How to Get More Participants for Your Webinars

Hello everyone and welcome back to Webinar Days 2023, Day 2. I'm so excited to have you guys all with us for the annual event for everyone doing webinars. Hello and welcome so much. If you've been joining us from the previous session, welcome back. And if you're new here today, welcome. My name is Amelia and I will be your host for the rest of the day. In my day-to-day job, I work here at 23 as part of the marketing team. But I'm so excited to host Webinar Days with you and hopefully learn a bunch that we can all share and use in our jobs for the rest of the year and next year. So I'm super proud to announce that TwentyThree is bringing to you Webinar Days. We see it as part of our purpose to help drive the industry and mature the field of webinars forward as well as digital events. So that's what we're trying to do here today, bringing together all these talented speakers to share their insights with you. TwentyThree is our video tool that is used by both growth companies as well as some of the largest enterprise companies in the world to do video and webinars. And we bring all you need to get real with video into one integrated platform ready to scale hundreds of marketers or hundreds of marketing teams in your organization. I want to give you a quick introduction to the platform here, our webinar room. You can see on the side there's a chat that you can use to engage with each other. Feel free to introduce yourself in the chat so you can learn who your peers are and who's here with us today. If you have any questions that you would like answered by the speakers, I highly recommend that you use the question button right above the chat. By using this feature, we can bring your question onto the screen and it's a golden opportunity for the speaker to answer exactly your question. We also have some reactions. If you don't have a specific question in mind, but you still want to give us a little bit of love and a little bit of engagement, please remember to react and give the speaker some feedback to what they're talking about. I'm sure they will appreciate it a lot. For this session, I'm super excited. We're going to talk about how companies can get more participants for your webinars. We'll cover trailers, campaigns with personal touches, teasers and emails, as well as ads. Yeah, and just get the load down from performance agency leaders on the tactics that will drive webinar traffic. First up with us today, we have Tony and Hofton from Obsidian Digital. If you're doing marketing in Denmark, you probably already know Hofton Tim. Besides being a partner at Obsidian Digital, he hosts the Marketing Brief podcast with more than 600 episodes and still counting. He is also hosting the Social Ads Conference here in Copenhagen. And with him by his side today, he has Tony Genove. Tony has been working with video and webinars for the past nine years, and he loves to take deep dives into data and create content with a hook that will keep people watching and keep people engaged. He now works at Obsidian Digital as a senior creative consultant, and I'm super excited to welcome them both onto the stage. Let's see if we have our two gentlemen with us today. Yes, there we go. Hi guys, how are you doing? We're good, thank you. And great to be a part of this day. Yeah, it's so exciting to see you guys virtually. How has your day been so far? Have you been super busy and just tuning in or have you been prepping slides for last minute? No, I think we came fairly prepared for today, I'd say. Yeah, nothing less. We've been sitting in the studio until now. Great, but I'm super excited to hear some of the stories that you have to share with us and some sneak peeks, tips and tricks on how to get more participants. So I'm just going to let you guys have the stage and I'll come back for a little bit of Q&A afterwards. All right, that sounds awesome. And thank you to everyone listening in. Webinars are a super important part of both our own inbound marketing efforts and it's a product that we actually help clients with. So it's something where I think we have some experience to actually contribute with here. I think we're doing like 30 or 40 webinars per year for ourselves, so it's a cornerstone in our own inbound efforts. And we've sort of split this presentation for the next 20 minutes into two different areas. The first part is mine while I talk about probably the five most important methods for us in terms of actually gathering signups and making sure that people come to our webinars. The second part is yours. Yeah, and I'll talk a little bit more about how you can get more participants by increasing the production value of your webinar. It sounds complicated, but it doesn't have to be. So I'll give you some of our best practices and some actionable tips that you can take to immediately make your webinar look better. So hopefully we can help you both get more visitors and actually get them to stay. So without further ado, I think we'll just jump to the first item because I have five like very concrete recommendations as to how you can approach digital marketing to gain more attendees for webinars. So the first thing I want to mention and recommend today is thought leader ads on LinkedIn and LinkedIn advertising. We've been doing it since we started in 2016, both for ourselves and for our clients. But anyone listening in on this who had worked with LinkedIn advertising knows that it's actually fairly expensive and kind of difficult to get to scale and really work, especially in a smaller market like Denmark and Finland and so forth. But thought leader ads was implemented four months ago and it kind of changed the game for us. Like I can say, we quadrupled our monthly LinkedIn spend immediately after gaining access to this. It's the best performing format we have on LinkedIn right now. So what is thought leader ads? Thought leader ads is really just the opportunity to take a post from your personal profile and sponsor this