Client-hosted webinar yields high prospect attendance and valuable channel engagement

Our client is a designer and manufacturer of high efficiency air purification solutions for enterprise, commercial, and consumer markets. With a recent infusion of private equity funding, they were searching for marketing partners for both their B2B initiatives as well as their B2C efforts. Sudden Impact Marketing (SIM) was selected to head up the B2B marketing efforts.

Challenge

When SIM first met with this client's C-suite executives, they expressed their interest in attaining the goal of ascertaining whether dealer recruitment was possible on a large scale. Evaluation of their success would be measured against their previously unsuccessful attempt to gain traction in this market.

They had previous experience using a media agency to promote their products to resellers in an effort to build channel partnerships. The specific resellers targeted were water dealers, which are largely franchisees of companies such as Culligan, Kinetico, and Ecowater. As part of the media agency’s efforts, they promoted and conducted a webinar. The results of that effort were disappointing.

Their specific challenges were threefold:

1. Identifying and building a prospect database of water dealers
2. Developing messaging that was on point for that specific audience
3. Understanding the steps and structure required for successful event marketing

Collectively, these barriers stood between our client and their stated objective of testing the feasibility of water dealers as a viable route to market.

Solution

Once selected, SIM worked on a day-to-day basis alongside the CMO and their staff.

Our revised messaging led to the development of a compelling narrative that resonated with the target audience. Much of what this client had previously developed was aimed at the consumer market and didn’t address the business value proposition they provide water dealers. Water dealers needed to understand the natural synergies between their current line of business and adding air purification. Consumers who care about water quality are also more predisposed to care about the health risk associated with air contaminants.

Secondly, we acknowledged that water dealer franchisees are small business owners. As such, they are acutely interested in the ROI opportunities, fearful of the risk of taking their focus off of their primary line of business, concerned about the support they could expect from our client, and cautious about the impact on their staff—both from a technical training perspective and an income generation angle for their sales teams.

SIM built outbound communication and event content that focused on these specific audience care-abouts and addressed them directly.

Implementation

The SIM process included a comprehensive plan with established timelines and deliverables for both the client and SIM teams to adhere to.

Some of the high-level steps included:

• Developing the target database—Along with the client's in-house list, SIM researched multiple data providers and ultimately bought data from two sources in order to build the database
• Building the media plan—SIM evaluated media options from associations, as well as publishers who had readership, membership, and subscribers who fell into our target audience; we then selected one vendor and promoted the event via targeted emails
• Adopting technology—SIM advised on which event platform to subscribe to for hosting the webinar, built landing page and registration forms in the client’s Hubspot account, set up UTM codes for tracking email and ad sources, and used a video platform to pre-record the event
• Developing content—SIM rebuilt their presentation deck to fit the messaging strategy, and created copy and design for the website, ads, and emails
• Recording video—Our team worked with the event speakers to record and edit the presentation that would be used in a “simu-live” format on the day of the event
• Implementing promotions—SIM scheduled and managed the email drop sequences and the deployment of third-party emails to drive attendance
• Phone engagement—We used our experienced phone team to call into the database and drive registrations to the event
• Event hosting—SIM moderated the event opening and Q&A session at the conclusion of the event
• Post-event planning—Finally, SIM helped develop a schedule for promoting the event “on-demand” and sequences of communications for attendees, registrants who didn’t attend, and the people in the database that didn’t respond, but were still considered prospects

Results

Live events are always anxiety-producing on the day of the event. In this case there was no reason to worry. We had 132 registrants to the event, and while normally there’s a 50-60% drop off rate in “live attendees,” 82 prospects attended the live event—a huge success by any measure.

Another key metric is engagement with the Q&A session. In this case, the questions continued for 20 minutes past the end of the presentation. This was a perfect way for their subject matter experts to address details not covered during the event.

The client and sales executives were extremely pleased with the success of the event.

Future directions

This engagement has paved the way for many potential opportunities to build on a positive and productive relationship.

We look forward to a long-term collaboration on both strategic and tactical campaign elements, such as:

• Event planning, hosting, and follow up
• Copywriting and design opportunities
• Presentation development
• Video recording
• Call team engagement
• Comprehensive, integrated campaign deployment

Reaction

“The attendance and engagement were fantastic. We couldn’t have done this without you—all of your help with the presentation, the recommendation to do a pre-recorded video… live welcome and Q&A, emails, presentation coaching, the awesome call team, and sophisticated videography.”

VP of Marketing and E-commerce