Building relationships with thought leaders for your webinars

My road trip to the Service Desk & IT Support Show 2012

As an IT service management community manager at BrightTALK, one of my main goals is to engage the community members by creating quality and timely content and providing the opportunity for interaction with thought leaders and influencers that are keen to share their knowledge. Staying current on the evolution of the IT landscape and building high-value relationships with industry experts is also key. For this reason, I recently attended one of the largest physical events in the ITSM calendar, the Service Desk & IT Support Show in London (SDITS12). These are my personal highlights and takeaways from the event:

Networking with thought leaders

The event was a fantastic opportunity to catch up with many IT professionals, especially the numerous thought leaders that are involved in the ITSM community on BrightTALK.

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The ABCs of webinar leads

Last week, BrightTALK’s Kathryn Kilner, David Kreitter and Jon Brink presented “The ABCs of Webinar Leads” as a part of the BrightTALK Academy series. The roundtable discussed the fundamentals of driving quality webinar leads and best practices for passing relevant leads to sales and following up on them from the perspective of sales and marketing.

Here are some highlights from the presentation and some additional resources on the topics presented in it.

Audience By Community - Create a destination for your thought leaders to consistently add content that they can embed to extend the reach of your online community.

• Webinar - How to Build and Monetize an Online Event Community
• Blog post - The new face of online communities

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The path to demand generation success

When I joined BrightTALK in 2008, BrightTALK had just released a powerful webinar and video platform that enabled companies to generate demand and create awareness around their thought leadership in their marketplace. I had joined the company to help sell this product to marketers but soon discovered that although we had created a great tool for companies to generate demand we had a gap in how we planned to generate our own demand and build awareness in such a competitive space.

In 2009 I shifted my focus to creating a program for using our technology to generate our own demand and set the goal to run one webinar per week related to best practices for using webinars and videos to support marketing and sales objectives and to help build a business. Some might call this “eating our own dog food.” It was a humbling time as the program was sourced by just two marketing professionals and everything was manual including lead scoring, lead uploading and sales enablement. We certainly felt like we had something to prove and our small team eagerly took on the task of building the most sophisticated webinar and video demand generation program.

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How to be the Amerigo Vespucci of your marketing team

Every American school kid learns the story of Christopher Columbus convincing the King and Queen of Spain to finance an expedition in 1492 to sail the wrong way to India. In the process he missed by 8371 miles, ending up in the Bahamas. For his troubles, he got a small city in Ohio named after him. The guy that drew an accurate map got 27% of the world’s landmass. The message is pretty clear; history rewards those who know what they’re doing. To help you be rewarded for your webinar programs, BrightTALK announces it’s latest release: dashboard charts for BrightTALK™ Channels.

While all of the data to help you optimize your webinar program has been available for download from the beginning, it was easy to take after Columbus and not process the data available to you effectively. Now summary charts give you a map for understanding your webinar performance. Here are three ways you can use the data generated by webinars and videos to gain actionable insight to help you improve your program.

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Promoting your webinars via social media

Posting your content to social media networks is one of many ways to promote your content. Any one post may not drive many registrations, but posting to a variety of sites can augment your audience and extend your reach to people who may not otherwise find your content. Please find below a chronological guide to promoting your presentation on social media networks.

Pre-event promotion

Twitter

Tweet 2-3 times per week during the month leading up to your event. Your tweets should include a catchy phrase or title, the handle (@BrightTALK) of the presenters and their companies, the date and time of the event and the URL to your presentation.

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