In Content Marketing Institute’s latest webinar, 6 Key Metrics that Impact Webinar Performance: Before, During and After, Mike Agron, Executive Webinar Producer for WebAttract, answered some of the biggest questions content marketers have when trying to measure webinar performance, including:

• What are key metrics and their benchmarks?
• How do you gather the information?
• How do you know if you are on track?
• How do you use your intel to convert more prospects into customers?

Creating the win-win webinar

Agron began his presentation by asserting that the objective of a webinar is to get business results while offering a high value to the audience — a benchmark that Agron calls High Performance­-High Impact (HP-HI). This is the content marketer’s “sweet spot” for reaping the greatest returns on their webinar efforts.

But, as Agron stresses, these HP­-HI webinars don’t just happen — you need to have a solid plan. Here are five things to consider to help ensure predictable outcomes:

1. Objectives: What do you want to happen as a result of the webinar? For example, is your goal to bring in more sales leads, develop stronger thought leadership, or achieve better customer retention?
2. Audience value: Is your content timely and relevant? Are your messages and information targeted to your desired audience?
3. Success factors: What are your target benchmarks for the number of registrants and the number of attendees?
4. Calls-to-action: What do you want the audience to do after the webinar, and what are you going to do in order to ensure this happens?
5. Analysis: How will you determine whether your objectives are achieved?

One of the biggest benefits of the HP-HI webinar is that you create a relationship with your audience before, during, and after the event.

Measuring the success of your webinar

According to Agron, the following six key metrics are most effective in helping you gauge the success of your webinars:

1.  Click-through rate

Click-through rate measures the number of people who registered for your webinar compared with the number of those who clicked to the registration page (just because they went to the registration landing page doesn’t mean they registered). This data can give you vital information to help you predict:

• How strong your registration and attendance may be
• The effectiveness of your registration landing page
• The quality of your message and its value proposition for your target audience

Tip: Agron recommends you start tracking your data as soon as your registration page goes live.

How do you know if your CTR is on track? From the webinars he has conducted and measured, Agron has developed a CTR benchmark that can serve as a guideline for other content marketers:

• Excellent: A CTR of 34 to 50 percent
• On target: A CTR of 25 to 33 percent; you are on target, but review your invitation message to make sure it is specific enough to your audience to improve your rate.
• Underperforming: A CTR of  less than 25 percent; you should be concerned if you fall in this range, because it indicates that something isn’t connecting with your audience.

If your registration is underperforming, the answers to these questions might help get your webinars back on track:

• Are you targeting the right demographics?
• Is the information you provide “must have” or just “nice to have;” is it just a converted sales message?
• Are you asking too many registration questions that are invasive? (e.g., “What product are you going to buy?”)
• Are you using words, characters, or phrases in your email subject line that might trigger spam filters, such as “free” or “!”?
• Are you using HTML? (If so, you might want to consider switching from HTML to simple text.) 

2. Attendee ratio

Attendee ratio (AR) measures the percent of people attending as a ratio of those who attended compared with those who registered. This data can give you vital information to help you predict:

• Your audience’s interest in the topic
• The demographic value of your content (was it something the target audience wanted to take the time to attend?)
• Best practices for post-webinar follow-up

How do you know if your AR is on track? According to Agron’s benchmarks:

• Excellent: An AR of more than50 percent
• On target: An AR of 40 percent
• Underperforming: An AR less than 30 perent

3. Online polls

Online polls are your opportunity to find out what your attendees are most interested in about your webinar content by measuring real-time feedback. This data can give you vital information to help you analyze:

• Your audience’s level of engagement
• Audience members’ perspective on the topic
• How you should be shaping your message — this is particularly vital for your speakers, as good speakers can take the information gathered from a poll and use it to shape their delivery on the fly

Agron advises content marketers to always look at the percentage of people responding, as well as how they vote, as this information can be used in follow-up conversations after the webinar. For example, in the poll below that Agron conducted, the knowledge that 40 percent of his audience wanted help on how to monitor their online reputations gave him a starting point for later outreach. 

4. Exit surveys

Exit surveys measure how well you met your audience’s expectations, such as whether the information you provided was aligned with the webinar description and whether the difficulty level was appropriate for the audience you were targeting. The data can give you vital information to help you learn:  

• Your level of thought leadership
• Future topics you might want to cover
• Lessons that can help you as you develop your next webinar

Agron’s standard benchmark for the number of people who respond to an exit survey is:

• Excellent: 35 to 45 percent
• On target: 25 to 35 percent
• Underperforming: less than 25 percent

But Agron says asking your audience members to rate their overall webinar satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5 can be telling, as well. Using this metric, if the percentage of respondents who rated your webinar between a 3 and a 5 is:

• Excellent: greater than 90 percent
• On target: 80 to 90 percent
• Underperforming: less than 80 percent

5. Audience retention

Audience retention metrics measure how well your webinar kept the audience interested in your business. The data can give you vital information on the impact of your webinar in terms of:

• Whether or not you delivered on what you promised in your promotional materials
• Whether there were audio or technical issues
• Your brand’s level of thought leadership
• What post-webinar follow-up opportunities might exist

Here, Agron feels it’s helpful to look at attendee counts at 15-minute intervals throughout the webinar. When it comes to his company’s webinars, “We want to see 80 percent of the peak audience is still there by the Q&A portion,” he says.

6. On-demand viewing

On-demand viewing metrics indicate post-webinar interest and, according to Agron, this phase is where the real opportunities for content marketing begin. Data you gather that can have an impact on your strategy include:

• Fresh, new sales leads
• People who attended the original webinar but watched it again
• Those who registered but didn’t attend
• What your audience considers to be must-have content

Using the data you collect during a webinar

At the end of the webinar, Agron offered some advice to help attendees take the data compiled through these metrics and use it to start a “warm conversation” that can convert prospects to customers:

• Step 1: Archive a copy of the recorded webinar.
• Step 2: Within 24 to 48 hours, send a follow-up/thank you email and include valuable content, such as the slide deck, or link to reporting.
• Step 3: Do final registration, attendance, and performance analysis.

Agron also recommends marketers gather insights by individual attendee (see sample chart, below), including capturing any special questions they asked throughout the webinar process. “This way, when you follow-up, you can start a conversation that incorporates their questions, and you can integrate this into your marketing automation processes,” he says.

If you missed the webinar, there’s still a chance for you to view the full presentation. Download 6 Key Metrics that Impact Webinar Performance: Before, During and After.

