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Webinars Drive Lead Generation:Trada Uses ReadyTalk Web Conferencing for Thought Leadership, Qualified Leads

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Effective marketing should drive business by uncovering sales opportunities,qualifying the resulting leads, and cultivating relationships with influencers anddecision-makers that turn leads into clients. In an increasingly global marketplace,in which customers can find vendors with a simple Internet search, companies mustdistinguish themselves to their prospects and clients with thought leadership andvalue-added services. Webinars can facilitate marketing initiatives, letting marketersmeet with prospects and clients anywhere, anytime, in an Internet-based, real-timeenvironment. The technology offers rich functionality, and recording and archivingcapabilities ensure businesses can re-use webinar content again and again,leveraging their initial investment and increasing the number of leads they generate.

As the first and only crowd-sourced online advertising marketplace, Trada is anInternet-savvy organization—and it uses a bevy of next-generation marketing toolsto get the word out and drive business. Web conferencing is a key element ofTrada’s marketing programs, since as a business-to-business company, Trada focuseson value-add lead generation. About 18 months ago, the three-year-old companystarted hosting webinars for lead generation campaigns using services fromReadyTalk. The marketing team’s goal is to drive high-quality leads, allowing thesales team to follow up as appropriate.

“A big part of the marketing strategy is to position the company as a thought leaderin the paid search market, educate people on how to use it, and offer bestpractices,” says Anna Sawyer, marketing manager at Trada. “We then work toencourage them to use Trada’s marketplace for their online advertising, becauseTrada makes paid search and Facebook advertising very easy.” But, she emphasizes,the webinars themselves contain little if any product information; the goal is todeliver value and a sense of community to attendees, so they associate the companywith smart thinking and leading-edge technology.

For instance, Trada is currently planning a seven-part webinar series on the value ofcrowdsourcing in general; search is only a part of that broader discussion. But thecontent is relevant and meaningful to the attendees, and Sawyer believes thatcontent encourages them to attend and gives them a stronger feeling for Trada as avaluable and trust-worthy organization. If they get good ideas about the value ofcrowd-sourced online advertising from a webinar on the broader topic—and if theywant to learn more about Trada’s services as a result—well, so much the better.

Sawyer plans webinars featuring Trada employees, as well as guest speakers fromother organizations with a similar customer base and experts in the field. She saysthe webinars are conversational and fun. “Our company is very young and energetic,and we let that bleed through,” she says. “So we try to keep content in that vein.”The results so far have been positive. The company keeps the presentations toabout 30 minutes, leaving the rest of the hour for Q&A with the audience.

Sawyer—who is responsible for all aspects of the webinars, from choosing the topics,to sending out invitations and managing the registration process, to moderating the

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Webinars Drive Lead Generation

live events and creating any relevant collateral like white papers—started out doingone event a month. Because the webinars have been such a success, she is nowhosting about six per month. “We quickly saw that it’s a really good way to nurtureleads and create a lot of content across the organization,” she says.

Sawyer and her team take a self-described “aggressive” approach to marketing, usinga variety of modern-day tools, including blogging and social media, as well as moretraditional means like e-mail campaigns and the company’s own paid searches.Webinars play a role in those efforts, of course, but they also allow her to use thecontent they generate as part of those other marketing initiatives. “Doing webinarsgenerates a lot of content, which we can then re-use by recording and archiving thewebinars,” she says. Not surprisingly, the company puts a lot of thought into howthat content will fit into its own search-optimization efforts down the road, and itselects topics and deliverables accordingly.

Sawyer notes that webinars are relatively cost effective, although they do require alot of time to plan and produce. To ensure everything goes off without a hitch, Tradatakes advantage of ReadyTalk’s operator-assisted services. “That way, if someone ishaving trouble hearing the speakers, or getting online, a ReadyTalk rep is there tohandle the problem and get them back on track,” says Sawyer.

Sawyer sends invitations only to people who have already expressed interest in paidsearch, Facebook advertising, crowdsourcing or Trada itself, noting that thelikelihood that a cold contact will register for or attend a webinar is slim. Evenwithin those constraints, the company typically gets 500 to 600 registrants, “sowe’re basically throwing them a party six times a month, which is a lot of peoplethinking about online advertising and Trada specifically,” she says.

By using ReadyTalk’s open APIs, Sawyer can easily send specific, custom e-mailmessages to invitees depending on whether they have registered for the event or haveyet to do so. Previously, she says, she would have had to export the list of potentialparticipants from the ReadyTalk system and then manually select those contacts whoneeded a reminder or some other message; now, the system does that automatically.

Trada uses its marketing automation software to score leads; every time a prospector customer takes an action, they get points—and registering for or attending awebinar certainly counts as a valuable action. During the webinar itself, Sawyer andher staff monitor the chat window, answering questions and offering demos; anyonewho asks for a demo is immediately identified as a hot lead, and the sales team hastwo hours after the event to follow up with that prospect. Certain questions andother actions will also generate points for a given prospect or customer.

Trada can also download the chat logs from the webinars and then use them to givesales people context for future interactions with prospects. “That’s huge,” saysSawyer, adding that knowing what questions people asked, and whether they had anyother issues or concerns, really helps the sales team make a connection.

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Sawyer chose ReadyTalk because the company does a good job of personallymanaging her live events. Eliminating her fear of technical difficulties is well worththe small extra cost, she says, and it ensures all attendees have a smooth andprofessional experience; since the company spends a lot of time, energy and moneydriving registrants, Sawyer doesn’t want to jeopardize the resulting opportunitieswith technical difficulties, access issues, and so on. She also likes the service’srobust features, including the fact that it is so easy to record, archive and even editthe webinars for future use. And when Trada first started hosting the events, itwasn’t yet using marketing-automation software, so at the time Sawyer liked beingable to assign unique URLs for different campaigns, which let her track who wascoming from where (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, etc.).

Sawyer says that for Trada, webinars are an integral part of their overall marketingstrategy—and without them, she can’t imagine how she would reach so manypeople, with such rich content. “Webinars support our brand,” she says, “and theygenerate great leads, too.”

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