with your business account. So I can do a post on my personal profile as I usually would, and it will gain some organic exposure. But I can then take that specific post with all of the engagement and comments and so forth and actually boost it, so to speak, using my ad account. So we combine two things that are great by doing thought leader ads. One is that thought leader ads are personal because it's a personal account. Like it's it's it's helped and Tim or Tony Gino doing the post instead of obsidian digital. So it looks less like an ad. The second thing is we still have access to all of LinkedIn's great first party data to optimize and deliver our ads to the right people. So I just have an example here of one I did for a webinar actually. So the the the image in the middle here is an organic LinkedIn post I made. My personal style is I like memes, homemade ones. So some of them are great. Some probably aren't. But I make a lot of memes. So this is based on a new update that Apple came with recently, which has some serious implications for companies doing Google ads and metrics in terms of how they're tracking their conversions. So we did a webinar on this. We actually gained like I think 600 participants for that one. But one of the things we did was making this post on LinkedIn saying, OK, you now have this issue making a funny post about it. And then in the bottom of the post, there's a direct link to sign up with our 23 link. And what we saw here is we spent five thousand Danish crowns on this particular campaign, which is like 800 euros. And we gained around 240 participants to the webinar from LinkedIn. So this equals out to a like price per participant from LinkedIn at around three, three and a half euros, which for us is kind of good. Like we're happy to pay three euros for a relevant audience. We've defined via the job titles and company size to actually sign up to our webinar and get into our house and become a marketing commission. Like we're pretty happy with that. And that's not the results we've usually seen with LinkedIn. So my first recommendation, just to sum it up, use LinkedIn thought leader ads because this is the best format that LinkedIn has currently. It takes the best of both worlds. My second tip here is to use LinkedIn Legion ads. And this is the format that's been available to us for years. And we have been using leaders quite a bit in the past. Our experience is that gaining subscribers via leaders is actually currently more expensive than thought leader ads. But it doesn't have to be one or the other. You can easily create both types of campaigns because that will increase your reach within the audience. You're trying to reach on LinkedIn advertising. Legion ads are the same as lead ads on Meta, which will also come to where when you're making your campaign on LinkedIn, you're not sending people to a website. Instead, you create a form on LinkedIn. This form is then pre-populated. So the name or company name, email, phone number, like whichever information you would like you customize the form will already be filled out when the user actually clicks the link. So instead of the user having to click your link and go to your website or 23 sign up link and fill out their email and their name and then sign up, they can just click. Everything will be filled in already. They can click again and they sign up. So this removes a lot of friction when it doesn't work as well as thought leader ads on LinkedIn. I think this is mainly because of a fairly high CPM price. So the price to show your ad running Legion ads is much higher than it is in thought leader ads. And that's some technical reasons as to why this is. But it just means that if your conversion rate is the same, it's still going to be more expensive. But it may be expensive if the leads are qualified. It matches your ideal customer profile. It doesn't really matter. Doesn't really matter. Like the actual cost per lead is less relevant than the cost per qualified lead. And LinkedIn ads are greater driving qualified, although not cheap leads. So for the two formats on LinkedIn, I'm recommending thought leader ads and Legion ads. But when listening to this right now, by the end of 2023 and going into 2024, if I were you, I'd probably spend the majority of my ad spend on thought leader ads currently, which is also what we're doing ourselves. My third recommendation is to use Legion ads on Meta. This is where we've historically driven the most of our conversions. So Legion ads for Obsidian. We've actually had more than 20,000 signups over the last seven years on Legion ads for Obsidian in Denmark, only for B2B people. So we've scaled it further than most companies have, I think. And we are still able to do that. Like Legion ads on Meta is the foundation of our email marketing list and our email marketing and marketing automation efforts. Facebook and Instagram is much cheaper. They have more users and they still have great targeting. We can even just use interest-based targeting and that actually works for us. Now, there's a lot of technical things you can do here, like using your existing client base as a seat for a lookalike audience, setting up question and conditional logic within Facebook to further enrich your leads or tell the algorithm which ones are the right. But you don't have to actually get started and gain some value from this. So I'd say besides our own email list, which over time have started to generate a lot of our submissions because we've built it over time, Facebook lead ads is the most important channel we've had for the last five years. And that's still the case today. So thought leader ads is the new and interesting thing. But Facebook lead ads is still where we drive the most conversions for webinars, both for ourselves and for our clients. Now, one thing I did want to mention, we're doing both video, we're doing images, we're doing carousels. Like the thing that's working the best for us in terms of the actual ad when trying to generate more