Can you help me fix the webinar marketing?

The Market trends in Service Provider networks webinar was well received by the attendees... the “only” problem was that there were so few of them. The conversion ratios were murderous:

  • From over a hundred thousand visitors who have seen the webinar announcement, approximately 1% clicked on the registration link. This is normal and expected; most people are banner-blind and many visitors are not interested in the particular topic or don’t want to attend a webinar.
  • Over a thousand visitors decided that the registration page is worth looking at, but only around 1% actually registered for the webinar. This ratio needs some serious fixing; increasing it by a few percentage points would make the whole idea viable.

If you were among those that were interested enough in the webinar to look at the registration page but did not proceed, please tell me what stopped you from registering. And, obviously, if you’ve spotted a glaring stupidity I made, please share it with me.

13 comments:

  1. it's not free.
  2. I found it was expensive. I might have registered if I made the early registration discounted rate.
  3. Thanks for the feedback. What would be acceptable price for you?
  4. It's only the price.
  5. I looked at the link because I'm interested in service provider technologies, but as I'm currently working in the mid-sized commercial market it wasn't something I wanted to pay for.
  6. Me: "Would you pay me some money for some training on internet?"
    Manager: "Ooh, that is tough, we don't have any training budget, except the one payed by customer direct. What kind of technology it is?"
    Me: "General, about the stuff we do in networking"
    Manager: "What do you mean by "General". You mean its not about technology?"
    Me: "Yes....err.....not really...it is generally about our SP network and the way to future, presented by one guy who EVEN wrote a book (trying to impress my manager) "
    Manager: "Ah, well we don't have budget for that, but please send an email to [email protected]", they would certainly attend these.

    So, I am too low (according to my manager) to attend these. Now, I am 100% confident the TSAs did not attend as THEY HAVE NO INTEREST, from what I can tell (no offence) the TSA job is more about customer communication then figuring out why we don't use ATM any more........

    Therefore I suggest two alternatives:
    - make the webminars low-cost, so that I can tell my wife I will spend a value compared to cinema ticket myself and go for it ..... not sure about what the wife would do in the meantime.....
    - promote the webminars by making them well known to management - with this slogan "DO YOU FEEL NOBODY SEES THE FOREST BECAUSE OF ALL THE TREES?"
  7. Too expensive unfortunately - being a one man band consultancy in todays financial climate - just couldnt justify it sadly.

    First reaction, is that if you are getting high visibility, but poor final take-up, the offering price-point is above the market expectation. (and the market is always right :-) )

    The real question for you - is the sweet point price, that cost such that you maximise attendance with maximum associated profit.

    Ie if you halved the cost, perhaps you would have more than doubled the attendance - leading to overall profit increase. In addition, once people have attended and bought into the events, you have a commited customer for life.

    Why not set up a poll - asking readers what they think the right price should be ?

    Good luck in future events ! 8-)
  8. If i could expense the seminar probably i would just go for it, but budget is tight and certainly this is quite out of my reach. Probably you can sell the recording of the seminar for the price of a movie ticket (or two) and profit from that. Sadly times when IT budgets were fat and generous are gone ...
  9. Well, our experience has shown that the key factor for a webinar being popular is making it free :) Any fee, be it 1$ or 49,95$ is the main stopping factor for general-type presentations. Unless people can associate some monetary value to the presentation (e.g. it's direct training for an exam) they psychologically aren't willing to spend a dime.
  10. I would pay $50, which is still steep (expensive) coming from a country where exchange rate favors the dollar.
    Thats R 450.00 in South African currency. Also is there any material I can keep for future reference ?
    slide show or word doc ?
  11. Too expensive to put on expenses - need to be around $50-60 for it to be a no brainer
  12. "The presentation is ideal for Service Provider account teams and sales engineers that have to understand the big picture..."

    I'm not sure that sales and account teams are the primary audience for a technical cisco blog like this.
    I come for the configuration and stay for the witty comments. My take could be wrong though, so maybe you could post a poll "what is your role within the company" ranging from casual IT guy to network architecture, along side with the softer sales/account team and managerial roles to reach better conclusions about the audience clicking the link.

    I would gladly pay to attend a technical course where the content was of deep technical nature, but keep in mind that the technical deep dives are usually presented "free" by the vendor trying to sell you the technology in the form of lunch and learn sessions or sales sessions.

    For example, most topical books I have read (latest being "interconnecting datacenters with VPLS") rarely have information that wasnt presented in greater detail by vendor engineers years prior on a road map, and again when it was generally available, and again when it reached large-scale deployment and validation, etc. They might be good introductions but if you are actually doing it working with a vendor they rarely bring any new exciting approaches as the vendor would have heard them from another customer already and suggested them.
  13. Thank you for your comments. Agree with most of it (so I have to find a way around all these limitations ;) ).
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