Webinars seem to be effective and a well-known marketing / audience-building strategy, but still not widely used. I’m curious to know why…
Have you considered using webinars as a marketing tool for your product? What made you delay or decide against it?
Obviously, webinars aren’t for everybody, but I’m curious to learn more about the barrier to entry.
The technology sucks.
We’ve tried GoToWebinar (expensive, and not great) and more recently Google Hangouts which let us down completely twice.
I’d love to do more of them for Perch and also to run some of my workshops as online versions, but until we can get the tech to work I don’t have confidence in doing so.
I’ve spoken at some online conferences and the only tech that has been at all reliable is Adobe Connect. I think that comes with a pretty high price tag though.
Yeah, the tech is pretty bad. Also, I think for bootstrapper level businesses you’re going to have a fair number of where nobody attends and as you have other things to do dedicated time to planning webinars you don’t end up running feels like a waste.
We’ve been doing one on one demo’s with HelpSpot and I like that a lot better if your product hast the price point to support it. You really get to dig in on the customers specific problem and explain in detail how your product fits their need.
I have to say Google Hangouts seem to have become more reliable in the past year. I’ve been using them (with custom landing pages) and they worked great. What I like is that the audience can join simply by clicking the link in the email I send them. No software to download.
Only once, my office internet connection cut out during a live webinar. It was only 2 minutes, and once it came back on, I was immediately back on the live hangout. Didn’t end the broadcast or anything, which was nice.
I like it for this purpose too. And if you have a lot of inbound leads, you can do small group demos on a webinar.
The first time we did one it worked great, the next time we couldn’t get screen sharing to work and had to play out a recorded version. Frustrating, found plenty of other people with the same issues and no resolutions and we’ve not been happy to advertise one since as we’ll get a lot of signups if we advertise one so it’s pretty embarrassing if it doesn’t work!
I’m actually wondering about this for Runway, which is at a price point where it’s worth us showing people around. What are you using for one on one demos?
If you go over to http://www.helpspot.com you’ll see a demo tab at the bottom. We use a service to embed the tab and setup the demo’s. It also creates the GoToMeeting event for us (which is what we use for the actual demo’s). I’ve tried a lot of other services but none have worked as well as GTM, which isn’t great just not horrible which is as good as I’ve come to expect.
Also, most people we’re doing demo’s for are larger businesses that have used GTM before so they’re usually pretty comfortable with it.
The service that does the tab and demo page is http://www.scheduleonce.com/. Probably could build the same thing, but just used that to get it going. We used to only do them on request before, but being more pro-active has paid off so far. We’re working on a new store now that will tie in the info on demo’s so I can have more definitive data, but even rough data shows a pretty good conversion on people we demo.
Demo’s are pretty tricky to automatically track conversion on because often the person who signs up isn’t the one who buys, so you have to manually match them up much of the time.