Early AM webinar or 2 webinars?

[Anonymous]

Anyone with a Global audience find themselves stuck between a hard and a rock place when it comes to webinar times? I'm conflicted by the need to either a) put on 2 webinars, one early AM for european time zones and one standard afternoon for US audience, or b) do one early AM webinar around 10AM to try to capture "everyone"

Any thoughts? running 2 webinars in Marketo is a bit tedious from a logistics perspective

[Anonymous]

Our platform (BrightTALK) publishes recorded versions of webinars immediately after the live event concludes, so we typically just pick a time zone for the live event and send the on-demand link to everybody who missed it.

Since anybody viewing this thread is obviously interested in webinars, I'll re-post this comment of mine from another thread: 

The presentations below contain tons of data on webinar trends and best practices. Some of the topics covered include:

• Webinar viewings by time of day
• Webinar viewngs by day of week
• Effective promotion channels for webinar and video content
• Using webinar data to prioritize sales activity
• At what point (time) in a live webinar is attendance at a maximum?
• Live vs. on-demand viewing differences

Presentations:

• Dataleaks 2011
• Dataleaks 2012version
• Dataleaks 2013

All these presentations are based on viewing data from the thousands of webinars hosted on the BrightTALK webinar and video platform, which I naturally recommend 🙂

[Anonymous]

I did watch the 2012 version, thanks for providing the link it was very informative. I feel the same way about on-demand recordings, but our staff feels as if we "snubb" the clients overseas. I can understand how it may look if our live webinars are constantly too late for our global audience to attend.

[Anonymous]

Great! Glad you found it useful. FYI one of the approaches we take to tackle the time-zone issue is to host a several-hour online event with multiple presentations. We establish "co-marketing agreements" with speakers so that they promote the all-day online event and/or their own presentation, and then we share the leads with each other. If you have any interest in doing this yourself (I'm not trying to sell you anything), you can find out more via this recorded webinar. This approach may require an additional team member.

[Anonymous]

Naor,

At one of my past companies, we would hold three different webinars for global rollouts...for some, we had the experts in that geography do the presenting of the same content, and on the one where only one presenter could do it (i.e. the SVP of Products) he and the other presenters just had to suck it up 🙂

[Anonymous]

Naor,

We previously alsways hosted 3 sessions (APAC, EMEA, America's), This didn't improve attendee rate compared to 2 sessions. I created a template webinar with a lot of tokens for the 2 session format. I only the first session has assets in Marketo and is synced with GoToWebinar. The second session in an empty Marketo program which syncs to the second session in GoToWebinar. Both programs are not synced with a Salesforce campaign. Changing progression status in Marketo or in the Salesforce campaign is done via a trigger with tokens (e.g. program name). This approach enables we to clone a webinar and have it ready in no time and all assets and tokens will only be in 1 Marketo program. So no need to build two programs in Marketo.

[Anonymous]

Diederik,

Can you explain how you set up your program to sync with the GTW sessions? We run each of our webinars in 3 time zones and use the GTW adapter.  We can't figure out...

1. Can we sync multiple webinars to a single Marketo program/event
2. Can we sync multiple Marketo programs/events to a single GTW session
3. What do we do for international teams who want to clone and localize the content into their native language. Do they do this within the program? Or create a separate program that syncs to the same GTW

Any ideas you have would be very helpful! Thanks 🙂

Anna

[Anonymous]

Hi Anna,

1. You can't sync multiple GTW's to a single Marketo Program.
2. I haven't tried this
3. You could use Marketo segments on the language field of a lead. You can use segments for dynamic content in your Marketo assets. Let your international teams provide you the translations for it. This enables you to use a single Marketo Program and GTW session for all languages. However the GTW session it self is only in one language of course.

[Anonymous]

I'm hoping someone here can help - I would like to set up my form in a marketo event to allow people who are registereing for a webinar to select their time zone, and in that way customize the email they receive.  Has anyone found a way to do this? 

[Anonymous]

I'd create a field (or it may already exist in your Salesforce instance) for TIME ZONE, and it can be a pre-populated drop-down field in your forms. Then you can segment your email messages based on time zone? Depending on your end goal here, not sure if worth the hassle. We use ReadyTalk and I'm almost certain the calendar reminder for webinars adjusts for their time zone automatically. We generally use generic timing like "1PM EDT/ 10AM PDT"