Scaling Customer Engagement With Webinars

I do product marketing for Picon. I'm now 10 or 11 months in Copenhagen. I used to live in London and before that in Greece, therefore my accent. If you need me to repeat something, just ask me. I should be at my daily stand up with my team. I told them I'm talking about Picon. I'm not talking about Picon. I'm talking about three problems that I have with Picon. So yeah, if you take any pictures of the T-shirt, it will justify my absence. Three problems that I've got. So we are growing quite fast at Picon. At the same time, our portfolio of brands is not as impressive as what we saw before, but it's all around the world and it's getting bigger at different time zones. Before Picon, I used to work for B2C brands. So it was mostly consumer facing brands in sports and fashion. And I used to do also brand marketing. So it was a very big difference. It's easy when you're trying to sell a story about a very fascinating product, but it's hard when you're selling a software, no matter how fascinating it is. And the biggest struggle that I find there is that a software doesn't have a face. It has a dashboard. But behind that software, there's a lot of love from the people building it. And this is a little bit what I want to highlight today during the presentation. I just wanted to justify the title a little bit, especially if anybody already tried to Google what Picon does. So Picon basically is working on the employee engagement, how we can all be happy and satisfied and feel that we're growing at work every day. But today I'm going to be talking about how we can scale the engagement of our partners, not our employees. So you're all aware with Fano. I don't know if you're aware of Workday. Workday was the second company after Facebook with the biggest IPO at 9.5 billion. Do you know how many customers Workday had before they launched their initial public offering? They had 310 customers. To me, when I'm thinking that a company went public with 9.5 billion, I would think that they have hundreds of thousands of companies. But they had 310. So what does that mean? So if we see this part of the Fano, you've already done all the hard work, right? You've already acquired your leads, you've already convinced them, you've already bought the product, so you're kind of settled. The only thing that you need to make sure is that the product is good. And if you're probably working for a company, you know that the product is good. But the way that I see this part is that, and I guess the way that Workday was seeing that as well, is that this is one of the most important parts. The churn that a company can have can be the most devastating thing. So the way that I see the Fano is engaged is consisting of two parts. The loyalty of your customers, but at the same time the advocacy. So the loyalty in a way that you want them to renew every year, you want them to probably go in a higher plan so that you can upsell them or sell them add-ons depending on your business model. And then also if you have new products, also get them into the new products. So the way that I see engagement is loyalty and advocacy. And advocacy is what is going to basically lower your acquisition cost. So if I were to ask three questions about this area, I would be, are you happy with our product? Are you getting the most out of it? And we have a new solution for another problem you mentioned to us. Do you want to hear more about it? And we use webinars for all three of these questions. So we are all here. I guess you're already pretty convinced about webinars. I don't want to really try to showcase the value. I do want to understand how more people are using webinars and what value they're bringing. So just a general question. Do you think that webinars are an alternative to an event like this? I see a few heads shaking. And I would say that no, webinars are a great channel, but it's another channel. It's something that it can easily scale. It's something that it can be higher on your funnel, or it can be where I'm using them mostly, at the very bottom. It can be something that it can generate leads, and also it can be something that is going to help you engage more your customers. Where do videos fit? And we saw before, Andrew, one of the values is transparency, from what I understand, and trying to showcase how robotics are in comparison to the competition that I guess they're trying to be a bit more secretive about it. So what's the difference between webinars and videos? So I said before I was working for consumer-facing brands. I was doing the marketing for O'Neill. And this was one of the latest activations that we had done with Mark Matthews. If you don't know him, he's one of the most well-known surfers. He's got hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and other channels, and he's very well-esteemed in the surfing industry as well. This is one of the most dangerous waves in the world. And the video has been produced and published from some of the top people around the world in regards to video production, and also distributed from one of the most well-known brands. So this is epic content. And this was a short video that was distributed and picked up from most of the media. 54,000 views. It's alright. By the way, we spent shed lots of money on this one. This guy, I have no idea who he is. He's filming probably somewhere in his basement. He set up a camera and a mic, and he did a very low-cost episode. So they were published, I mean, yeah, pretty much a year ago. But it's already quite a few years. It should have built up. This guy has 137. What I want to highlight with this is that webinars give you a sort of transparency, that it's a very conversational and a very vulnerable way to communicate. And I think this is the highest value of all webinars. When you do a webinar, the highest value is that you're showcasing your people. And when you're doing a live broadcast, you're taking the risk of saying something incorrect, of having a really hard question to answer live. But most of all, they see the people behind what you're building, what you're selling. And people care about people. Actually, I heard a talk from PR Gurans who was saying people care about people and money. We're not saying it about money. But anyways. So then it's the credibility. You see what you get. And that creates trust, especially if this is on a recurring fashion. The conversation can create this online community that you need. I honestly believe that webinars are far more targeted than any kind of other video that you might be doing. And it's more true and more transparent again. Anybody can do videos. You don't need Mark Matthews to do a really successful one. Me and Andrew, we're doing webinars. We're no heroes. Maybe you