Measuring Your Educational Impact

As a full-service B2B marketing agency, our team at Canyon Communications focuses on identifying our clients’ specific marketing challenges, then helping rise to those challenges through proven, multi-touch end-to-end B2B marketing communications strategies.

We’ve enjoyed great success with many of our clients by utilizing a variety of specific tools, and one of my favorite client-service success stories involves the introduction of Brainshark as an online training, education and presentation tool for our client Horizon Distributors.

Horizon is a professional landscape and irrigation distribution company within the green industry that is committed to providing its customers with innovative and professional service and quality products in four product categories: irrigation, landscape, equipment and specialty products.

Horizon places a large focus on providing business-building resources for its professional landscape and irrigation customers to help them succeed in their business ventures. That’s why they created the BizPro eSources training portal, an online resource that is filled with tools, tips, training videos and much more to help green industry professionals grow their businesses and increase their profits. The BizPro eSources website includes access to these resources, including the ability to watch training presentations on irrigation, landscape, equipment or specialty product topics.

Working with Horizon, we discovered that we needed a way to provide Horizon’s customers with valuable, educational content that was easily accessible, visually entertaining, creative, and most importantly, trackable. After reviewing all of the options, we turned to our previous experience implementing Brainshark presentations with other clients. Brainshark ticked all the boxes to meet our goals, making the choice to implement the software a no-brainer.

The easy-to-use cloud format enables us to include image links within e-mails, which provides customers with a more enticing reason to click through to the portal.  Brainshark also allows us to embed the presentations directly on the BizPro eSources website, giving Horizon’s customers detailed educational and training materials without having to leave the portal.

The video format of the training presentations proved to be a great way to engage our audience and provide them with valuable information and tips.  And the ability to track not just who viewed the presentations, but also when and for how long has proven to be an incredibly useful tool to show our client how the portal is performing.  It also provides the actionable data to analyze used to refine and optimize performance, driving greater value for both the audience and our client.

Integrating Brainshark into the BizPro eSources training portal has produced amazing results for Horizon, dramatically improving the performance of its BizPro eSources training portal by increasing the number of customers accessing the site. Horizon’s conversions rate for video plays is 15%, providing fantastic visibility into the great business-building resources.

Are you ready to swim with the Brainsharks? What educational tools do you use when driving B2B content online?

Even though September is two months away, I can’t help but start thinking about college football already. For those of you who don’t know, I am a HUGE college football fan. Nothing makes me more excited than the opportunity to spend my Saturdays planted in front of the big-screen watching the games and highlights from the dozens of college matchups going on.

Since I am a Phoenix-area native, and born-and-raised in a pro-Arizona State household, it stands to reason that ASU is my team. Many of you may be aware of the old news that Arizona State University recently unveiled their new uniforms containing a more contemporary look and a newly redesigned logo that replaced “Sparky” who had been the primary logo since 1955.

The overhaul of the Sun Devil uniforms may not make a splash or seem that it matters to most, because after all, it’s just a team logo. However, how many of you noticed and took up an opinion with Starbucks when they recently changed their beloved logo? Or when Pepsi altered their logo a few years ago? Though consistency is great and having a recognizable identity is key, change can be good. Companies and brands can evolve over time and their visual identities may need to as well.

A college football team is run very much like a business, and a corporate identity plays an equally important role. Sure, teams want fans which bring in large ticket sales or ratings, or more merchandise purchases (all of which a new flashier logo and appeal can contribute to). But in order to attain those goals, they must first reach and impress recruits and players as well.  ASU players and staff, have no doubt that the new look will serve as an important and powerful marketing resource when recruiting new talent and building the best team for their fans to watch. The new logo becomes as much a marketing tool as it does as corporate identity; that duality is the mark of a good logo.

Arizona State’s new uniforms and logos may not rocket them to the front of the minds of potential recruits (but it won’t hurt), but building an impressive and attractive identity for yourself is an important factor in building your business. Making sure your brand identity accurately reflects you is an important aspect in the B2B space.