subscribers or participants for your webinars are short videos, like short 15 to 30 second videos, usually filmed in 916. So it matches the phone because most of your users will be on mobile with very large subtitles, either handmade or in an AI tool like Submagic or something like this. That's the best type of creative we have on Facebook advertising is better than images and it's better than long videos. You can't make a two minute invitation to a webinar. That's too long. People don't have two minutes, but they may give you 15 seconds if you have a good hook. The last two things I want to mention is inside our email marketing software. One is HubSpot where we're sending out campaign emails. One thing that we're like, you're probably already doing this. This is nothing new. My two recommendations here in terms of gaining more participants from your own email list. One is super important to segment your lists. Like if you don't segment your list and you just send out to anyone, you will see a lower and lower open rate over time because more and more people will actually have you been added. You will be added to the spam filter for more and more people. The spam filter used to be for actual spam. The spam filter for today is for anything that people doesn't really click and engage with. So maintaining a high open rate by not sending to people who's not interested is just good business. So in our own HubSpot, we have people segmented based on their interests, like which webinars have they participated in in the past? How big of a company is it? What's the niche? What tools have they installed on their page using the built with integration? Like a number of different things. So we don't just charge anything to one list that might increase the signups for the first webinar, but we know that will decrease the value of our email list going forward. The last thing I want to mention in terms of gaining more participants to your webinar is sequences. Now, not everyone has access to sequences, but this is a really powerful tool if you're using it with caution. Sequences is an opportunity in HubSpot to send out mails from HubSpot or done by HubSpot, but in your own actual email account. So I can connect my email account and we're using Google Workspace. That's a Gmail account, but you can also do this with Outlook or anything else. I can connect my inbox to HubSpot, actually write a template in HubSpot, have HubSpot send it out to relevant contacts with their name and company name, but actually sent from my email. Now, this is not how you send out an invitation to like a thousand people because that's going to look unnatural and you may end up actually hurting your deliverability from your personal email. But if you have a very specific audience, say if Tony and I made a webinar specifically on how to do app install marketing, which is something we help some clients with, that's not relevant to most of our list. But I can probably find 50 to 100 people for whom this is very relevant. So I might want to set up a sequence to them and send them a personalized one-to-one email instead of a blast because I know that the one-to-one email is much more likely to not end up in the spam filter because it's actually going to be sent from my own. So this is a powerful move and a powerful tool, but I do want to warn you, you shouldn't do this with 500 or a thousand or 2000 email addresses because you do that once and you've burned your email address. So powerful tool, but use with caution for the right campaigns and it can be extremely efficient to drive very relevant webinar signups. So just to sum up, I had five very concrete recommendations for this one thought leader ads on LinkedIn. That's awesome. We actually spend a lot of money there right now. The LinkedIn lead gen ads also works, but spend most of your money on thought leader ads. Mesa lead gen ads is where we've driven the most volume historically and still continues to be in the best lead prices for us, even though thought leader ads is actually coming close right now when we do something good there. Campaigns on HubSpot, but please make sure to segment them and sequences for the very niche audience where you have few but very important potential participants for your webinars. That probably concludes my part as to how you actually get people to sign up. Then we have the very important part of how do you actually get people to stay? Good point. Now, in addition to everything that had them talked about, if you do that and you get a lot of participants, my angle to this is that you want to actually increase the production value of your webinar because that incentivize people to stick around and come back again. And there are three main ways that you can do that, in my opinion. First of all, it's actually in the way you package it and that is closely tied to advertisement in the way that you design the promotional materials, what kind of videos you do, how do they look like, that whole thing increases the production value of it and incentivize people to watch more. Then there's the software part of the actual production of the webinar. And right now, we are actually running this exclusively through 23. And I know that if you want to actually use advanced settings on your webinar and you want to include intros and outros, music and graphic elements, you would usually have to do that through a third party software like OBS, but that creates a lot of things that can break and that creates extra complexity through the whole system. And you can actually do that completely in 23. You can upload videos in there that you can play like intros, you can upload different segments and you can switch camera angles, just like I'm doing right now. And I've been doing it this whole time. And of course, lastly, it is the gear. Simply by getting any pretty much DSLR or mirrorless camera and running the software with that, as opposed to your web camera, will immediately increase your production value rather easily. How much is