What's the best day and time for a webcast?

Here's an interesting question blogger Ken Molay is asking. What day of the week is best for a webcast? And what's the best time of day?

He's doing a survey to collect data, because as he notes, conducting tests on this sort of thing would be difficult. I completely agree that gathering hard data from tests would be tough, but I think most producers of frequent webcasts could get a pretty good hunch for which days and times pull well, just knowing some of the variables that are in play (like how popular the topic of each event is likely to be). On the survey front, I also worry about whether people's actions of actually attending webcasts at certain times will follow their responses, because quite often, what people *say* they'll do is quite different from what they actually do. But it should be an interesting survey nonetheless, and it's probably better than the hunches all webcast producers are operating on right now.

In July 2007, webcast vendor ON24 did an interesting study that looked at a lot of different data points with key webcast trends. They examined things like months of the year for webcasts, plus which days of the week are best for registration. But they didn't dive into the attendance question based on day of the week or time of day. (Here's a link to a press release about that ON24 report, with a contact name on how to request a copy of the PDF. I couldn't find a direct link to the report PDF anywhere, probably because ON24 wants your name first so they can sell you something. But hey, ON24 is the best webcast vendor out there as far as I'm concerned, so let them sell you!)

Here's my contribution to conventional wisdom on best times for a webcast...

Last October, IndustryWeek did 12 webcasts in two days. We called it the "Operational Excellence Online LIVE" web conference. Sessions started at 11am, noon, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm Eastern on each day (a Wednesday and Thursday). The target audience was manufacturing management. The majority of our audience is based in the Eastern and Central time zones, although there are still quite a few manufacturers in Mountain or Pacific. Overseas audience is generally around 5%.

Since there were lots of variables with these 12 sessions -- 12 different sets of speakers, 12 sponsors who did differing amounts of promotion for the event to their current customer/prospect base, 12 different topics of varying interest to the IndustryWeek audience -- it's hard to draw scientific conclusions. But in terms of attendee percentage, we can make some pretty good guesses.

We found that the first session (Wednesday at 11am ET) had the best attendance percentage. There were several others that had comparable numbers that were just shy of the first session's numbers, so I'm sure that's not statistically valid.

We also found that the 4pm session each day was by far the weakest in terms of attendee percentage compared to other sessions that day. This is despite the fact that both 4pm sessions had particularly good speakers and particularly interesting topics that are normally "hot button" sort of subjects for our audience. (We survey the audience after each session and ask them to rate each speaker, and out of 24 speakers for the 12 sessions, the speakers for the 4pm sessions were rated as the #1, #2, #4, and #8 presenters for the entire conference.) Good content, good speakers, poor turnout.

We had similar results for the 4pm sessions during our December 2006 multi-session online conference. Those two sessions underperformed from an attendance % standpoint as well.

As a result of these pretty convincing results, we've eliminated the 4pm time slot from future multi-session online conferences. We'll see how the numbers change in the future. Perhaps the 4pm time was too late for manufacturers, since a lot of manufacturing companies start and end their days earlier?

Webcasts: What's more important -- leads or thought leadership?

The April 7 issue of BtoB magazine has a graph with results from an online poll they conducted about webcasts. The question was "What's your top webinar objective?" and the two choices were leads or thought leadership. Interestingly enough, 69% said their top objective was thought leadership and only 31% picked leads.

These results really surprised me. I'm sure this wasn't a scientific poll, so perhaps I should take this data with a grain of salt. But in my many years of experience conducting webcasts, I'm accustomed to most sponsors being obsessed with leads. That's how sponsors usually evaluate success -- based on number of registrants and number of attendees, plus the quality of those people. It's just the way many companies are set up right now...they're dependent upon leads.

But after thinking about this poll, I realize just how difficult of a question "thought leadership or leads" is. A webcast needs to do both to be effective, so it's silly to say that one or the other is the primary goal.

If a webcast doesn't generate leads, it's going to be difficult for the sponsor to quantify results. How will sales and marketing turn that thought leadership into action without leads? But on the other hand, if the webcast doesn't provide thought leadership, the leads are actionable but they're not nearly as valuable. After all, there are a lot of easier and less expensive ways to get leads. But the thought leadership conveyed during a well-executed webcast, combined with the fact that the person just sat through an hour-long presentation about a topic, makes for a very qualified lead.

This is exactly why I believe webcasts are so popular in B2B markets right now. It's not about the lead -- nor is it about the thought leadership. It's an inseparable combination of the two.

Keys to a successful campaign

As a media provider, my team is often asked to answer marketers' questions like, "What's your average click-through rate on [X web ad placement]?" and "How many leads do you think we'll get if we run an ad in [Y newsletter]?" When I put myself in these marketers' shoes, I completely understand what they're trying to find out. These are good questions to ask.

But probably like many other media providers, we don't answer these questions with exact numbers. Sure, we're happy to provide a range so the marketer can get a feel for how well their ad might perform. But usually we'll present it in the context of "the best ads get X percent" (or X number of conversions) and "the worst ads get Y percent" (or Y number of conversions).

The reason we offer a high/low range is simple. In most situations, either the marketer or agency is controlling the creative message for the ads. During the buying process, when they're asking these types of questions, we have no idea how good (or bad) the creative will be. Well-designed, well-written, and well-thought-out campaigns will get much better results -- independent of the medium.

Even though it covers a lot of points all of us have heard before, this article by Harry Gold of ClickZ does a good job of reminding us of the keys to a successful creative execution. Start with the message and offer, then think about the landing page, and follow through to the post-action phase like confirmation pages and confirmation emails. Every step matters. Good ad creative can't overcome a bad landing page. A good landing page is useless if the creative message is wrong. And if a strong follow-up isn't in place, you're throwing away perfectly good opportunities.

One thing I'd like to add to Harry's article: Don't forget about what comes after these steps too. How will you nurture these leads? What's your sales team's approach for following up, taking the prospect through the sales cycle, and closing the sale? Often these tasks are not our job as marketers -- since this responsibility is passed along to sales in many companies. But if there's not a seamless plan in place, you know what happens. Leads and opportunities are lost, even if you did your job developing a successful advertising or marketing campaign.

Developing personas for your web audience

Here's a link to a good video about developing personas for your web audience. How can you design a site, or add new features or content without knowing who you're targeting? Granted, personas are more art than science, and well-designed surveys and usability tests are other things you should be doing to learn more about your audience. But they can still be helpful.

Last summer, one of my colleagues and I put together a set of personas for the IndustryWeek.com audience. Unfortunately we didn't have the benefit of watching this video first, so it was a little more painful since we had never done it before and didn't know some of the helpful pointers covered here. But it was still a good exercise that helped our sales team (and even us) internalize some of the key attributes of our audience.