Webinar Wire

Warrillow Report On Marketing To Small Businesses

Posted by Ken Molay February 18 2008 4:51 PM EDT

Warrillow & Co. is a research and analysis company helping corporations with marketing to small businesses. Warrillow provides research to members of a "subscriber network" (in other words... clients). I recently contributed to a Warrillow report on how webinars can help enterprises generate sales leads from small businesses. Other companies quoted in the report include Bulldog Solutions, Citrix Online, Quantum Leap Marketing, and smallbiztrends.com among others.

While Warrillow does not make its research available for sale outside the subscriber network, they gave me permission to quote a few small pieces of information from the report for the benefit or Webinar Wire readers. I thought some of their findings were particularly interesting.

In a survey of small business owners, they found that 23% of those surveyed said they had ever attended a webinar. That leaves a lot of room for growth and expanded market penetration!

In a surprise to absolutely nobody, business/technical/heathcare service company owners were overwhelmingly more likely to have attended a webinar than other types of companies. But a statistic that really caught my eye was the fact that attendance was significantly higher for owners of companies with high revenue growth rates than for companies with lower growth rates. I wonder which is the cause and which is the effect?

When Warrillow surveyed large enterprise marketers targeting small businesses, they found that a quarter of the respondents said they have no plans to use webinars at all this year. For shame! The good news is that 47% said they planned to increase their use of webinars.

I was amused by one quote from a small business owner talking about why she preferred attending webinars over live meetings. She said "If I listen to a webinar, I can multi-task, whereas in a meeting, I need to give my full attention." This points out the need for webinar speakers and producers to invest extra effort in techniques that continually re-engage the audience and refocus their attention.

The full report contains many pages of tips, tricks, and best practices for enterprises putting on webinars. If you are interested in becoming a Warrillow subscriber and gaining access to the research, you can contact Elizabeth Mateus by email or phone at (416) 368-8279 x250.