a DSLR camera? You can get pretty cheap cameras nowadays. And there are actually webcams that are doing 1080p and 4K nowadays. So it's really not breaking the bank to increase the production value in terms of the visuals, but even more importantly would be to increase the production value in terms of the audio, getting a microphone. That would be more important probably than the visuals of it. And actually in my next slide, I'm going to come up with some precise examples of what we use as recommendations to you. And lastly, on the top of obviously lights, like for example, a softbox, which you can find anywhere. Those are fantastic. So cheap. And they're very, very cheap and they get the job done fantastically. I would very much recommend a video switcher. It is this device that I have right here that allows me to switch the camera angles as I'm doing right now. And that device is running as a virtual camera, which allows me actually to use all this setup, all those things that connect into it, the camera, the laptop, another camera. You could have four camera angles in here. You can have four microphones in it. It is just running as a simple online web camera and you can use it on 23 on Google on Zoom and you can record videos in the computer with it. It's fantastic. So if we want to get a little bit more specific, I recommend a DSLR and a mirrorless camera. Pretty much anything would do. But most importantly, I would say is get a battery dummy, which is basically a fake battery that you poke into the camera, that you poke into the wall outlet. That will allow you to shoot as long as the camera doesn't overheat. It could be for hours. Very important. You don't want your battery to run out in the middle of your webinar. We've had that happen before. That's a whole other story. You don't want that. You don't want that. And then of course, the microphones, my go-to recommendation. I love those things. It's the Rode Wireless Go 2. Those things are probably my favorite piece of gear ever. Even better than cameras. I love those devices. We use them all the time for everything. They're just brilliant, brilliant pieces of gear. Very easy recommendation. And for cameras, we're using the Sony A73. But again, any DSLR, any mirrorless camera will pretty much do. We recommend, of course, getting a soft box because even if your camera is not that expensive, you can actually achieve a fantastic look if you shape the light because the light is what truly matters. You can have an extremely expensive camera, but if your light sucks, it will still not look great. And lastly, video switcher. I would say this is the go-to most important thing if you want to run a webinar or any type of live studio. The one that I currently use is the Blackmagic Atom Mini Pro. It is fantastic. And there are so many of those on the market. Very big recommendation. And those are some ways that you can increase the production value of your webinar. It is basically like a TV show or a movie. It has to be good for people to watch it, right? The content, of course, it is the most important thing. It is how you promote it. But then you can also incentivize people by showing that you actually put effort in it. And that makes them want to see it more. How much do you think in total like our current setup is? Probably 15,000, 20,000 Danish crowns? About 15,000, 20,000 Danish crowns. We probably could have done it cheaper if we wanted to. But just to say like this is like 15,000 to 20,000 crowns is a lot of money, obviously. But it's not like you have to spend a quarter of a million to actually get started with something that looks pretty good, I'd say. And I hope you're looking in. Hopefully. Yeah, I feel like that as well. Just noticed a good question from Paul. He's asking if we're using gear mode with that box, like gear mode on 23, which allows us to do more advanced settings. That's the beauty of it. We are not. Gear mode is amazing. It is amazing. But actually being able to do it natively in 23 is fantastic. I love it. I love it. So you're able to do that exclusively in 23. We generally like less complexity. And less things that can go wrong. Yeah, yeah. No, I love that. I also have to tell you both that you look great. So the gear you have is definitely working for you. So you have like some nice inside studio lights and looks very professional. And wow, look at that. Even a little bit of filters for some extra magic. Very interesting and super helpful insights, I would say. I had a conversation yesterday with a speaker who also recommended to prepare for a webinar beforehand in terms of, yeah, if you have already decided that you're going to put all this effort into it, like be prepared, make sure you've invested in your campaigns. And that people are aware that it's happening. And the number, the second thing that I thought was very interesting that he wasn't talking about signups, but he was talking about the art of getting your participants to stay to the end. And I think those are topics that both of you covered very well in terms of how gear is not necessarily a barrier to get started as it is perceived by a lot of people. But it's actually an amazing tool to get that quality, level of quality into the webinar that you want and yeah, make it entertaining. Yeah, absolutely. And distinguish yourself from for us is also like a brand question. We don't want to create something that kind of looks like we just took a laptop and sit in some random room with no lighting. That would also be a brand guideline issue from our perspective. So both from a performance perspective, but also making sure that our potential clients watching the webinar viewers in the right light is important to us. Definitely. And you guys also mentioned audio, you know, that if the sound is bad, you're just going to have such a hard time keeping people engaged. We do have some questions in the chat that I can see on the side here. And I have one particular that I thought, Hofton, you would probably be the guy