How to do a webinar?

September 17, 2012 4:39 PM

How can I find an audience for a software demo webinar?

Yes, yes, I should duck from thrown tomatoes, but seriously I'm launching a piece of SaaS software (2 years in development) and those prospects who are most interested (20+) claim they LOVE webinars. Like, for real.

We're targeting folks involved in mergers and acquisitions, due diligence, compliance, attorneys. Most likely it's the tech contacts and "worker bees" and tech decision makers at those types of businesses.

Here's my question: What is a proven process by which I can find warm, interested, target market folks?
- Can I pay someone to bring together a group of people for a demo?
- Is it easier to pull lists from Jigsaw (data.com now, which I have an account with)?

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (2 answers total)

Buy a few Google Adwords (text ads) for the keywords you're interested in (including "Webinar") and filter them to a SurveyMonkey survey that can narrow them down from "People who are interested in you" to "People who you're interested in." This would be a quick survey of what kind of job they have at what kind of company, and probably a question or two to help gauge how interested they'd be in what you do. And of course an "Enter your email address if you'd like to be contacted for an advance, preview demo webinar of our awesome new thing! We'll pay you $XXX" I'm not sure what the going rate for $XXX is for a webinar is, but when I've been part of professional targeted market research professional, targeted participants got between $75 and $150 a person for an hour or two of time in person.

Turn off the campaign when you have the right number of respondents. I can't imagine it would cost you more than $50 of ads, which is several orders of magnitude less than it would cost to buy a very tightly targeted mailing list. And you'd know that you were getting results. Even with a very tightly targeted list you're going to have to hit up a lot of people before you'll find those willing to demo for you.
posted by Ookseer at 7:09 PM on September 17, 2012

Find the tech magazines which target the market, especially the ones which are free to qualified subscribers. Contact the advertising department for either a data dump or find out what other options they have for you to purchase access to your targets.
I'd mail them a physical item, not just a brochure, but some little useful, or very fun gizmo, preferably something you can tie into your pitch letter. Maybe a tube of crazy glue, Stanley Screwdriver, etc. then follow up with a phone call.
posted by anon4now at 7:14 PM on September 17, 2012