- Field of Dreams, 1989

Maybe in 1989 “build it and they will come” was a viable marketing plan. But now? Sorry Ray, it’s just not that easy anymore.

When it comes to marketing events, specifically webinars, you need to let your target audience know you’re putting together a show. You do that by running a coordinated marketing campaign with the value of the webinar as its core message and offering a clear next step…register!

What’s The Goal?

With a webinar campaign, as with any marketing campaign, the first step is to develop your goals. What would you like to accomplish?

Determine what would realistically make your webinar series a success and whom you need to target to make it so. Keep in mind that whom you are targeting directly impacts what you can expect for results. Attendance numbers or follow-up meetings will be quite different for a campaign targeting CIOs when compared to another targeting Directors of HR.

What Is the Value (to Your Audience)?

You now know the type of prospect you want to attend to accomplish the realistic goals you’ve set. The next question is: What content can you offer to attract your target audience?

Your content should reflect the initial goals you set for the series. For example, if you are trying to generate new leads, you will not want to have a service/technology overview webinar. Most new leads don’t want to hear you talk about yourself. Share content that is both complimentary to your services and of interest to your ideal prospects.

Here are three examples of good and bad approaches for choosing a topic for a lead generation webinar.

Spend time speaking with your client leaders, business developers, and even your clients, to find out what’s “hot” and relevant to your targets. You’ll likely find, surprisingly, that it is not your newest service offering. With this intelligence in hand, you can outline what your webinar may look like with your subject matter expert(s).

Get the Word Out

You now need to create the marketing plan for your webinar campaign. To do so, you must recall your goals:

Then add the reality of every marketing effort—the budget. This tells you how robust of a marketing program you will need and will be able to implement to support the webinar series. Will you send letters and e-mails, follow-up with phone calls and voicemails, and blog about the event?

Remember: Just because you’re offering a free webinar with strong content does not mean prospects and current clients will just appear. You have to market to them as you would for an in-person event, almost as if you were selling your services outright. With that in mind, do it in a manner that will cut through all the clutter.

There is no secret formula to creating the perfect marketing mix. You may have statistics from past campaigns that can be applied to your webinar series or you may have nothing to work from. A generic—since I’m not familiar with your firm or the size and quality of the list you market to—coordinated campaign recommendation on giving your webinar series the best shot at achieving your goals is:

If your targets have any interest in your webinar content, this marketing program will get them to register.

Game On!

“If you build it, they will come,” just does not work any more (if it ever did!). But, "If you build great content, target the right people, and market it aggressively – they will come,” does. Again, sorry Ray, but you have some more work to do.

Patrick R. Cahill is a principal at Rally Point Webinars who specializes in marketing, business operations, and CRMs. Click here to email Patrick.