to answer because Sylvian is asking, what about boosting a LinkedIn event for your webinars? Have you experimented any with this or had any results? Yeah, so that's actually a good question. So it's true. You can create an event on LinkedIn and actually boost this. And we do create events on our own LinkedIn. The downside to boosting an event on LinkedIn is that people still have to actually click your link in the event and go and sign up because you can't sign people up and automatically transfer them to 23. So in terms of actually gathering leads like identifiable emails, you can then work with afterwards. LinkedIn events are not great because people think they signed up by actually saying yes to the event, but they didn't really. They have to actually still click the link and sign up with 23. So we've had some confusion over this in the past where it might make sense if you instead of having a link to a webinar on 23, maybe use the platform to then just stream it to LinkedIn. You can do this. This will probably increase your reach. But at the cost of not being able to identify that he will actually signed up and add them to your marketing automation system. So we generally don't do this ourselves, but that's not because it's wrong or technically can't work. But that's more of a strategic consideration from our side that we would rather have fewer but identifiable leads actually participate in our webinars to build up some value for ourselves in the future. Definitely. And I appreciate the very clear and transparent answer in terms of that. There's just a little bit of communication uncertainty, which I totally understand because when you're being communicated to in an omni channel or from multiple points of departure, it's hard to know. When did I actually sign up? Where do I get the link? Can I watch it on demand afterwards? You know, there's a lot of noise out there on the Internet. So it's important that it's extremely clear and easy for your potential participants to to find the right event. And then, Tony, I'm sure you mentioned it, but I have another question in the chat from Corrina, who's asking, which video switcher are you using? Because she is thinking of buying one herself. And I think you're going to be just the guy to give her the best tip on that. Yes. First of all, great idea. You should absolutely get a video switcher. The one the exact one that we have right now is the Blackmagic. Actually, I think I've shown it. It's the Blackmagic Atom Mini Pro. And we swear by this device, it allows you to do picture and picture like you're about to see us right now. It's right now shop here in the corner. It allows you to switch different camera angles. You can connect four different cameras, laptops, all kinds of different fun devices to it. You can connect two or four microphones to it. And it's just brilliant. It's fantastic. You plug it and it works. I sound like a salesperson for Blackmagic, but it's just that great. And it's the mini version we're using because they have a fairly expensive one that's like ten thousand crowns. But we're using the mini one, which is like two thousand crowns. Yeah. And it's more than enough for pretty much anything. Yes. And I can promise you guys that this was not coordinated, but that's actually the exact mixer that we're using as well. So Blackmagic has done something correctly. Yeah. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for joining me. This has been absolutely amazing. I think your insights have been so tangible and hands on that I imagine that a lot of marketers watching are going to go home and make notes to their strategy for the future. When it comes to their LinkedIn advertising and webinar gear. So thank you so much to the both of you. I hope you have a great day and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you for having us on. Thank you for having us. And I'm sure I speak for both of us when I say that people can just reach out to LinkedIn or email and we're happy to help with webinars and answer any questions. Thank you so much, both of you. I'm sure that is much appreciated. Now up next, we are going to be tuning in from Finland because we have Tapio Hiatt with us. Tapio is the chief video strategist at VideoOla and development director. He has worked a lot both with 23, but also creating video content and webinars in Finland. VideoOla is a Finnish video agency owned by Sonoma and he creates great video content for their customers. And they recently had a huge success with getting more than 2000 participants in for their own digital events. And I know that Tapio has been challenging the typical way of webinar setups and the processes of running them. And I am so excited to have him here with us today to give us some insights into how he was able to get more than 2000 participants for your digital event. Hi Tapio. Hi. How are you doing? I just have to say that we also approve Black Magic Gear, but we are not. Unfortunately, they are not our sponsors, but whatever. This is becoming like a Black Magic session. Exactly. But if it works, then I mean, don't challenge it. Don't break it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great to be here. And like Amelia said, in this session, I will share some that. Oh, this will be like mostly case session. I will talk about our video marketing 2024 event, which we had in the beginning of October and where we got 2347 registrations, something like that. That is so impressive. I'm so excited and I can just tell you right now I'm going to be sitting behind the camera taking some notes of my own. So I'm just going to give you the stage and let you have it and take it away, Tapio. