On January 18, 2012 Mike Agron presented a webinar on “Managing the Webinar Life Cycle-From Start to Finish”.  Watch this webinar recording to learn how to tightly manage and control the many aspects of running a great Webinar and hear real life examples of best practices and metrics used to deliver predictable outcomes for global and emerging brands.
Also learn:

• A proven methodology for planning and delivering engaging Webinars
• Pointers for audience recruitment, content development, coaching of speakers and post-event follow-up and conversion
• The key metrics and analytics to track and measure across the Webinar life cycle

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It seems people have grown weary of “gated” web content – the practice of requiring site visitors to fill out a form to gain access to premium content.  Conversion rates are declining steadily for all but the most valued websites. The reasons vary according to market surveys – some responders complained of the time to complete the forms, while others doubted that the quality of the content would justify the follow-up phone calls they assumed would be received from aggressive marketers.  And, despite passage of the CAN-SPAM Act, there are still those who are reluctant to share personal information for fear it will lead to clutter in their In boxes. The aggregate result of all this is a strong prospect preference for non-gated content.

In this business brief from the marketing experts at True Influence™ try to answer the most commonly asked content marketing question. To Gate or Not to Gate. Which approach is best for your business?  Read on…

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On Sep 27, Jason Hekl, Founder and Principal of Demand a Lot Marketing, presented an informative webinar on DIY Demand Generation: Scrappy Marketing Strategies for Filling the Funnel Faster.

Recession. Limited resources. Budget cuts. Pricing pressures. Diminishing returns on advertising. Poor response rates. Low conversion rates. Prospects who don’t want to engage your sales staff. Stiff competition. The challenges facing B2B marketers today are many. There is no “business as usual” any more. Traditional marketing techniques just do not work as well as they once did. And that is creating great demand for scrappy, street-smart marketers who know how to do more with less.

Watch it here:

Date: September 27, 2011 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST

Recession. Limited resources. Budget cuts. Pricing pressures. Diminishing returns on advertising. Poor response rates. Low conversion rates. Prospects who don’t want to engage your sales staff. Stiff competition. The challenges facing B2B marketers today are many. There is no “business as usual” any more. Traditional marketing techniques just do not work as well as they once did. And that is creating great demand for scrappy, street-smart marketers who know how to do more with less.

So what can a B2B marketer do to drive greater demand in this challenging environment? Quite a bit actually! Attend this webinar and learn how to become the in-demand scrappy marketer who can:

• Drive greater response out of your outbound campaigns

• Use trigger-based offers to qualify prospects and accelerate their evaluation processes

• Think like a quota-carrying salesperson, and use that to improve your marketing

• Increase conversion rates from your free trial programs

About the Speaker:

As founder and principal of Demand A Lot Marketing, Jason coaches entrepreneurs and DIY marketers on demand generation strategies to accelerate growth. With experience that spans enterprise software sales and all facets of technology marketing, Jason has sourced, developed and closed millions of dollars in new business throughout his career.

Before founding Demand a Lot Marketing, Jason was Vice President of Marketing at Coupa Software, the fast-growing cloud spend management solution provider that help companies large and small control their spending and generate savings that go direct to the bottom line. Under his leadership, Coupa grew 100% year-over-year and went from virtual unknown to being recognized by Gartner in 2011 for “standout performance in market share growth and its remarkable visibility in the e-procurement market.”

Before joining Coupa, he served as Vice President of Corporate Marketing at InQuira, leading provider of enterprise knowledge applications recently acquired by Oracle, and was responsible for all corporate marketing initiatives, including demand generation, messaging, and marketing communications. During his 4+ year tenure, revenues grew nearly ten-fold and the marketing organization won one of the original Markies (for Best Lead Scoring).

Earlier in his career, Jason held positions in product management, alliances and sales at Siebel Systems and InSystems Technologies. He holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and Economics from the University of Delaware.

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When looking for ways to get the word out, B2B marketers have more pay-for-performance options than ever.

In this new business brief from the marketing pros at True Influence™, we compare and contrast PPC email marketing and PPC search engine advertising, arguing that both approaches have their place in a well-rounded marketing campaign.

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Imagine you are dining in a fine restaurant and, after taking your order, the waiter returns with a box of ingredients and says, “OK, here’s everything you need to prepare your meal. Our kitchen is right over there.” Would you take him up on the offer and make your best attempt at playing “Iron Chef” or would you never visit that restaurant again?

That’s what it feels like when suppliers offer demand creation portals loaded with tools (e.g. email templates, customizable white papers, case studies) that they expect channel partners to download and use to generate interest. These suppliers forget one key thing: Partners have limited know-how for developing and executing marketing programs. At best, they’ll take what you offer them and shotgun the content to the first prospect they come across, regardless of whether the content resonates at whatever stage in the cycle the buyer has entered. Most don’t even have a marketing automation platform they can use to send the emails; our research indicates they use their email programs, CRM package or whatever infrastructure they have (often provided through the cloud) to push content to their customers. Let’s face it: they are not good at cooking!

Why do suppliers continue to offer partners so many tools they’re unlikely to use? One answer is the abundance of vendors working to convince suppliers to build marketing portals to generate demand and revenue. Yet most of these efforts ignore the reality that, once the launch is over and the new portal is past its novelty phase, suppliers will experience the same lack of adoption by partners as before. Could it be they’re asking them to do the cooking, and they really don’t want to?

Three components must be addressed when delivering marketing campaigns to partners:

• The offer. In terms of offers, suppliers should show partners what the expected results or ROI will be if they sign up for a program. This will require that they engage in more performance-based activities (e.g. appointment setting or lead generation with their demand generation vendors).
• The delivery. When discussing program delivery, it’s important to address questions paramount to ensuring partner engagement: Will program tools be accessed from the portal? How do partners get started? Who will guide them through the process? Rather than ask partners to “do the cooking,” present them with the “finished meal” instead. In other words, create campaigns that include all the ingredients (e.g. teleprospecting, list acquisition, appointment setting, event confirmation, followup reporting) that partners can choose from a “service menu” – preferably from their portal.
• Partner communications. Finally, partner communications must be continued through the launch, past the enablement phase and through the entire program’s lifecycle. With companies spending up to one-third of their channel marketing budgets communicating to partners, we suggest they focus on talking about getting them engaged rather than bombarding them with new product release information (as is the norm).

These three components are often overlooked by suppliers that continue to throw money at the problem to acquire technological fixes. Instead, suppliers should focus on serving up a marketing program that requires the least possible effort and expertise for partners to set into motion, instead of expecting them to somehow cook up their own.