Get more great insight from Mike Agron when you attend Content Marketing World on September 4 to 6 in Columbus, Ohio. 

Video and social media have experienced tremendous growth in the last few years — in terms of technological capabilities, as well as in usage rates. For example, according to the B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends study, marketers’ use of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn grew by up to 20 percent between 2010 and 2011. In that same time period, video usage increased from 41 percent to 52 percent among marketers.

These technologies have presented marketers with tremendous opportunities and challenges, as the audience has high expectations.

In the Content Marketing Institute’s recent webinar, Jump-Start Your 2012 Content Marketing Strategy with Video & Social Media, Steve Rotter, VP of Marketing at Brightcove, outlined some of these accelerated consumer expectations:

• Devices: Viewers demand the ability to access content on a number of different devices — not just on their PCs.
• Everywhere access: They want to be able to consume content wherever and whenever they choose.
• Social: They want to be able to engage with content, share, and discuss it across their social graphs on their favorite platforms.
• Options: Their desired content must be available at their demand, and must offer them convenient choices for consuming, purchasing, and subscribing.
• Quality: They don’t accept excuses for poor viewing experiences. Living-room quality video is essential, no matter how, when, and where they choose to view their content.

In turn, these technology speed zones have resulted in some significant speed bumps for CMOs, who face new challenges when it comes to standing out, keeping engagement levels up, and driving conversions in the face of fragmented audience attention and increased strategic complexity.

But, as Rotter says, “If you aren’t prepared to commit on these new platforms, you will miss a huge opportunity — and large portions of the audience — that your competition might grab.”

Fortunately, Rotter had some valuable insight and inspiration on hand to help improve the ways marketers leverage their content across these technologies. Framing his discussion in the context of the customer life cycle, he began by outlining some compelling ideas on how to use video to drive awareness, and offered best practices in five key areas:

SEO: Video dramatically improves SEO results, as search engines treat video content as higher-order objects when indexing web pages. Rotter suggests creating interactive transcripts of video content, as these components are searchable, drive navigation, and can create a fantastic user experience.

YouTube: As the second-largest search engine today (second only to Google), YouTube has become a powerful tool for marketers, particularly when it comes to creating content synergies. As a best practice, Rotter recommends that marketers make sure their YouTube videos point people to their own websites to maintain creative control and capture deeper viewer analytics.

Social video: Rotter stressed the importance of pushing video content onto your business’ Facebook page. He also mentioned that the functionality you create when using a white-label video player (such as Brightcove’s player), can carry over into your Facebook page, allowing viewers who discover your content on one platform to take action on other platforms as well.

Live video: Rotter described live video’s “halo effect”, where people who discover your live video may return to your site to consume additional content. This produces incremental, on-demand views that can continue long after the original video event takes place.

Online & offline integration: Mobile technology offers tremendous opportunities to engage consumers on one platform and direct them to additional platforms in a seamless way. For example, product or object recognition that results from interacting with a billboard ad can be extended through interactive web experiences by using a QR code.

Rotter also outlined some video and social media options that can be used to drive consumers further down the purchase funnel:

• Branded video channels and video product demos can be used to drive interest.
• Video case studies foster increased levels of trust, which can encourage trial.
• Video landing pages, video embeds in email, in-player calls-to-action, and shoppable video can make trial and purchase more convenient.
• Developing social-based customer communities, customer care programs, and corporate communication initiatives support loyalty.

If you would like to hear the rest of Steve Rotter’s advice and view some of his compelling case study examples, there’s still time to experience the webinar. Download Jump-Start Your 2012 Content Marketing Strategy with Video & Social Media. 

Yes, content works well when it comes to driving consumer demand. And, in turn, existing demand can create an ideal opportunity to deliver valuable, informative content. Yet marketers don’t always recognize how holistically these two marketing functions are linked to each other and to the various stages in the customer’s buying process — an oversight that needlessly complicates the job of any marketer.

Fortunately, there are some successful strategies for aligning and delivering content that will (to borrow a phrase from Hollywood’s latest storytelling success — “The Hunger Games”) turn the odds of a purchase ever in your favor.

During Content Marketing Institute’s latest webinar, Content to Customer: Aligning and Delivering Content According to the Buying Process, Eloqua’s Joe Chernov and Elle Woulfe shared a framework to help marketers address the most pressing customer goals and create the types of content that will work best at each phase of the purchase funnel.

What’s in a lead?

While many marketers simply identify any potential customer as a lead, according to Joe Chernov, Eloqua’s VP of Content Marketing, this term leaves out vital information about customers’ content interests, and their current mindset and motivations behind those interests. The broad usage of the term also fails to take into consideration important details you may have already gathered through earlier engagements they’ve initiated with your company. For these reasons, Eloqua uses the following four categories to more clearly define potential customers and help content marketers direct their communications more effectively.

• Suspects: A Suspect is every possible person who fits the criteria of your target market but hasn’t yet taken any action after accessing your content. These are people who could be interested in buying your products at some point down the line, or they may have just come across your content through an interest unrelated to a purchase.
• Prospects: When consumers in your target market have actively supplied personal information in exchange for more of your content, they become Prospects. This group includes consumers who have searched online for information on products that are relevant to your business, but who might not be actively engaged in the purchase process at the moment.
• Leads: In the Eloqua framework, Prospects that fit your consumer profile and have demonstrated a desired behavior or intent are referred to as Leads. At this stage, you know this consumer has an interest, and your use of content can help you determine if they are sales-ready.
• Opportunities: When your content has helped to put you in touch with a consumer who fits your buyer persona and is looking to make a purchase, you’ve created an Opportunity.

The right content for the right stage

Once you have categorized your potential customer, it’s time to create and deliver content. Whether they are ready to make a purchase now or are just window shopping, your goal should be to support their current informational needs and move them through the buying cycle.

Suspects

What information they want: Suspects are looking for companies to share what they know as an organization — not what they sell. So the content marketer’s goal at this stage is to get content to spread from person to person in the hopes that the more people it reaches, the better the chance that it will reach a potential prospect.

What content works well: According to Joe Chernov, a blog should be the hub of your content wheel in this phase. He also advises content marketers to avoid using forms when communicating with Suspects, as anything that interrupts consumers’ ability to view your content is a surefire way to blunt its spread at this stage of the marketing game.