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. I first have to say that the Teams and Tony session was really good and we are also really in-pound focused video agencies. We do a lot of webinars almost monthly, at least. At least monthly. But let's skip a couple slides. Let's go here straight. So the problem we have had with our own webinars, we usually get like from 100 to 300 registrations to our webinars. But the problem, if we look, we have been making webinars for years, but the most basic problem is usually about 80% of people are the same people who are always participating. So we are always getting same people come more and more to our webinars. Of course, that's a good thing. Leads get more warmer. Maybe they buy from one day from us. But we would think that we have to find some way to get like really new people coming to our webinars. And Team Antony got some good ideas and we are also using LinkedIn lead ads and Facebook lead ads. To be honest, most of our webinar registrations come from our newsletter. So we send each week we send our newsletter to 2000 to between 2000 to 3000 people. So most of our webinar registrations come from our newsletter. So the solution for us was that we had this hypothesis that let's make something really big. Let's not just make some simple, typical webinar. And we came up with this concept called Video Marketing 2024. And the idea behind this was that, OK, because we as a company, we want to own the video marketing in Finland. Basically, if people think video marketing, we want people think video. We come to their mind. So we were thinking that, OK, we have to have like video marketing festival. So if you're interested at all about video and marketing, you want to participate in this event. And we started to think about like festival way of thinking. You know the festival posters where you see like 20 artists involved in this festival. And this was like we started like, OK, we have to have like festival kind of poster. I guess this slide is a little bit small, but this is how it ended up. We knew we got people from TikTok, YouTube, big marketing CMOs, ex Netflix marketing director, famous editor. So we tried to take people from all the different sides, like creative people, marketing people, performance people, platform people, 23 people. So we tried to get speakers all around the video marketing sphere. That was the starting point. So let's make something big. So if you're creative people, if you're marketing people, but if you see the poster, you get the feeling, oh, I have to go there. I have to register there. Of course, we knew that people usually only watch like one session or two sessions, but at least we get leads. So this was like the basic promise. Let's make something bigger. Something really big, which at least in Finland haven't been done before in the video marketing scene. And so. We started basically pushing ads to all possible channels and the basic promise was like like 10, 10 hours, 20 sessions, 30 speakers. Actually, it ended up being like, I think like 16 hours, 23 sessions and 35 speakers. But whatever. It sounded cool, like having a 10, 10, 10 hours, 20 sessions, 30 speakers. So, so of course, this is like basic advertising stuff. Just make something big and push it to all the possible channels. One thing as we were bought by Sonoma Media Finland, which is the biggest media company in Finland. One benefit we nowadays have that we can almost freely advertise in their channels. So first time we were thinking, OK, so we can freely use TV advertising and print advertising. So actually we were we were pushing ads, trying also print ads. So we had those full full full page print ads for our this niche B2B virtual event. And surprisingly, actually. Of course, I can say how many registrations we got through this print ads. But this was really big thing for the speakers because many speakers were like, OK, should I participate or not? But then we were told like, OK, but hey, you understand your face will be seen on the biggest newspapers in Finland. Full full full page ads out there. Oh, nice. That sounds big. So this was like a big thing to get get more speakers to our event. Of course, we also created like for each speaker, we also created like personalized ads that we run all around all around social media channels. And Sonoma channels also. One thing I go a little bit like I go later to numbers, but a little bit. But one production like because we knew we didn't we don't have like tens. We had two day virtual event and we knew we have over 20 sessions and really big name, big name marketing people. But it would have been impossible for us to get all the people in those two days to participate being speakers. So and and as we all know, there are a lot of technical potential problems when you're having live sessions. So what we decided that, OK, we will pre record all the sessions, but we will have live studio like television studio kind of. We will have live intros and outers. So we will have a live host telling that, hey, last week we were having having discussion with YouTube and we were discussing that. Let's go to see the session. And while the session was running, we actually have had the speaker live on the chat. And that worked surprisingly well. That worked actually better than than more. It was actually more interactive than most of our live webinars. And I was actually just thinking when I was listening to Tim's and Tony's session presentation, people were asking questions on the chat that actually Tim and Tony could have been answering all the time to those questions on that same time. So that was really big surprise for me because I'm always like it has to be live. But this mix of pre recorded and live works surprisingly well. I was just going to show you because basically I was the I was the host for the most of the sessions. It was crazy. Three weeks we pre recorded like 33 sessions. I was I'm going to show how it did look like. By the way, miss, welcome. Let's go. Hi, Tony or Tapio. Sorry. I think you have to take out your headset because there's no sound in the in the webinar room from the video. And I'm sure we all go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go further. Let's go on. It doesn't. Okay. I wanted to let you know. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Okay. Okay. But like I said, the big, big, big thing was that this is like just one animated gift from the session with Robert Reins. And Robert Reins was his A.I. artist doing huge amount of fun doing A.I. art, by the way. But anyway, this was one of the most interactive webinar I have had in my whole life. Like like this was pre recorded, but Robert was live chatting there. And we had like I think we got like 150 comments in the chat. I like it was like really hardcore chatting all the time. So this pre recorded live studio and live chat, I think we will do that more in the future, especially with this big events. Okay. So how did it go? So our main target was to create brand awareness and get huge amount of new leads. And because that was the biggest webinars, we have had like 500, 600 people. We were talking that at least we have to get 1000 and 2000 was like, oh, that would be like a dream come true. But we got 2300 registrations. And and like one of the main thing was that we have to get new people to our CRM and we get over 1700 new contacts were totally new to us. And about there was no show of what 1000 people and the best sessions had over 700 people live at the same time. So this was it's been and if you ask for more salespeople, this there was a lot of I wouldn't say the numbers, but a lot of marketing, quality leads and sales quality leads and so on. So really, really good stuff and key learnings reserve enough time for marketing. I think this is the like really important thing. We started marketing in the beginning of 1st of August and this was October 13th. This event was held. So we had like two and a half months because it's always when you start marketing, you see the peak. Then it comes a little bit down and a few days before event. It goes up once again, but I think it was really important to have enough time to do all the operations. And for us to get new audience, you really have to make something different. If we would be making those same webinars again and again, we wouldn't have got new people and marketed in some new ways and different channels than usually. And one from production standpoint, pre-recorded sessions with live intros and outros plus live chat work surprisingly well. This was the big learning for us. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you, Tapio, for sharing some of your insights. I think it is really interesting to hear how you challenged the typical format of a webinar by doing this like hybrid version, having some of the speakers, pre-recorded sessions, as well as the, you know, the energy and the dynamics of having a live studio. I'm wondering, like, it must have been such a big project for you guys to pull off internally. How was how did your colleagues respond to all of this? Was it great excitement? Were they all on board from the beginning? Or did it take a little bit of convincing to pull off such a big event or a festival, as you called it? Well, I guess you know how it goes. Yeah, it's a lot of convincing. It's a lot of convincing. But it wasn't that hard because the pre-recorded sessions was the biggest part, actually. And we had like over one to pre-record those. So only like three people were more involved in that time period. Of course, the actual day, we only had like five people all the time because we had two hosts, then we had the technical people and etc. So it was quite easy to do this way. Of course, still a lot of convincing. Still a lot of work to do all the marketing, still a lot of work to get all the speakers. Exactly. But I can relate to a big production setup. We also run webinar days as living in the marketing team. And then when it comes closer and closer to the actual event, we'll pull in some of our colleagues from the other teams to help with their expertise. So, for instance, we have as part of our production team, we have our in-house specialist helping us out. We also had some of our colleagues actually as the speakers for some of the sessions yesterday. And also using our founders to communicate some of our findings through reports and pre-launches and stuff like that. But it's definitely I can tell that people get a little bit intimidated when they're asked to do extra stuff and they're like, I don't work in marketing. And what am I supposed to say? And is it live? What if I mess up? It is a little bit of a process getting people trained to be on webinars. Yeah, true, true, true. And actually yesterday, yesterday, we had a big live event in our office with 23 and the video booth. We had like a slush pre-event and we had like 80, 100, maybe 100 people here. And that was a lot of work. I didn't remember how big work live events are compared to webinars. I think that's a very awesome quote that is going to be reused because I totally agree. I think we've gotten so used to doing digital events that all of the sudden doing a physical one is totally new to us. I do have a... Sorry, continue and then afterwards I will pop a question on screen. No, no, no, no. One learning that never do hybrid events. Do live event or do workshop. Don't do both. And why would you say that? Because you can have like a really good virtual event in a small audio studio like this one. But to have like a really good live event, you need to have big space and all the facilities. And usually it doesn't even look that good and the interaction is not good. It's not similar. So it's really hard to pull both events at the same time and have those work. I know you did it last summer. It was great. But it's a huge challenge because I think the most important thing to consider when doing a hybrid event and where a lot of people fail is that you either have to prioritize your online audience or you have to prioritize your physical audience. And then there might be, let's say you have a Q&A after a session. And how do you make sure that both audiences get the same opportunity to ask their questions? And sometimes there will be something that's happening in a room that just doesn't translate well when