The Marketing Maven: Industrial Marketing Blog & B2B Marketing Tips

How to Host a Successful Webinar

Webinars are the online version of a seminar. They are much less expensive to host than in-person events, an excellent way to engage an audience that prefers online communication and a great tactic to generate or nurture leads for your products and services.

But as with any event, you have to compete for your audience’s precious time, and if you do get their time, you’d better host a compelling event. If you bore your audience with irrelevant content, dull their senses with text-cramped slides, or numb them by reading from a script in a flat monotone, your customers and prospects will be pulling back their virtual chairs and running for the exits.

Here’s how to host a successful Webinar, one that will have your audience paying attention to what you have to say and benefit your company as well. We divide the Webinar campaign into three periods - Advance Planning, Day Of, and Post Event - and offer a list of best practices for each.

Use Online Marketing to Strengthen Customer Relationships

You invest valuable marketing and sales resources to acquire new customers, and should also invest in ensuring your customers stay with you long term. It's widely acknowledged that the cost of acquiring a new customer can be more than five times greater than the cost of retaining an existing one. That means that you should make marketing programs aimed at customer retention a priority.

What makes a customer stick with your company? Aside from offering products and services that meet their needs, you need to let customers know they are important to you. You can do this by providing excellent support, soliciting their opinions and building familiarity that strengthens your relationship.
When marketing for customer retention, it’s important to get out of the promotional mindset and get into your customer’s mindset. In other words, don’t just keep selling to them. A number of online marketing tactics are considered best practices for keeping customers in the fold. Here are some you can add to your marketing portfolio:

Five Practical Ways to Improve E-mail Marketing

Yes, e-mail has presented challenges for marketers the last few years, such as competing for attention in flooded inboxes and having legitimate e-mails caught in spam filters. But the fact remains: in business-to-business, e-mail still works.

Research from Datran Media shows that e-mail is still important for driving incremental revenue, reinforcing a company’s brand position and improving customer loyalty. In addition, few marketing tactics offer the speed, low cost and measurability of e-mail. With these benefits, it’s important to keep going with e-mail marketing.

Here are five practical tips to help you achieve continued success as an e-mail marketer.