Some content formats that do work well here include:

• Infographics
• Non-demo videos
• Curated lists (e.g., 20 Women who Rock Content Marketing)
• “Infotainment” content       

Best platforms for delivering content to Suspects:

• Blogs
• Social networks
• Branded outposts (e.g., your company’s video channel or other owned media platforms)
• Partner sites

Prospects

What information they want: In general, Prospects are looking for content that feeds their professional interests and provides a service, whether it be helping them solve a problem, giving them some targeted business tips, or arming them with information that can help them get buy-in from team decision-makers.

From the content marketer’s perspective, the goal at this stage is to collect information on people you haven’t established a relationship with yet, and to gather more information from those you have. This makes the Prospect stage a good time to start using forms as a gateway to your content.

As it’s all about conversions, at this stage, Joe Chernov recommends that marketers deliver content that speaks to Prospects’ fears and pain points. He also advises marketers to make sure they are pairing the channel they use with the role, as not all channels work for all titles.

Content that works well for Prospects:

• Email
• Advertising/Display
• Direct mail
• Events (both online and in-person)
• eBooks/Guides
• Chapters from physical books
• Licensed analyst reports
• Webinars

Leads

What information they want: Like Prospects, Leads also want content that addresses their business pains. But they differ in the types of information they will find most useful, and not all hand-raisers will turn out to be sales-ready decision makers.

At this stage, Elle Woulfe, Senior Marketing Programs Manager at Eloqua, advises marketers to focus on communicating with what she refers to as the sales-accepted lead — those with the Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing (BANT) to make a purchase decision.

Woulfe supports the use of progressive profiling at this stage — where you determine what information you already have on the lead, and then ask only for information that is missing. This allows marketers to gather more useful information without overwhelming the potential lead with repetitive requests. She also urges marketers to follow a Golden Rule of Content: Ask if the content you are pushing out is advancing the customer’s process.

Content that works well for Leads: Woulfe has found that product-related information works well here, as long as the consumer is comfortable with the level of content you are providing, and advises marketers that this is the stage where automated nurturing can begin to transition to an actual sales rep.

Preferred content formats for reaching leads include:

• White papers
• Case studies
• Demo videos
• Product comparisons

Opportunities

What information they want: Once your content has created an Opportunity, it’s up to you to help the consumer make a purchasing decision that they will be satisfied with, and to make that decision quickly. This includes providing clear, transparent pricing information because, as Woulfe says, you are better off supplying this information proactively than waiting for your competitors to do it for you. For content marketers, this also means staying involved — nurturing the buyer all the way through the close of the deal, and not relying exclusively on the sales rep to deliver content.

Content that works well for Opportunities:

• ROI calculators
• Pricing sheets
• RFP generators and templates

Woulfe also warns content marketers that just because these may be “dry” topics, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be presented in a vital, exciting way. She also encourages marketers to consider bundling their best Opportunity-stage content into a single buying center.

If you missed the live webinar, you can still benefit from these and other insights shared by Eloqua by viewing the archive version here. You can also download the slide presentation here. 

But what happens when your business starts to grow beyond the ability to manage your outreach with the same hands-on, one-content-person-wears-all-the-hats approach?

To remain competitive and responsive in our global digital “multiverse,” you need to be ready to scale up your content efforts to reach new markets, in new countries, and to communicate using new levels of sophistication.

Content Marketing Institute’s latest webinar, Content Marketing Two-Step: Scaling Editorial Calendars and Multiple Content Channels, provides marketers with some fantastic tools to address these challenges — with the help of a few seasoned content pros.

Scaling editorial calendars for global use

As Integrated Marketing Manager for Intel, Pam Didner recognizes the importance of content planning that is built to scale as outreach objectives grow. Pam started globalizing her editorial calendars last year, and has shared some insight into how Intel manages the process.

Pam says the secret lies in tight collaboration between the company’s headquarters (HQ) and its regional offices (geos). “Geos are your BFFs,” she says, so in order to manage expectations — and the flow of communication — establish clearly defined roles and responsibilities for each participant from the outset. Once you know who is in charge of each task, the content process boils down to a few manageable steps:

1. Prioritize your geos/countries, and the topics that are most relevant to each one, based on budgets and goals. Here, HQ takes the lead in making the decisions, but geo involvement and feedback is vital. When you are providing content on a global scale, it’s likely that every region will have its own distinct ideas, communication styles, messaging goals, and business objectives. Help each geo understand the focal points that will best speak to your current brand priorities by giving them the reasoning behind each choice. While you can’t always make every region completely happy, open communication will help ease potential conflicts.

2. Finalize the editorial timeline for outreach, based on each geo’s specific business objectives and product launch schedules. HQ should take ownership of this step, which, if Step 1 above is done correctly, shouldn’t take much time.

3. Create geo-specific editorial calendars to set deadlines for content creation and execution. This step requires equal participation from both HQ and geos. HQ makes its recommendations on topics, and each geo will then take its budget and message priorities into account to select the topics it will create content around.

4. Create a topic marketing kit. This HQ-driven task includes: 

• Outlining the key story you want to tell in a given geo
• Determining your overall brand messaging and positioning
• Listing the key search terms you’ve identified for that geo
• Listing the specific content pieces that will work best (e.g., white papers, social media messages, case studies, videos, etc.), and templates the geo can use to customize any materials that HQ has created to share. 

5. Craft an engagement plan. Once geos have the topic marketing kit in hand, they can begin developing their own plans to create, launch, and manage their content. Here, individual geos can use their knowledge about the audience to ensure that messages will resonate with their audience, based on its distinct communication style and cultural priorities. A few general tips apply here:

• Make sure to allow yourself a long enough lead time to produce the kit
• Use simple, headline-driven creative content that can be easily customized
• Videos work well when creating content templates that cross cultural and geographic boundaries. But make sure your videos focus less on dialogue and more on images and demos so that key messages don’t get lost in translation.

This step is also where geos will determine the media strategies they will use to distribute their content (e.g., direct marketing, local events, search campaigns, etc.).

6. Share engagement results. After the campaign has been executed, it’s vital that HQ and geos take the time to debrief each other on the program’s performance. Metrics should be discussed and measured against expectations, and any unexpected events should be noted and explained. 

7. Refine the editorial plan and marketing kit. Taking into account all results and learning from Step 6, HQ can go back and tweak the process for future use.