doing a digital event and vice versa. I mean, having like, for instance, at the end of today, we're running a cocktail hour that is just going to be filled with a bunch of inputs, different speakers, quick check-ins. But having a cocktail hour at a physical event wouldn't, you know, would probably turn into chaos. So there's definitely something that's more suited for the different formats. Yeah. And it's doable, but the bigger the live event gets and if you want to have it good also in hybrid, it starts to do like actual TV production. You really have to have like big scale production crew. Yeah, exactly. Yes, I do have one question in the chat here that says, Tapio, how have you been repurposing this content? Which I think is such a great question because you invested so much time into this huge festival. And yeah, can you tell us a little bit about what you did with all the content you got? Well, most of the sessions are of course still, you can watch those on demand. Those will be available end of the year. So if you speak Finnish, please go ahead and go to our site and look at those. So basically we have been in our newsletter every week. We still like and push some social media ads that, hey, go to look at that. We have made some short clips from some of those the best sessions, speakers saying something clever and go to see the sessions. So yeah, we're still pushing on demand watching the platform. Yeah. Well, this is two questions in one kind of first half, I guess. Have you decided if you're going to continue with this festival format and run another festival in 2024? And if so, are there any major things you would you would change about it? Yeah, we will. We will definitely do it again. But we won't. We won't do it because because it was 20, 24, maybe 23 sessions. But basically it was like eight hours each day. It doesn't make sense because because we could easily see that, of course, people drop at some point. There were some really popular sessions also in the evening. But basically I would probably do two mornings or two afternoons like like for like you. I think you are doing with webinar this. I guess that would be like better, better, better way to do it. So a little bit shorter days, maybe 10 sessions. Yeah, but it depends a little bit on it. It depends a little bit on, you know, who you're catering for, because some of the considerations we made when hosting our webinar days was that we we really wanted it to be a global event. So the time slot we chose might be a little bit more inconvenient for the European professional because their work hour is, you know, or their work day is done around five o'clock, which is when our event ends. But at the same time, we want to keep it late enough in the day so that our US audience can also participate, even though it's live. And of course, that is some of the pain points with a live event is this scarcity, because not everyone can attend and you cannot cater it for perfectly for everyone. So you kind of have to make some strategic decisions. And for us, we decided that we do want to keep it, you know, a global event first. So prioritized to make it accessible for the US market, as well as some learnings from previous years in terms of production crew, our own employees having eight hours in one day is just a very long time to be on set to kind of feel the energy drain a little bit throughout the day. And you want your sessions to be energized and dynamic and have that passion to them. So that's some of the reasons we decided to do fewer sessions per day, but then, you know, more days. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense to those. Makes sense. Yeah, but I can't wait. Yeah, once. Yeah, no one surprising thing was because we started those days 8am, which is I think for office workers quite early. But surprisingly, we got a huge amount of people coming. Maybe they were commuting to their work or something, but we were surprised how many people actually came, came to maybe listen. I don't know. Maybe they just listen. But anyway, they came to webinar. I am. I definitely can't wait to see how how this festival concept grows and evolves. And I'm really excited to see how you guys are going to bring it to market for next year. So I'm definitely keeping an eye out on that. I do want to take this opportunity to thank you so much for joining our session and giving so many hands on insights. I think having a use case like you presented is, you know, it's so valuable for the audience because you get that really tangible example of how to do things and like following your thought process and considerations you made with a 10, 20, 30 festival vibes. It's just so inspiring. And I think who knows? Maybe we'll see a lot more digital festivals popping up after today. But thank you, top. You're so much for being. Thank you. Thanks. For everyone who has been joining us from the previous sessions, we still have so much more to come. I want to thank you guys for still being with us. We've had some amazing talks today. So big shout out to our speakers, Hoff Don, Tony and top. I think the session is going to be replayed a lot of times. And there are so many golden nuggets to take away from this. I do want to let everyone know that if you stay in the room, you will join us for our next session. You will be automatically redirected. And it is going to be a really interesting session where we get a sneak peek into webinars 5.0, the best webinar tool on the market today. So stay tuned for that. If you are not redirected, please click the button in the top right corner. And if you have to leave us, unfortunately, then don't worry. You can also catch this on demand. However, I do encourage you to tune into our cocktail hour that is happening at four o'clock Central European time, because we have a small surprise for you guys there and you will have an opportunity to win a special gift. But that is only applicable for our live attendance. So we'll be right back and I'll see you soon. Thank you.