Every now and then one gets fascinated by the success of a particular marketing technique. Today was another such day (and there have not been too many of them recently :-))
Lead generation strategies for B2B clients is something that me and my agency has been involved in for the last 16 years, and have done tens of hundreds of end to end initiatives and yet for me to get goose bumps to see yet another lead gen initiative is quite remarkable.
I just witnessed my team undertake a purely online, by invitation, highly interactive, highly technical, yet cost effective session with over 254 (earlier twitted number was wrong) delegates from over 8 countries. While my team members have been doing this for a while, I had to be in the same room to understand and appreciate the success model.
The session had over 450 registrations a day prior and the session host had indicated to me that she would expect 50% attrition.
What was wonderful to see was;
Such a large number of participants / delegates, who were in for the “love” of the subject. They were not there to “network” but to “learn”. A lot of physical seminars turn out to be peer networking events.
The program format gave the option for the delegates to simply drop-off if the session is not of interest – and yet the attendance stayed constant. In the age of “conversational marketing” this session was a great example of a two way dialogue between the panel and the attendees and it was not forced.
The participation was from managers and sr. managers of large and medium enterprises and from major cities as well as the slightly distant locations. The entire rational of bandwidth were really a non-issue. (The experience of my team members has been that India and China have not just the highest delegates, but also the maximum questions come from these locations, although local language has to be used in China, Thailand & Korea)
The session lasted for over an hour and the drop rate was less than 6% from start to finish.
The 45 minutes of tech presentation was followed by 25 minutes of Q&A – better quality questions then most physical interactions. And guess what drop rates was still 6%!
The panel of speakers was the best of breed and from locations far away – they needed to spare only about 3 hours in all to reach out to audiences across 8 countries without ever having to get on a plane.
There were enough “I need to know more” and “get a rep to meet me” notes at the end of the session for me to assume that the ROI would be high on the investments in this session.
The format, bring with it huge advantages of reach, scale & interactivity, is also non-intrusive, the content has a much longer “shelf-life”, is more measurable and track able in terms of delegate interaction (pre, during and post) and at the same time far more cost effective as against other lead generation models for B2B marketing.
I believe the way we undertook / undertake the process is a b2b marketing best practice and I will create a process note and insights over the next few weeks and put it here for all to read / follow – in the meanwhile, if you need to understand more on this do drop in a line.