Meet Erik. Erik is an IT visionary and potential buyer. Now, what does that mean? He works tirelessly to lead his company forward.
His role tasks him to understand current and potential threats, evaluate new products to improve efficiency of the company, keep employees happy and handle any technology-related fire drills.
In order to stay on top of the latest trends, Erik turns to online videos and webinars to deep-dive with industry experts and his peers.
As marketers, it’s our job to influence these online conversations to help these visionaries with their jobs to earn their attention (and budget).
Here at BrightTALK, we connect the brightest minds in the IT space with industry thought leaders and vendors to create real change – big and small. We recently compiled the data of over 756,000 IT professionals engaging with over 20,000 webinars and videos on BrightTALK in North America.
As the largest community on BrightTALK, the NA IT community is a vibrant, engaged group of IT visionaries who are looking to solve pressing job-related challenges and inform technology purchases.
Here are a few of the takeaways from the report to elevate your marketing program and inspire these visionaries. To learn more about influencing this buyer, download the full report.
1. Use BI tools like Google Trends to explore hot topics in your industry and see what people are researching. Leverage those insights to develop your webinars and videos around those subjects.
2. Humanize and diversify your content marketing mix.Switch up your marketing formats to draw in more attendees and re-engage your existing audience with fresh and exciting content. When surveyed, the IT community on BrightTALK expressed a preference for technical deep-dive webinars using real-life scenarios and short, episodic content highlighting current and coming industry trends.
Video edition:
Webinar edition:
3. Bring in multiple presenters. Your customers, partners, and internal and external thought leaders all have different perspectives that add unique value to your webinars. Recruit co-presenters who can add the most relevant color to your session. This also helps to diversify your content mix with different kinds of webinars (case studies with customers, industry benchmarks, and trends with partners or analysts, etc.). We typically see up to a 30% increase in attendance when clients use co-speakers. Try it out.
4. Extend the impact of your content with on demand. You only get 65.5% of your total viewership within the first 100 days of your live event. It’s essential to make your webinars and videos available on demand to maximize lead generation potential. And don’t forget to create a hub for your content. By creating a central location for prospects to engage with you, you’re able to create long-term relationships that you can nurture into prospects.
5. Measure your webinar program ROI. Directly connecting your marketing initiatives to revenue is the ultimate indication of success. Make sure your webinar platform integrates with your marketing automation and CRM platform to track ROI easily and be able to adjust with the latest insights.
All marketing initiatives should focus on the IT buyer’s challenges, share examples of success, and spark debate to capture these visionaries.
Download the report today to find out more about the content consumption habits and preferences of today’s visionaries.