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.
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?"
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-)
Thats R 450.00 in South African currency. Also is there any material I can keep for future reference ?
slide show or word doc ?
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.