Virtual communications: Delivering a global content plan

Once you have designed and developed a scalable content strategy, there’s still the question of how to execute those plans. Scalable distribution of content presents its own challenges, such as how to capture customer attention, how to deliver consistent and personalized messages, and how to make your content accessible anywhere, at any time, on any device. Fortunately, there is a wealth of virtual communication solutions available to help marketers address these issues. 

In his part of the webinar presentation, Mark Bornstein, Senior Marketing Content Manager at ON24, urges marketers to expand their perception of content execution and distribution beyond the trusty webinar. As virtual communication evolves, enhanced tools and capabilities are becoming available, such as:

• Engaging rich-media experiences, including video, demos, Q&A screens, and more
• Integrated branding opportunities that enhance, rather than interrupt, the audience experience
• Multimedia content options that add sight, sound, and context to presentations
• Enhanced interactivity, such as chat functionality, that allows the audience to participate, rather than just view what’s happening on the screen.
• Social media integration, so participants can share what they’ve learned with their colleagues and the business communities they’ve cultivated online. 

Virtual communication vehicles also work well when reaching out to consumers who aren’t able to attend your live events. For example, solutions such as briefing centers or user conferences and trade shows work well for distributing educational and informative content — particularly for busy professionals who don’t have the time or budget to attend many training sessions or press events. Another benefit of virtual communication events is that they can be archived and viewed at the consumer’s convenience. “These are not one-time environments. They live on after the original events,” says Bornstein.

Speaking of archived events, you still have a chance to experience all the fantastic insight shared by Pam Didner and Mark Bornstein in the Content Marketing Two-Step webinar. View the archive version here. 

While governmental entities do not market products or services in the same sense as most businesses do (many government services are not duplicated in the private sector), by their very nature they compile a great deal of information. In fact, the websites of local and federal government entities in the U.S. are often designed specifically to share content that informs and educates — just like the best B2C and B2B content marketing does.

Unique considerations for government-related content

Though the purpose may not be to sell anything, content created for a government website must still engage readers and earn their trust. To make sure the content you create in the public interest fulfills its responsibilities, there are a few standard rules you should follow:

• Use plain English and avoid jargon, as the diversity of the audience will likely span the socio-economic spectrum.
• Focus on what the consumer needs to know, and how the particular services or information offered on the site can help. Limit information about why or how the government entity achieves its goals, as this extra information can confuse or frustrate people who visit the site looking for answers.
• Format content in a clear, compelling way. Government websites must compete with consumer websites that offer similar information (and all the bells and whistles they offer such as compelling graphic design, widgets, social media icons, and content rich blogs).
• Check — and double check — your facts. For many citizens, information shared by the government has an innate relevance and gravity, while others automatically doubt information from any level of government, and dismiss it as self-serving. To gain the trust of both audiences, it is critical that the content be factual, accurate, have transparent input, and be beyond reproach. It may also be appropriate to have your content reviewed by experts to ensure accuracy.
• Information needs to be easily accessible and relevant, even though government services rarely compete with private sector services.
• A .gov (or equivalent such as gov.au, gouv.fr) extension provides an air of authority, so be sure to reserve these URLs for your content, if possible.

What government sites are doing it right?

When it comes to best content practices for government entities, there definitely are government-owned or sponsored websites that do a great job of sharing information and educating the public. However, many government sites seem to be stuck in the internet of a few years ago, in “government 1.0″, so to speak.

Here are three examples of government websites that make educational content available to constituents, with varying levels of success.

BabyYourBaby.org

Baby Your Baby

Baby Your Baby is run by the Utah Department of Health in conjunction with two non-government entities. The site is designed as a resource to help mothers understand how to take care of their newborns — and themselves after giving birth.

Content description: The content is created by nurses, medical doctors, and public health professionals. There is not much information to validate the trustworthiness or expertise of the articles, though that is likely not an impediment to the target audience.

Some of the articles contain links to source articles (though some links are broken) and the name of the author of the article. However, most of the articles lack a publication date or information about peer reviews (as is the case with many medical sites).

User experience: For the most part, it seems that users are expected to only use one way to navigate to any piece of information — via the site’s navigation bars.

• Navigation: Each page includes a top navigation bar, with drop-down menus of subtopics. The right navigation bar remains the same on all pages (except for the blog page).
• The topmost navigation bar provides links for the entire Utah Department of Health, as well as a link to search the state website, Utah.gov. This provides a high level of access to the state sites, if desired.
• Search: The search function searches the entire state website and other Utah government websites, rather than just Baby Your Baby, and results can be less than satisfactory. For example, in a search for the term “breast feeding,” results from the site were fifth from the top. 

In search results for "breastfeeding", Baby Your Baby ranks fifth.

Content: Content is freely available to all who visit the website, and users do not need to register before accessing content.

The information is divided into topics that make sense for the audience and make it easy to hone in on the information needed. Topics and subtopics include:

• Pregnancy — Before, During, and After
• Infants — Overview, Breastfeeding, Dental Care

Format/Layout: The overall format is clean and simple and remains the same on all pages, making it easy to navigate. However, there is limited use of graphics or photographs, and some topics could be more useful if presented as video content, rather than text.

Social media: The Utah Department of Health has its own YouTube channel and Twitter account, which are both accessible from the department’s website (linked to from the topmost navigation bar) but not the Baby Your Baby pages. Yet, Baby Your Baby does not have its own dedicated social media channels, and the link to the Baby Your Baby blog takes visitors to a page without any blog posts.

Nutrition.gov site

Nutrition.gov

Nutrition.gov is a U.S. federal government website run by some pretty powerful agencies with a focus on promoting health and nutrition: The National Agricultural Library of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in conjunction with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

Unfortunately, this is an old-style website overflowing with information that is difficult to find and isn’t presented in a graphically interesting way. The information may be useful, but it is hard to imagine a consumer spending much time searching for the information they need before becoming frustrated and, possibly, abandoning the search. The site could use a makeover to be more contemporary and user friendly.

Content: The subject matter is broad across the general topics of health and nutrition. The site organizes the content into categories such as:

• What’s In Food
• Life Stages
• Shopping, Cooking & Meal Planning.

However, the content itself is a mishmash of links to next-level pages, other government websites, and PDFs. While the federal government does indeed provide a wealth of information, a site like this would be most useful if it curated its content and focused on providing the best and most recent information available. Deeper-level pages and links to more detailed or professional levels of information, if offered, could help to ensure that all of the site’s content would be accessible without overwhelming consumers.