are. I don't know. Sorry. And then it's something that you can scale up. And scaling up means that you created a content, you got feedback, and then you implement it again to see how you can improve it. So they're cheap and scalable. Following right so far? The accent is going good? By the way, just a week ago, my manager sent me this gift. So Mark Matthews has made it into a gift without the name and without a brand logo. And that really, really was a hit in my heart. So back to the problems. I joined about a year ago, and right now we are around 130 more people. We're in four more regions. And we're in four more regions. And we are launching around 10 to 15 features every month. And I want to talk about the first way that I use webinars. And it's on the consideration. We use webinars internally. It's really vital for product marketing to evangelize, to earn the buy-in internally first from our teams, from our sales teams. That's why I was asking you also for whether you guys do use them for internal training. We don't have a big e-learning platform yet. We're, I guess, quite smaller than you guys. But we use webinars quite a lot to communicate with all other regions. So we've got teams in APAC. We've got teams in the U.S. Therefore it's different regions. We need to try to find good times that they work for everyone. And if that doesn't work, we need to make sure that we have a good production that afterwards they're going to see. So a big tip on internal webinars is don't just use your computer and your webcam on that computer. Try to make them a proper production if you really want to engage your teams. It's really easy to do the setups. I'm going to talk about how to do a setup of a webinar if we have time at the very end. But try to make them a proper production. Try to make them fun. Try to communicate them in a fun way through your emails or Slack channels or whatever you need. And it's a great way to bring the team together. It's a great way to have a monthly recurring internal webinar where you're going to be sharing all of the internal news of your company. If you have a lot of features like we do, it's a great way to start the product training for them and communicate. And why I'm putting it on the consideration, again, it's our sales team. They are out there talking to customers every day. They really, really need to know how to talk about the products. And one of the main things and one of the reasons that I also ask you whether you use them is usually when you're doing these webinars, because the audience, not the internal ones, but the external ones, you're thinking that the audience is the people that probably will be buying. You want your sales team to be able to talk in a consistent way. And these webinars are a great way to make sure that you're using the same lingo. You've probably sent a positioning document or something else beforehand to the team. By listening to you, they get the information much better. And then I'm going to be talking about what we do for our external webinars and how I'm trying to engage our customers, as I said before. So this is the Picon Monthly. We do this once a month, the second Wednesday of each month. It's a recurring event. I'm going to really quickly explain the three topics and then go to the nitty gritty stuff. So your audience will join not because they want to hear about your features, they want to earn something. So they have to be an academy as you guys are doing or something that is educative. So it's very important for us to give them other customer stories. People care about people, they want to know what other companies are doing. So it's really, really important to give something that they're going to be learning. During the webinars, as I said, we do live podcasts. We've got more companies from our communities. So they will hear the stories they relate and hopefully maybe they will start a conversation as well. It doesn't happen that often, anytime that we are trying to find a way to do more. But it's important for me to obviously do the commercial break and show them some of the features, of the newest features. But again, we won't really focus on utility. We will show them how to begin with them. But the main thing that we want to highlight is the value that they're going to be getting. And then at the very end of the webinar, so that we manage to make sure that they're going to stay until the end, they're usually 30 minutes, so 20 minutes and 10 minutes questions. We put the theory. So one of the biggest things with Picon is we've got a really solid methodology. And it's the thing that interests the most the companies because we have a really strong organizational development team and they really want to hear from them. Obviously, webinar is helping us to scale that and allow them to get access to our latest methodology and our latest learnings. And that's why we put it at the very end. The main thing that I am trying to communicate as product marketing is obviously the one in the middle. And so far, they're going great. And then the most important thing is, as I'm going to highlight it later on, it really doesn't matter how many people will be at the live broadcast. What really matters is who are the registered because you are already building an audience and you can follow up with them. Patrick Gustav. Patrick is our VP of people. Gustav is the director of CS. So one of the tips is use quite senior people, people that your clients would not have access to every day just because it's not scalable. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we're doing. We're showing up every month with Don't Lose a webinar. Super important. We deliver quite a lot of additional value. We're building an audience and a community and we are building another distribution channel of all the information. Most of all, we are building valuable content. And on that, we saw before from Andrew an amazing execution and a really, really beautiful frame, good camera, everything was good. If you do a webinar, do it properly. The means to do it now, they're really, really easy and quite cheap. And the fact that you will create content that you can repurpose and reuse is invaluable. Repurposing the content, build a library, your content team will love it. You're giving them free content that they haven't really worked. It's really easy to transcript a webinar. There is also technology that can do it for you, although obviously it wouldn't make it into a proper blog. But it wouldn't take you more than half a day to write a really strong blog post. And then that blog post, you can obviously communicate it through your newsletters or any kind of other distribution channels that you have. Try to build it in a consistent way so that you also build brand awareness around this