Integrating Social, Email, and Content Marketing with edWeb

Integrating Social, Email, and Content Marketing with edWeb opening slide with link to watch

 

Dynamic Webinar ContentAnna Wilmoth, Marketing Director at Gryphon House, recently presented in the webinar, “Integrating Social, Email, and Content Marketing with edWeb,” co-hosted by edWeb.net and MCH Strategic Data. Anna discussed how Gryphon House uses edWeb to their expand marketing outreach in order to build stronger relationships with educators and provide them with professional learning. She began her presentation by discussing how webinars fit into a marketing plan. First, webinars expand reach by partnering with companies that already have an established audience and marketing network. Webinars also build stronger relationships with customers by providing additional value, giving the company a competitive advantage.

Gryphon House webinar approachGryphon Houses approaches edWeb’s webinars by evaluating the stakeholders, starting with the customer. Knowing that early childhood professionals are typically short on resources and face increasing challenges in the classroom, webinars provide the perfect free and easy PD solution. Along with early childhood professionals, Gryphon House also uses webinars to support and connect with the authors they work with. Anna added that the Gryphon House Sales Team, an internal stakeholder, also appreciates being able to offer the added value of free PD when speaking with buyers and customers.

So what is the return on investment for these webinars? Anna noted that while she asked herself this question at first, it cannot easily be answered. “It’s incredibly important to let go of the direct sales mandate when you’re looking at an investment like a webinar platform,” she said. There must be other ways of measuring success, like how a new venue is being created for reaching customers. Gryphon House measures short term success by website hits, product orders, and leads generated, and long term success by brand awareness, recognition, and trust.

Webinar return on investmentAnna then described some of Gryphon House’s promotional marketing methods. They advertise their webinars all over their website, including on the Event Page, Author Pages for the individual author webinars, Product Pages, and the Home Page. They also send promotional emails before and after each webinar. Last, Gryphon House posts on their social media platforms for all webinars. This has the added bonus of providing their authors with the graphic elements to post on their own social media pages.

After the promotion period, Gryphon House can often seal the deal with potential customers by offering a coupon code in the email following the webinar, exclusive to webinar attendees. Any video content from the webinar event goes right on their site, which helps boosts SEO and is great for sharing and engaging people on social media. Since catalogs are popular among early childhood educators, Gryphon House dedicates the first page of their catalog to their edWeb webinars, explaining their value and benefits. Last, Gryphon House gives out postcards that discuss free PD and edWeb webinars at any conferences they attend.

Gryphon House webinar resultsAnna concluded the presentation with some of Gryphon House’s webinar metrics for this year. First, they have seen higher engagement; click through rates on webinar emails are 15-20% versus the industry average of 2.7%. Open rates on webinar emails can reach up to 30% versus the industry average of 22%. They also achieve conversions, immediately observing sales and use of the coupon code. Gryphon House notices a spike in traffic during the webinars, with their links used in the webinars as their top 20 traffic drivers, and their Author Pages and Book Pages as their top webpages for the month when they have a webinar on that topic. While the analytics are clear that these webinars have been a success for Gryphon House, Anna ended with a different kind of success indicator; happy customers. They can be “hard to quantify,” but, “really gratifying to see,” she said.

For more information on Gryphon House, visit Gryphon House.