Use your social network to spread the word about your events (CC BY-SA 2.0)
If you’re selling a complex service in a crowded industry niche, you know how challenging it can be to establish your firm. It’s doubly difficult when you’re the start-up in an established space.
That’s one reason this story about Avature is instructive. In 2004, this firm entered the crowded field of customer relationship management (CRM) technology and consulting and the company’s leadership was looking for a way to differentiate.
They already had a lot going for them: the founding team had previously launched and sold a successful jobs website. With their new company, the experienced team members wanted to position themselves as thought leaders in the CRM field. They did this by co-creating content with other industry leaders and then distributing it through free webinars, video, and slide presentations. What’s most interesting is the approach they took—combining social media and partnerships.
Here’s a snapshot of the Avature approach:
Find your audience: Avature started by identifying which social media networks would be most effective for spreading the word to their target audience. They listened to who was participating on these networks and what they were saying.
Find partners: They partnered with industry leaders (through existing relationships) to create compelling content. They didn’t want a thinly veiled sales pitch, so they created content around a timely topic (web 2.0 technologies) with recognized names (Pixar Animation Studios). They positioned the webinar events as two industry leaders speaking on an issue the target customer valued. In addition, they sought out very active participants on the social media networks they targeted to help spread the word and create buzz around their message.
Find the right platforms for social sharing: Avature kept its message available and circulating after the live event by posting the recorded event online. (They used the free Blip.tv to host the hour-long recorded event and posted the PowerPoint presentation that accompanied each event on SlideShare, another free service.)
The approach proved to be a success. In one six-month period Avature ran five webinars that attracted more than 200 people—with more than three times that number viewing the recordings and presentations online following the live events. Beyond being a thought-leadership platform for the company, each webinar generated a minimum of 10 qualified leads for the company’s software, and of those, 20% turned into sales. In addition, new business from referrals increased by more than 50% in the three months following the webinars—with many non-customer referrals from people who referred business to Avature based on what they had heard about the company.
“You have to think about your messages as something someone is going to want to read. They want to be educated, and the message needs to tie back to your product or service.” says Michael Johnson, director of sales. “We weren’t interested in just saying, ‘Here’s what our product or service is.’ That would die on the vine and not get very viral.”
Has your business used webinars in your content mix? What kind of results did you see?
