Ep. 14 Ben Reese - Using Webinars as Your Content Engine

The Master Marketer Show

How would you like to increase your inbound revenue by over 1,000%? It’s taken Ben and his team a solid 6 years to get to this point, but it has been solid triple digit growth every year. This case study is pretty much a playbook for anyone running marketing for complex technical businesses.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• How to clearly define your pipeline stages and transition only qualified leads to sales
• How to get your internal SMEs to take part in content development
• How to leverage webinars as a content engine
• How to effectively build an annual marketing plan, when you are the sole marketer in the company
• How to leverage live chat to decrease friction
• The right way to nurture webinar registrants

Ben’s recommendations:

1. Make sure that you are holding on to the lead as long as possible before you kick it over to sales. A lead should only go to sales once the prospective customer is ready to make some big moves. NOTE: This makes sense with smaller TAMs and lower lead volumes.
2. Make sure that your live chat is staffed appropriately, and focus on answering questions, not selling.
3. Focus on creating more opportunities for real human-to-human interaction
4. Be transparent and own when something goes wrong in the customer experience
5. Use voice of the customer to ensure that you are messaging to your customers in the way that they are talking
6. If you are going to events, use that opportunity to do customer research
7. Your website should be a living breathing thing - updated based on what’s happening in the market, the challenges your customers are having and how they are talking.
8. Make sure you are walking into planning meetings with a concrete plan. It’s better to have sales and leadership to shoot things down and change topics, instead of asking for their input on what should be done.
9. Never have one person present a webinar by themselves. Have one person available for color commentary and another to manage the live chat.

You’ll need to listen to the full episode if you want to hear the Lightning Round, but here are a few highlights:

• Ben is a HubSpot junkie and can’t live without it.
• As many out there, Ben hate’s the word “synergy”

Proofpoint’s POV:

What I love most about this conversation is that it makes you realize that the fundamentals of good marketing have always been around, but many marketers have gotten away from them because of technology.

If you spend any time scrolling through LinkedIn these days, you will hear many - myself sometimes included - saying that we need to switch from lead generation to demand generation. And while that is true, based on what we see in the market today, solid demand generation has been around for a long time. Ben has been doing it since 2012.

Whatever you call it, the point is that the focus needs to be on the customer and focusing on driving quality leads to your sales team. You do this by educating your customer, answering their questions, and focusing on pulling them in.

The other thing I loved about this conversation is how Ben was able to get his internal SMEs onboard and involved in content creation.

We always tell our customers that the key to successful content creation in a technical company is making as much of it as possible part of the already existing workflow. And in general, video is one of the easiest ways to get information directly from SMEs.

• If your SMEs are presenting during internal meetings, record those presentations.
• If your SMEs are present at conferences, set them up in a room and record customer interviews
• If your executives are presenting at conferences, make sure you can get your hands on those recordings
• If you are running a customer or user summit, make sure you plan for some good recording material

As an added benefit, video also allows you to put real faces to your marketing, and on top of that, it creates an incentive for the SMEs themselves to share content and get active on LinkedIn, because they no longer have to think about what they should create/write.

A bit more about Ben:

Ben is a former sales guy, turned marketer, and has been in the trenches for Dimensional Control Systems for almost ten years. He is extremely knowledgeable and what we would call a full-stack marketer. He is a self-proclaimed HubSpot junkie.

Ben is also a long-time martial arts enthusiast and instructor and has been most involved with Long Fist Kung Fu.

Helpful Links & Resources:

• Connect with Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminreese/
• Follow Alert Logic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dimensional-control-systems/
  
  

Connect with Mike & Gaby at Proofpoint:

• Mike’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegrinberg/
• Gaby’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellaisrael/
• LinkedIn Company Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proofpoint-marketing-llc
• Proofpoint YouTube Channel: http://bit.ly/ProofpointonYouTube
• Proofpoint Website: www.proofpoint.marketing