There is a news section (see image below), though most of what is covered wouldn’t typically be described as news, and this section does not appear to have been updated recently. Moreover, no dates are provided on articles in this section, and most link to other government sites, rather than news accounts on a given topic.

Nutrition.gov news page

Authority: Each link or piece of content contains a short description and a brief description of the government agency that is the source of the information. Government information is considered public and for the most part is not attributed to a specific individual, though in some cases PDFs show authorship.

Unfortunately little effort seems to have been dedicated to making the information readable by a general audience, as is evidenced by this PDF listing fat and fatty acid content of selected foods.

Nutrition.gov listing of fatty acids content

User experience: Though there is a general navigation bar and search box on the left side of the page, the design of the site makes seeking information or drilling down to sub-pages unintuitive.

Social media: Nutrition.gov has a Twitter site (11,266 followers, to date), which seems to be the only social media outlet for this information. Also, the site does not provide tools to share information via email or social media sites.

New Orleans Office of Homeland Security

This section of the New Orleans city website I reviewed is dedicated to Emergency Preparedness. This site provides information for citizens on how the city deals with emergencies and provides information about what to do in case of an emergency.

New Orleans city's emergency preparedness site.

User experience: Users can follow a link from the New Orleans City home page to the Emergency Preparedness site. Visitors to the site will likely find the most educational content under a link to General Disaster Preparedness in the left navigation bar. Though not elegantly designed, once you are on the Disaster Preparedness site, it is easy to navigate to the general topics a citizen would most likely need.

Content: Not all of the content listed on the website is available, and what is there is often out of date. For example, the News page is empty, and the link to Learn about Hurricanes and Natural Disasters is broken.

The section on Current Disaster Information is helpful and provides clear pathways to find the information people commonly seek in an emergency, such as school closings, closed streets and bridges, and other sources of emergency information.

At the bottom of every page is a long list of links to the rest of the city’s services, though the great amount of information provided there can make scrolling all the way through each page a chore. The site might be more user friendly if the city found a more elegant way to help users connect to its other departments and services.

Social media: Neither the city nor the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security appears to have a blog or any associated social media sites. However, users can sign up for text or email alerts — if they know where to find the link, which is somewhat hidden (it is located under General Disaster Preparedness, Preparing to Evacuate, below the first screen of information).

Conclusion

As I mentioned above, governments do not generally market services in the same way businesses do. But these and other efforts do demonstrate their recognition of the need to provide public information as an online service. What do you think about these efforts to create and share educational content? And what are your thoughts about how governmental entities can take the next steps? 

It’s certainly not time to pull the plug, since webinars are still a reasonably effective way to generate and nurture prospective customers, as well as to educate and engage those you already have. As noted in the recent B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, 46 percent of marketers are using webinars, and of those users, 70 percent consider them to be effective. But it’s time to take a good hard look at the tried-and-true 60-minute live webinar formula and ask, “Can we do better?”

And so I’ve set out on a personal mission to totally re-think the webinar this year, in the context of a world that has changed dramatically in the last four years. And I’d like to invite each of you, as a thoughtful content marketer, to take that journey with me.

According to my friend, the high-volume webinar producer, there are several important problems with the today’s standard webinar formula — that is, the audio-over-presentation slides format that is scheduled for an hour, with typed-in Q&As:

• Webinars have a personality problem.
• Webinars have a scheduling problem.
• Webinars have a length problem.
• Webinars have an engagement problem.

In light of this, is it any wonder that webinar sign-up rates are declining, attendance among sign-ups is flagging, and mid-session dropouts are increasing?

1. Employ video (not just audio) to add personality and energy

As I observed in a recent CMI post, audio-only webinars rob communicators of many of the natural communication and engagement tools they possess as human beings — their body language, their gestures and facial expressions, as well as props and visual aids. Psychologists will tell you that one of the earliest skills we learned as children was how to read facial expressions and to interpret them into feelings of trust and authority, so omitting this powerful communication mechanism can be a costly mistake.

When we listen to the faceless webinar voices talking over PowerPoint slides, we often fail to connect with the personality and authority of the speaker. And isn’t that why we’re there — to immerse ourselves in the knowledge, the stories, and the authority of the webinar host or guest?

This is the age of web video, and the audio-only webinar has not kept up. Fortunately, there are tools (like KnowledgeVision and ON24) that offer easy ways to stream video side-by-side with PowerPoint slides. And there are even ways to dial in remote guests via Skype to a conversation that’s almost like having the guest in the same room, as in these excerpts from a recent webinar on video content marketing.

2.“Flip” the webinar by pairing a presentation that’s on-demand with an interactive portion that’s truly live and interactive

Educators and online learning pros are discovering and applying a new model called the “flipped classroom”. Traditionally in education and training, a professor or trainer will stand in front of a room and give a lecture, reserving a few minutes at the end for questions and then sending everyone off to do exercises or homework.

In the “flipped” model, they put the lectures on video to be consumed before the classroom session, and then use class time for a highly interactive Q&A, discussions, or exercises.

Why not conduct webinars the same way? Distribute the highly-structured “lecture” material as an online video presentation, and then schedule one or more live conference calls or Google+ video hangouts with the guest and host to handle questions, discussions, and even explore a case study together.

This “flipped webinar” approach solves several problems at the same time:

• The presentation material can be much more compact, since the host doesn’t have to structure the talk to try to fill an hour. Rarely have I seen a webinar topic that could not easily be delivered in 10-15 minutes, rather than the 40-minutes-plus-time-for-questions approach most common today.
• More people can benefit from the material more quickly, since the “lecture” material can be viewed at the time of maximum interest — when the viewer signs up for the webinar.
• By running a live follow-up via conference call or Google+ hangout, these sessions can be much more engaging and truly interactive — resembling a seminar set-up more than a sterile submit-a-question-and-give-the-answer approach.

Online event and content marketers can learn a lot from what’s going on in today’s most innovative classrooms, and 2012 would be a great year to start applying it.

3. Use interactive engagement mechanisms during the webinar to your best advantage

Online presentation platforms are notoriously one-dimensional when it comes to engaging viewers. In fact, an analog to the “couch potato” is establishing itself among webinar viewers who stare at their screens for an hour. Call them “mouse potatoes”, if you will.

Well, the dirty secret is out. During the webinar, most “mouse potatoes” are actually checking their email, taking phone calls, posting on Facebook, and discussing the latest movie with folks who drop by their cubicles. We increasingly deal with a distracted, short-attention-span audience — one that certainly multitasks during webinars.

