back, or worse, creating more work. By integrating technologies between a Drupal-based website, Pardot, Salesforce, and GoToWebinar, we were able to achieve this. Prospects were able to register on a branded page on their website and were automatically added into Pardot, assigned to appropriate lists for follow-up emails, registered for the correct webinar time slot, and more.  

Generating Leads Beyond the Event
The client knew that it was not only possible to extend the life of the webinar beyond the day of the event, but crucial to staying top of mind with the 200 publishers and ad-tech executives who had registered, at a time when the company’s services are most useful and relevant to their industry. So, in order to stay top-of-mind, NetStrategies crafted follow-up emails that would be delivered in the weeks after the webinar as a way to keep leads in the marketing pipeline, regardless of whether they had attended the live webinar or not.  

Results

How can NetStrategies help your team succeed?  

When you reach out to our team, we’ll be able to answer questions, talk about your goals, and come up with a plan that’s tailored to your project needs and internal capabilities.