Is it time to refresh your company’s logo? What logos are your favorite? And does a great logo make you more loyal to a brand?

Webinars have become an extremely popular tool in B2B marketing. In Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices handbook, 92% of respondents indicated that webinars were one of the most effective means of generating high quality leads (second only to website design and optimization).

Because of this, I believe it is imperative to get an audience to show up for a webinar presentation.

One of the many tasks I take on as an account coordinator at Canyon Communications is to moderate webinars for one of our clients. For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to think of ways to increase webinar attendance due to the fact that registration doesn’t necessarily lead to attendance. In the course of some research I came across a great article at Marketo with some even greater tips.

Top 5 Ways to

Increase Webinar Attendance:

1. Give webinar attendees access to the speaker
2. Have a prize draw during the webinar
3. Give attendees access to other attendees
4. Have an exclusive offer for attendees
5. Call attendees to remind them

It’s difficult to get an audience to show up for a webinar presentation so it’s important we provide people as many ways as possible to attend  a webinar despite their busy schedule. After all, webinars are a great way to build a prospect relationship and generate leads.

Do you think webinars are an effective tool to use in B2B marketing? Do you have other ways to increase webinar attendance?

Image courtesy www.immaccpresentation.com

Growing up in Wisconsin, I’ve long had a sense of loyalty to my home-state airline, Midwest. For those of you not familiar with this carrier, it built its name on spacious business-class seating, affable service and warm chocolate chip cookies. Over the past couple of years, an attempted hostile take-over, as well as two acquisitions has left both the cookies and loyal passengers – well – burnt.

Most recently, Frontier Airlines acquired the company.  Along with the name Midwest, many of the amenities the carrier became known for are gone (though the cookies allegedly remain). I noticed not too long ago that Frontier Airlines was running a new ad campaign – presumably in an attempt to win-over passengers – on Wisconsin’s most prominent online newspaper, JSonline.com about “free” checked baggage.

My assumption is that the airline was trying to draw eyeballs to rival Southwest Airlines “Bags Fly Free” policy.

Accompanying the headline on the banner ad was an asterisk – further review showed the promotion was only good on certain types of seats/tickets, which were linked to more costly airfare. In the end, the deal was only as good as a passengers willingness to pay for their “free” bag one way or another.

In today’s B2B and B2C marketplace, companies find themselves relying on giveaways and special offers to vie for the attention of the prospects and customers they seek to engage. The Internet boom over the past fifteen years has swung the transaction pendulum clearly in the buyer’s favor.

People have far more options and much more information at their fingertips. If a company, or the products and services it offers doesn’t seem authentic, customers will click to the next option until they find an organization they want to do business with.

The problem with most offers is the conditions that are attached, something I call the “Asterisk Offer”. In my opinion, the asterisk is the blemish on what should be a genuine opportunity to create a customer relationship.

An asterisk screams “this offer is too good to be true”. Frontier Airlines is not alone in its use of the asterisk. Many companies (some of our clients included) are eager to promote a snappy headline offer in order to generate excitement and instigate action. The fine print, however, reads like tax code and leaves people feeling deflated – victims of attractive bait that leaves a bitter taste.

B2B transactions are more complex in nature (enterprise technologies, multi-year service contracts, etc.) and inherently lead to long-term customer relationships, and it’s important to instigate that first purchase or trial. However, if takes longer to read the restrictions on your promotional offer than it does to actually execute the purchase transaction, it probably isn’t going to lead to a conversion rate you were hoping for.

To be fair to Frontier Airlines, Southwest’s offer also comes with an asterisk, although they offer the service at all ticketing levels. The right approach is to develop an offer that sets up a genuine two-way value exchange. Extend the offer that demonstrates to prospects that you have skin in the game, and make sure it is unconditional. Create simple steps for acceptance. Make it easy for a prospect or customer to participate.

If you make an offer seem too good, and it ends up being too good to be true, it will have the opposite affect you had intended, and you might end up repelling people in droves.

What was the last authentic offer you accepted? Do you have any examples of a promotion that fell flat once you read the fine print?