Here’s the challenge: Why don’t you give your audience interesting things to multitask with that are related to your own webinar materials? Give them virtual hand-outs that amplify the lessons being given in the material. Maybe provide mini-worksheets for them to fill out with information on their own businesses, or give an interesting mini-survey or a poll.

The point is that the more you can channel that multitasking attention on-task to your webinar material, the more your audience will get out of it. And since every download and survey is a potential data point to measure interest and engagement, this approach carries a double benefit for the webinar host.

4. Embrace restlessness: Innovate continuously with your webinars

It’s all too easy at this point to settle into the comfortable-but-vanilla white-papers-and-webinars rut for lead generation. But with more B2B marketers spending more and more dollars on content marketing, we shouldn’t be surprised to see the traditional webinar supplanted by new, more innovative models that build on the traditional foundation with video, new scheduling and length models, and more engagement mechanisms.

I’m on a personal mission to reinvent the webinar in 2012, using a flipped video, high-engagement model. Will you join me? What ideas do you have to stand the conventional model on its head?

Photo credit to Terry Borton, Magic Lantern Shows

While this is a great practice for marketers who may struggle to find the time, resources, or budget to create the volume of content they need, it’s a challenging undertaking, to say the least. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to distributing content, as different groups will choose to engage with your assets in different ways, often depending on which social platform they are using. This means you must be constantly tweaking your approach, and messages, to meet your audience’s changing needs without compromising your style or integrity.

As an example, take a look at how my team recently marketed a webinar across four different social channels. 

Background

For a period of eight weeks, we promoted an educational webinar about the latest best practices for online lead generation. The promotions began with a targeted email campaign, a press release, and various announcements on social sites. As the event drew closer, and in the time immediately after the event, we wanted to keep audiences engaged (especially those unable to attend) by socially sharing information and real-time updates, as demonstrated below: 

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn community is a goldmine of influencers and other audiences craving educational content, particularly for B2B marketers. It’s also a place for people to gather and share ideas, best practices, and challenges with others in their industries or job roles. In general, marketers tend to do more content sharing and less self-promotion on this platform, so as not to jeopardize their reputation or deter their audience.

In addition to announcing the event on two groups I am an active member of, we also communicated how members of our own LinkedIn group could get involved, such as by submitting questions prior to the event or by following the event hashtag on Twitter. We also posted poll questions, so group members who would not be able to join the webinar could still provide their feedback, and shared the output from the webinar after it had ended.

Here are a few of our sample messages:

How to follow the event in real time:

Extending the webinar’s poll to LinkedIn group members:

Sharing the webinar output with LinkedIn group members:

Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for promoting content because you can broadcast messages quickly to a very broad audience. We used Twitter to promote the webinar event, announce speakers, and encourage people to submit their questions prior to the event.

Because the Twitter community is so vast, messages can be a bit more brief and informal than on LinkedIn groups. You can also leverage the “live Tweet” concept to share information, in real time, by using a well-communicated hashtag, which we found to be quite valuable. Using a hashtag, you can provide snippets of information, or “teasers”, to engage your community and encourage those outside your group to tune in and hear what they might be missing. Check out a few examples below:

Facebook

Our audience is not as active on Facebook as it is on Twitter or LinkedIn, but we still use this platform to share photos and articles and have discussions. The tone we use is similar to what we use for our LinkedIn group, but with a conversational style that fits in with conversations throughout the Facebook community.

Our Facebook posts ended up being somewhat of a blend of the Twitter and LinkedIn posts, as you can see from the examples below:

Blog Posts

Blogs are an incredible and, some would argue, essential content marketing tool (to learn more about why, check out this post by Joe Pulizzi, called 6 Steps to Successful Blogging).

Instead of providing a recap of the entire webinar on our blog, we chose to focus on the Q&A portion of the event. Why? People can go and view the webinar at any time; but what we wanted to demonstrate was how valuable the thoughts and opinions of our viewers were. By addressing their specific questions, rather than just highlighting our own webinar content, we were able to communicate how valuable we felt the audience’s contributions were:

What are some ways you’ve distributed content across multiple social sites? In what ways have you altered your messages to suit those different groups? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Image courtesy of opportplanet via Flickr

But in the digital age we have fewer opportunities to connect with our audiences on a personal level. We increasingly use online presentations, webinars, and meeting tools, which often fail to capture the body language and personality of the speaker.

The result? They fall flat, failing to take full advantage of the power of personality and storytelling that a good presenter offers to a live audience.

So what’s a content marketer to do?

1. Fully exploit video

The “disembodied voice” approach to online presentations needs to evolve. Audio-only online presentations — from webinars to online meetings, from voiced-over sales decks to screen-sharing tools — are popular. But this popularity comes at a cost: Most online presentations lack personality and effectiveness.

An audio-only online presentation is handicapped right from the start, as the medium robs the speaker of many of the visual communication tools that are available to a live presenter. No eye contact. No smile. No confident stance. 

Put your best foot forward and deliver more “you” with online presentation tools that use video, not just audio.

Take a look, for example, at this online presentation from Australis Aquaculture. Pairing the CEO with an energetic product manager to tell the story of sustainable seafood, and sprinkling it with b-roll video, helps move the story along and personalizes the message.

2. Plan your presentation with online distribution in mind

So often, presentations are designed for a live event with digital capture and distribution as an afterthought. Of course you’ll send the slides after the presentation… but with no presenter, will your message seem out of context and your points be lost on your post-live audience? Capture your presenter live alongside your deck in all their hand-waving, storytelling glory and you’ll increase your chances that your audience will connect with the on-demand version of your insight.

Once the multimedia team at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise started looking around, for example, they quickly found that potential content marketing material was all around them. This keynote address by President Tom Burns, for example, was quickly turned into enduring online content that continues to work well as a demand generation and lead nurturing effort long after the live presentation has faded into memory.

3. Understand your goals — and the goals of your audience

By attempting to satisfy both your organizational goals and those of your audience, you can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your online presentation. Think about all your possible objectives for creating an online video presentation — and why your audience would sit through it. You may be looking to establish thought leadership and capture leads, or it could be that developing a fabulous online presentation is the key to your viral branding strategy. But what’s in it for them? Your audience has no interest in becoming your lead, but would love to evaluate your expertise and learn something new. When you hit the jackpot and exchange value, your presentation naturally becomes more personal.

