Green Marketing: Replacing In-Person Events with Web Seminars

  
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Web seminars are becoming increasingly popular way for Sales and Marketing teams to drive high quality leads at a lower cost and to save the environment from the carbon impact of an in-person event. Unlike other e-marketing tools, web seminars enable you to come as close as possible to an in-person tradeshow or event, without incurring the carbon impact or cost of travel. But given the fact that most of your target audience may be accustom to in-person events, how can you ensure that your Web Event will drive the same level of results as the in-person alternative?

Here are some simple steps you can follow that will help ensure that your online event will achieve the results you need without impacting the environment:

1. Communicate your brand
   Whether your Event is aimed at attracting new leads, briefing partners on your product roadmap, or training your sales force, youll want to ensure that your online presence reflects your company image and brand. With Connect Pro you can customize your account so that Event participants are presented with a professional branded experience throughout registration and event attendance. You can apply your companys colors and logos throughout registration and login pages for a consistent, branded experience.
   
   
2. Automatically Encourage and Ensure Attendance
   No matter what the scale of your event, Connect Pro enables you to automatically encourage and ensure high attendance rates. Only Connect Pro eliminates the barriers to audience participation, with instant access from any standard browser. Connect Pro is deployed using Adobe Flash Player, already installed on over 98% of browsers worldwide, so seminar attendees don't have to download and install plug-ins to participate, which is critical in making a solid first impression on your prospective customers. Connect Pro saves you time, money and trees by electronically sending out invitations, registration confirmations/approvals/denials, reminders, and post event communications. You can also easily import your existing email invitation lists for convenient reuse.
   
   
3. Qualify Potential Leads
   To ensure that you reach your target audience, Connect Pro enables you to create custom online registration forms that address the questions most important to your organization. You can choose from a standard list of questions or add your own custom questions. Once you have registrants, you can review registration form answers and approve or deny attendance based on the answers to your qualifying questions.
   
   
4. Streamline Event Preparation
   Connect Pro meeting rooms are automatically saved and always available, so you can set up the meeting room for your event in advance and then fine-tune the layout and content during your practice sessions. Connect Pro uses layouts to make it easy to transition from one topic or type of content to another.
   
   
5. Engage the Target Audience
   The backbone of any web seminar is usually PowerPoint slides, and Connect Pro supports full PowerPoint animations. Connect Pro goes far beyond PowerPoint, however, with unique support for rich content such as video, animations, and software simulations. Connect Pro enables business users to easily implement multi-media content, thereby enabling a far more engaging experience for their product or service.
   
   
6. Interaction with Your Audience
   Connect Pro provides the ability to go beyond one-way communication and further engage attendees through a variety of interactive tools. Connect Pro provides multi-point video, so multiple presenters can be shown live simultaneously. Each presenter has a choice of his/her picture being posted in the camera and voice pod or setting up a webcam for live video. Connect Pro also allows interactive chat, file sharing and polling questions, which are great ways to engage your online audience and ensure that they remain interested and paying attention throughout the event. For large audiences its best to use moderated chat only and reserve Q &A until the end of the seminar.
   
   
7. Coordination with Co-Presenters
   In order to make sure your event runs smoothly, Connect Pro provides a Presenter Only Area that enables presenters to coordinate with one another pre, during and after the event. Presenters can meet before the event to set-up their layouts, as well as review the overall flow and content for the event. During the event, Connect Pro enables the moderator to respond to chat questions, allowing the presenter to continue to focus on delivering the presentation and fielding only those most valuable questions that are passed on by the moderator.
   
   
8. Measure Success
   After the successful execution of the event, the next most important step is to measure the events success. Connect Pro includes both dashboard and detailed reports that provide information such as attendee demographics, who registered, who attended, or who viewed the event recording. Connect Pro also enables you to evaluate answers to registration survey responses and in-session polling results, providing valuable insight into your attendees interests and needs. Connect Pro also allows the export of all report data into your CRM system for sales lead follow-up.
   
   
9. Continue Gaining Value
   After the conclusion of your live event, Connect Pro enables you to continue to continue generating interest and leads for your sales team. You can easily post your recorded event on your website and drive potential attendees to it via your traditional marketing communications vehicles. Add the reporting results from your on-demand event to those of your live event to evaluate the success of your entire event campaign over time.