You work hard for months and months on a webinar. You get people to register and your analytics show that a large percentage of people who attended actually stayed for the whole presentation. You and your team could not be happier with how things went.
But now what? From the perspective of your attendees, assuming you don’t have some sort of follow-up, it will appear that you simply have fallen off the face of the planet. This is a fairly typical problem for all kinds of marketing tactics, quite frankly. A person can see your advertisement, read your news releases, or attend your webinar and then it’s just not clear what they should do next. You have not closed the loop.
Since it’s Friday and we tend to offer five tips on this particular day of the week, we thought we would offer five tips on how to make sure you close the loop in your marketing.
1. Advertising – Drive traffic to an informative landing page
Creating an ad that looks really good and effectively conveys your message is not the end of the journey. You want to make sure that you have a way to capture anyone who looks at your ad and thinks, “Oh, that looks interesting.” Unfortunately, a lot of companies simply use their homepage URL as part of the sign-off, which is useless not only for tracking any leads but is also predominantly useless for the person who wants to learn more about the content in your ad. Don’t make interested people search for more information – deliver them to a special landing page that will answer any follow-up questions they may have. Make sure there is an easy way to contact you from that page as well.
2. Trade Shows – Follow up with more information
A lot of companies may feel like the give-away items they distribute at trade shows are good enough in terms of closing the loop. The sad fact, of course, is that most of those give-away items won’t make it home with the attendees. Particularly if someone seems really interested in what your company does, make sure you have some way to circle back with them about a week after the show is over (everybody is busy catching up as soon as they get back to the office). Ideally, it’s beneficial to send a folder or brochure that is of high quality. People tend to feel guilty about throwing away items that look expensive.
3. On Facebook – Like your likes
This advice is particularly for those of you who might have a small following on Facebook at this point. When you get a new “fan,” make sure you do something to reciprocate that interest. If another “page” likes you, see if it would make sense for you to return the favor and “like” their page. If an individual joins your Facebook community, it doesn’t hurt to welcome them. People appreciate being appreciated!
4. Blog Posts – Give a call to action
In a perfect world, your blog posts will be seen by people who initially do not know who you are. This is part of what makes social media so exciting. Someone you know can share your work and a person in their network finds it interesting and then passes it on. It’s like the Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation game. If someone reads your blog post and that is their introduction to your company, make sure they can easily click somewhere to learn more. It also doesn’t hurt to invite people to click over to your “contact” page or to entice them to explore your products or services in more detail.
5. Webinar – Keep attendees interested
Back we go to the webinar example with which we started this post. Webinars are huge investments of your time and effort, and if an attendee has remained for an hour-long presentation or more, they are clearly interested in your company’s message. Don’t let these qualified leads slip through your fingers. Of course you want to avoid being that creepy company who calls or emails with overtly promotional messages as soon as the webinar ends, but there are less intrusive ways to follow up. You can send attendees a survey asking what they liked or did not like about the presentation and what they might want to see in future presentations. You can send a simple email to attendees inviting them to send any questions your way. You can even send out a simple “thank you” email with a “learn more” link that takes recipients to an informational special landing page. The latter, of course, also gives you one more level of tracking.
It is hard to diagnose an absence of action, but I suspect that many companies miss great opportunities because they simply do not close the loop. Does your company suffer from this problem? Do you need some help addressing that kind of issue? Leave us a comment below!
Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pelegrino/3957449915 via Creative Commons