International consulting firm Parthenon Group, for example, produces a series of thought leadership presentations by its chief economist, Roger Brinner, that directly addresses key client and prospect anxieties about the state of the economy. Brinner’s quiet authority comes through clearly in these video presentations, in a way that it simply would not using audio-narrated slides.

4. Move beyond PowerPoint by including a range of existing digital content types

Adding video to your online PowerPoint presentations will transform their effectiveness. But consider all the other great content you already have. Online video presentation tools that are on the market allow you to also pull in rich text, animations, ads, JavaScript applets, images, and more for an unique interactive experience. Your audience will thank you for not boring them with the same old flat slides. Just about anything you can render on your website can now be incorporated in an online video presentation. Get creative, save time, save money, and extend the life of all that content you worked so hard to develop.

New online presentation platforms allow live web pages to be synchronized into a presentation or webinar, for example. This is perfect for taking polls and displaying real-time results, or even for taking orders right in the presentation window.

5. Look for powerful, flexible online presentations tools, but start with what’s simple

Luckily, today’s most advanced online presentation platforms don’t stop at video synchronization. They further enhance the experience by providing just-in-time footnotes, virtual handouts, calls-to-action, forms, quizzes, surveys, interactive transcripts, and other tools as part of the entire interactive experience. And they augment that experience with powerful analytics that show how the presentation material is being interacted with. We’ve built all that capability into KnowledgeVision, but other platforms will undoubtedly be adding some of these features in the future, as well.

Most importantly, don’t get overwhelmed by trying to do too much, too early. Start simply, getting your bearings with basic, on-demand video presentations and adding powerful features and even moving to live streaming later on. It really is easier than ever to create video presentations for an online, 24/7, anytime/ anywhere world.

1. Build an in-house e-mail database of customers and prospects

When it comes to webinars, content may be king — but the email database rules. The most effective way to promote webinars is through email marketing to a list of people with whom you already have an affinity/relationship. You can have the greatest content, but without a substantial in-house database of subscribers, you’ll struggle to get attendees. If you already have e-newsletter subscribers, you are well ahead of the game because you have a following who trust you as a resource of information. But if you don’t, your first step will be to start building an e-mail database by offering free e-newsletters, white papers, or other content assets on a regular basis. 

2. Free or fee: Decide how to position your webinars

In a publishing company I worked for, we produced well-attended paid monthly webinar programs. They delivered real value – strategies, tips, and how-to information that attendees could use in their jobs. But when we tried offering sponsored webinars free to attendees, we got a fraction of the numbers we’d normally get. Why? People may have thought the free webinars would be commercials for the sponsors (although the promotions made it clear they weren’t). Also, there’s a perceived value when a fee is charged.

If you are building a webinar program to provide valuable, educational content to your subscribers on a regular basis, consider offering the sessions at a deep discount or no cost to subscribers, and charge a fee to nonsubscribers. There are many factors to consider when deciding how to price your webinars. Whether or not you charge a fee, remember that your audience’s time is valuable, and your content needs to be so as well…So make sure you don’t waste it by always delivering valuable content.

3. Keep the webinar content tightly focused

It’s better to go in-depth into a narrower topic than to skim the surface on a broader topic. The highest-rated webinars I’ve produced are the ones that provided valuable detail on a specific topic, including strategies and tips. Most webinars are about an hour in length for the presentation, followed by a Q/A session. So if a speaker tries to present a broad topic in that hour, she’ll end up skimming the surface and not having time to give valuable strategies and tips. To prevent this mistake by your speakers:

• Get the PPT presentation from the speakers two weeks advance to give yourself a chance to review it and ask for a revision if needed.
• Have a speaker prep session one week in advance, in which the speakers will rehearse their presentation.

4. Always deliver high-quality webinars

While webinars can be a “content marketing” tactic, when you are planning your webinar topics, you have to remove the word “marketing” from your mind. Never make your webinar content about your product or service, or even plug your product or service.

You want your viewers to have the best experience, which means you need to pay attention to technical quality. Here are a few tips:

• Work out any technical issues that your presenters may be having when you do the speaker prep session.
• Have your presenters dial in and login 30 minutes in advance of the live session to ensure they are ready to start right on time. During this 30 minutes, go over the flow of the call, answer any last minute technical questions, do a sound check, and eliminate background interruptions like cell phones.

5. Always deliver value to attendees

When planning a topic with presenters, I ask presenters for the top five or six key points that attendees will learn and how attendees will benefit (such as, attendees will do something better, save x amount of dollars, prevent these mistakes, etc). If presenters cannot answer this, there’s a high probability that the presentation isn’t going to deliver valuable content. It’s better to revisit the focus of the topic than to move forward with a weak presentation. On the other hand, if your presenters provide solid strategies with benefits, it will make great fodder for your promotional copy.

6. Don’t promote your webinar series as a “series”

Even if you’ve planned a series of webinars, do not promote it as a series. Promote each event as a separate, stand-alone webinar topic. As in the old direct mail guideline, too many choices can depress response. It’s the same with webinar promotions.

The temptation is to promote the entire series, offering a discount for signing up for more than one date. You are asking your prospects to choose between paying full price by signing up for one date, or getting a discount by committing to a number of dates. If they are unsure what to do, the easiest decision is to put the decision off for later. Then later comes and goes, and they never sign up. Believe me, you get very few people signing up for a whole series, and you lose people who would have signed up for the individual webinar date had you promoted it as a stand-alone event.

7. Offer an on-demand (streaming) recorded version of the event

Attendees benefit from on-demand webinars because they can view the event at their convenience, and they have the ability to share the link with other people on their staff. For paid events, I’ve priced the on-demand version at the same price as the live event. But if attendees registered for both at the same time, they would get a 50 percent discount on the on-demand version. Also, you can work with your technology provider on how long the on-demand link remains active for a registrant (normally 60 or 90 days after the purchase date). After you’ve gotten a few events under your belt, you can create a nice online library of archived events.

Overall, webinars, when done right, can provide enough value for your business to make them a leading component of your content marketing efforts. So give them a fighting chance. You won’t hit them all out of the ballpark, but even if you have some low-attendance events, don’t give up.

So what makes some content offers stand out above the rest? It all comes down to perceived value vs. perceived risk.

Value is created when you can solve important and challenging problems; in other words, you need to determine how badly your customers want the content you are looking to provide, and how difficult it has been for them to find this information.