specific brand activation. And then a few stuff that they are very, very important in regards to the audience. We have to make things easier. I don't know if this is any new. But a couple of stuff that they will help you is don't send an invite every time. Send one invite for the whole series of webinars. And why is that when you're building an audience, if you send once the invite, you will get 100 people. Then on the second one, you will get another 100 people. But the first 100 people that they join, they might lose you. They might be busy. They might not be able to attend. So by sending a recurring event and by also adding the calendar option in that invite, you make sure that you start building the audience. So we started with 50. Now we've got about 450 people. Not everybody will join. Usually it will be 50 people joining in the webinar. But then I have 400 people to send them back the recording and the slides and let them know how was it. Do you want me to create another topic for you? But I can converse with all these people. Of course, at the very end, for GDPR compliance and everything, you will have the unsubscribe button. But I rarely, rarely see somebody unsubscribing. It's just that people don't have time. They need their own time. It's a good recording that they can see at any time. They can also share it with their teams. So make sure that you send one invite, build the audience, and then start distributing content to them. Remind them. One day, one hour, maybe sometimes one week before as well. Three reminders sounds spammy. It's not. They really want to hear. Nobody has complained. When I've asked, they say that they love it. They want to know when the webinar is coming. And try to make it friendly. Don't use these terms. Never miss another webinar. Just as you would send an email to a colleague. And follow up afterwards. Send them the recording. So in regards to the show, as I said, never miss a show. The people that they don't have that much access to, and the people that they have the less public air, so your data science team, usually they wouldn't be on events, they wouldn't be on videos, they wouldn't be talking to clients that much. Get them in front of the camera. They might not be perfect hosts. They might not be perfect presenters. But they will improve. Everybody is improving. And the thing is that they have information that usually is invaluable. And we can't always communicate them as they would. Try to have the same hosts until you get a steady following. People trust what they know. So don't mix it up from the very beginning. Especially if you're starting about bringing also guests in and doing more complicated ones. Try to be safe in the beginning for at least your six, seven episodes. And then bring more people in. And yeah, less slides, more face time. When you're repurposing the content, it's a webinar. Use a GIF. Simple stuff. We all know how to do this. It's super simple now with all the free applications or any paid applications that you're using. But try to showcase it's a webinar. When you're editing the content afterwards, now it's a video. It's not a webinar anymore. So try to do a cut, try to do an edit that is going to be immaculate. Try to add the best slides from your presentation. Because when you're actually doing the broadcast, stuff don't always work perfectly. If you've pre-recorded beforehand, it's a very safe way to do it. And it's a great way. We've chosen the more risky way, but then we play it safe when we send the video afterwards. When you are using these webinars, it's important to let know the whole company. A great way and the way that we do it is we integrate the webinar platform to Salesforce. Therefore, our sales team knows who has attended and whether they've been attending a lot of them or just one. But basically, when they will be doing the renewals, they know also the interest of the client and how engaged they are. And it's really important. And then if you want to do more customer stories through these webinars, you can really find those advocates that they join every time your webinars. And then you can reach out to them and ask, hey, we've seen that you've joined all our webinars. You want to do a case study together? And then in regards to production, as I said, quality means I can see you and I can hear you really well. That's the two main things. In regards to the backdrop and everything that you want to use, it's more about your brand values. For us, it's again transparency. And because we're selling a dashboard, we're selling a software, we want them to give us access in our office. So during the webinar, you will see people in the background walking upstairs and going around. And yeah, have fun doing them. It's a really nice thing. Usually it's not the first priority when you're an engineer or when you are a marketeer. So you've got the chance to have some fun when you're producing them, when you're building the content with your host. And it's a nice learning process as well. So wrapping up, we use them internally for sales training and also to build high value content that we put on our resources. Then our sales team uses them. We've got quite long sales cycles because we sell to enterprise mostly. These webinars that they're on a monthly fashion, it's a great way for them to stay in touch. So every month I will be creating a sales love template for them and they will be able to send this to their SQLs that they are actually might be converting soon. So that's going to help them convert. And above all, in the way that I use them at least, is on the engagement product adoption, building a community, enhancing the brand and showcasing your face. Filming and running the show. I'll give you guys my email at the very end. Feel free to get in touch. I'm happy to have a coffee. I didn't know I used to film before with like a simple DSLR camera. But then when I decided that I'm starting the webinars, I had to find a way to do it. It was a nightmare. I thought that it's impossible to run a broadcast. I found an amazing company here in Denmark that they were super helpful. Danish people are helpful very much. Basically, they just took me by the hand and they ran me through all the equipment. I spent less than five thousand pounds, pretty much. Much less, actually. I think I spent in total three and a half thousand. I got the basics so that we can have a really good production. Check the webinars on our website. I think the productions are quite good, but I'm happy to just be the person who takes your hand and runs you through the equipment and tells you what are the most important stuff to buy. But you can also find them fairly easily online. It's just online you're going to find so many options and it's far more simple. So this is my email.