Web Business Marketing Blog

In my last post, I mentioned the almost perfect webinar platform ‘Adobe Connect Professional’. If only it had an event manager to collect user registrations. Such an event manager exists. It’s called Online Registration Center (ORC).

What ORC allow you to do:

1. Create a registration page for your event, with a unique web address
2. Collect leads from this page. Qualify these leads through additional registration questions (turnover, sector, function, …)
3. Send automatic confirmation messagtes upon registration
4. Send up to 4 automatic text reminders prior to an event
5. Send up to 3 automatic feedback requests as follow-up
6. Issue manual e-mail messages to registered users at any time

In short, ORC automates the effort to manage online events. It enables you to gather a community of practice around the topic of your event. Why not build a micro-site on the topic, which you update regularly, and alert the community to updates. Each of these updates in turn offers an opportunity to further grow the community.

ORC does not stop at event management. It can be used as well for lead generation from content. If you have a report or white paper of value to a targeted group, you can ask users to register before receiving a download link. You can equally qualify these leads and build a community practice around a content item or stream rather than an event.

Such vertifical communities tend to appreciate e-mail alerts with highly specific, relevant content. Opening rates go up and abuse complaints go down.

ORC in combination with Adobe Connect for events and drupal for content management is a very powerful combination to build a market presence on the internet.

The long tail of webinar campaigns

Now that you’ve conducted a webinar, and collected a group of individuals interested in the topic, what more can you do? For example:

1. Send a copy of the webinar slides to this group
2. Post the recording of your event on the webinar page and alert the group
3. Post the list of questions discussed during the webinar on the page, preferrably with answers
4. Now that you’ve mastered the topic more in-depth, produce a white paper on the subject, and run a campaign on the white paper in combination with the webinar resources
5. Sometimes, the topic will lend itself for a series of white paper, or a white paper that is regularly updated
6. Look for third party content on the subject of the webinar and inform your group
7. With the webinar, white papers and third party content, you can build a microsite. Possibly the webinar can be re-run at regular intervals. You’ve now homesteaded a niche. Enjoy it.