Risk is anything that your audience even suspects may waste their time and energy such as boring, bullet point-riddled slides, meaningless stock images, blatant sales pitches with little useful information, dry facts, and pure data with no context.

High perceived value combined with low perceived risk is the formula for increasing your conversion rate. That means solving important problems and delivering those solutions in a convenient, engaging way.

Luckily, delivering on this formula isn’t that difficult once you know how. Here’s a step-by-step plan for creating an on-demand webinar that will engage your audience and open the door for real-life conversations and new sales.

Meaning must come first

It’s the why, which is the existing emotional motivation of your audience, that makes it possible to create truly engaging and relevant content.

Discovering that why begins first with understanding the problem you solve, who you’re solving it for, and how that problem affects them as people, not just personas. In order to attract the leads that are most likely to become customers, you have to be very clear about the problems your products or services solve then create content directly related to those problems.

Start by asking yourself these questions:

• Why do we do what we do? What’s our mission; what’s our purpose? How do we make our customers’ lives, jobs, and companies better?
• How does this problem impact our customers? Are they overwhelmed? Anxious? Confused? What are the consequences of not solving this problem?
• What emotional payoff does our audience want most? To feel more in control? Effective? Informed?

Speak to these real desires and you’ll tap into the meaning that moves people to action.

Capturing ideas

In order to identify the solution topics that will have the most impact, it helps to start with a wide range of options. Starting with the answers to the questions above, brainstorm both the high-level and low-level problems that relate to it. For example, a CRM software package may solve high-level problems like losing sales due to incomplete or inaccurate real-time intelligence or the lack of a structured, automated follow-up process.

A webinar can address these high-level problems, as well as related lower-level problems like not knowing how to manage and analyze sales data, lack of awareness of follow-up best practices, and poor communication between the sales and marketing departments.

Which topics will be in most demand? The only way to find out is to test them with your audience. Start with a simple blog post or poll to get a sense of the topic’s value to your readers then build on those topics that generate the strongest interest.

Storyboarding

A critical step to creating more impact with your webinar content is to organize the presentation so that it tells a compelling story.

As an example, think about some of your favorite Pixar movies, like Wall-E or Toy Story. They all have very strong themes — the underlying point of the movie that gives the story meaning. But meaning isn’t enough if the movie is boring. In order to make that theme compelling, Pixar’s directors plan and storyboard a movie for over two years before a single frame is shot.

Storyboarding allows you to plan the heartbeat of your webinar and see it from both the big picture and close-up views. Nancy Duarte’s latest book Resonate shares a very effective way to incorporate a story structure within a presentation.

• The beginning focuses on “what is,” framing the problem in a way that’s relevant to the audience.
• Turning point 1 shows the gap between what is and what could be, again within the context of the audience’s motivations. Show them “the after” — what their jobs and lives would be like if that problem were solved.
• The middle section is the body of your content. To keep the presentation interesting and relevant, constantly reinforce how each step takes the audience from where they are now to where they want to be.
• Turning point 2 is your call to action — the finish line you want your audience to cross. The goal here is to inspire immediate action.
• The ending leaves the audience focused on a higher plane — the possible rewards of the future.

Writing the script

Start by using your storyboard as the structure for your presentation, fill in the details, and then identify the 5 percent of your content that delivers 95 percent of the value.

Even with a motivated audience, there’s a limit to how much information anyone can absorb in one sitting. That short attention span means that every unnecessary word you use is going to diminish the overall impact. So find what the true point of your webinar is and trim what isn’t necessary throughout the script.

Imagine you have a word budget — the perfect length that allows you to express your ideas as clearly and concisely as possible. You reach it by ruthlessly cutting out every unneeded word and every sentence that doesn’t add clarity and impact to your ideas. When in doubt, cut.

Save your title for last. The best titles communicate meaning almost instantly, telling your audience exactly what they’ll learn and why it will matter to them. But don’t confuse meaning with hype. Words like “powerful” and “secrets” may sound persuasive, but are so overused that they often have the opposite effect.

Images

The photos, drawings, and diagrams you choose will be critical to helping your audience quickly understand new concepts and relate to the information in a personally meaningful way. Here are a few tips for using them successfully in a webinar:

• Keep each slide focused on one concept. The more ideas and images you share in each slide the harder it will be for your audience to grasp. Complex ideas should be developed over multiple slides, not piled up into one.
• If your ideas are important enough to share with your audience, invest in original images, diagrams, charts, and models. Cliche stock corporate photography (do we really need to see The Handshake again?) makes your webinar and your ideas look generic.
• Original doesn’t have to mean elaborate. White board style illustrations and diagrams are very effective and are within most of our artistic capabilities. It’s not slick design that matters. It’s how well each image helps the audience understand and interpret the ideas you’re sharing. A great example of this is Corporate Vision’s How to Get Customers to Do Something Different.
• Sometimes using words, lists, or phrases on your slides can be a useful way of focusing your audience’s attention, building up the importance of an idea, and demonstrating a linear relationship between concepts. That said, please spare your audience a trip through PowerPoint Purgatory by reading off slide after slide of bullet points.

Recording your script

Dynamic presentations are all about pacing. The tempo of your presentation should be slow enough to allow your audience time to process your ideas yet lively enough to keep everyone interested and engaged.

Authenticity is key. Speak as if you were giving your presentation at a live, face-to-face event or chatting with a friend. Don’t try to use a forced, “professional” sounding voice. The value of your ideas is what gives you credibility. Your tone and passion is what gives you authenticity. Together they earn trust.

Hosting

Online presentation sites like Brainshark, Slideshare, and Sliderocket make it easy to share your on-demand webinar. While each of these options has their own particular strengths. My personal favorite is Brainshark. Here’s why:

• To help generate leads, you have the option of adding guest registration forms that can require as much or as little contact info as you wish.
• It’s easy to import slides from a PowerPoint file or a Keynote presentation exported to a PPT format. You can then record your audio directly to each slide, as well as edit, add, and remove slides from your presentations.
• Other cool features include the ability to attach files, website URLs, and embedded video clips directly into your slides, as well as add questionnaires and polls to your presentation to generate feedback and make your webinar more interactive.

The basic version is free, while professional features like guestbook registration and detailed tracking and reporting tools are available for a small monthly subscription fee.

Engage

With meaning, story and imagery as its foundation, your webinar will connect with your audience and inspire them to take action in a way that no other medium can.