The Future of the Webinar Programme Manager

Hello everybody and welcome to Webinar Days 2021. This is day two. My name is Anders Mundelin and I will be your host for the three sessions that we have today. And I am very proud to welcome you all to this webinar session. This is more than three days of sessions. We have more than 30 speakers and over thousands of great webinar experts, marketeers who are joining us all from all around the world, different time zones. All hopefully to level up your webinar game. So we are really excited to have you all here. We already had one day yesterday where we had three sessions, one about camera love, another one about how marketeers could level up their games and as well the webinar driven organization. If you missed some of the presentations from yesterday, you can find them all on demand here in the system so you can get up to speed on those. Now, why are we doing this? Well, of course, we have seen a great explosion in webinars, especially within the last two years. There are many powerful conversion centered and really great produced webinars out there. And we aimed with Webinar Days 2021 to show you all, you know, great webinar marketeers, actors and industry experts who will share their knowledge and key insights on how to create powerful webinars. So we hope you will get inspired while being here. At Webinar Days 2021. Together, as I said, we will be inspired. Hopefully we will learn new ways about how we can create powerful webinars, practices about how it works. And of course, also, how about to share the great story and give it a good long tail after we have had the event. And of course, we need to generate lasting value with our webinars as well. So we will look into that. I think that's it. And I think actually a great example about how you can do this is actually while we had our sessions yesterday with Webinar Days 2021, Apple had a product launch. In case you haven't heard, more than 10 million viewers from all around the world tuned in online to see the product launch of Apple. 10 million people. I really think that is a true example of the value it's given when you go online for your marketing. So wow to Apple on that. As mentioned, my name is Anders Mondelin. Besides being a host of today's webinar, I'm also head of marketing development at the multi beverage company called Royal Unibrew. During the COVID-19 period, we have had a series of different streaming and hybrid events. Some has been great successes. We've broken world records. Actually, we have sold out and we have really tried different concepts. Some has also failed miserably. But I think most important is that we have really seen the value of going online and especially also we're looking in right now into the hybrid so we can connect people both digitally and in real life. And I also think the first session that we will look into today is quite interesting because just an example from my own company is that we have just built a new webinar studio. We have just started to hire the first people. But what is really the perfect webinar program? So we need to find out. And I hope I will get some learning about that in this session myself. So today we have three sessions as well as yesterday. The first session that we are in now is the future of the webinar program manager. The second session is creating attention and engagement in digital events. And the last one is how we all as leaders and event organizers can learn from an Oscar winner. To produce authentic content in our content and communication. And we will have the Oscar winner with us live here in the studio. So that will be quite exciting at today's last session. Of course, we also need a little bit of housekeeping on these webinars. We are all here together in the virtual room. So hopefully you will be engaging with each other and also with the speakers and us. And there is different tools for you to engage. Use the question tab that is just above the chat. Then we will gather all of your questions and comments. And we will have them for the presenters when we have them at the panel debate at the end of the session. So type in all your questions in the question tab. Then we have the chat. This is where you can all talk together, be engaged and involving. And of course meet up with your peers. So type in your chat. I think we can test it right now. So where are you watching from? So where are you right now? Country? City? Where are you placed? Type in so we can see the great virtual room we are all in. How big it is. So which country, city are you placed in right now? Type it in in the chat. And while you are doing that, there is also reactions. So you can clap and send hearts and thumbs up. If you have heard a good idea, send the light bulb. And that is reactions. You can use that as well. It is also just in the chat. And if there are any sessions from today you missed, then don't be alarmed. We will record them all and they will be available on demand afterwards. And I can see now we are starting to get in some of where you are all sitting. I can see Stockholm, Barcelona, Stuttgart as well. Chicago. Oh, you are up late in Chicago right now. Also Copenhagen. Great to see. Denmark as well. Just keep them coming here. It is great to see. Yeah. One more again. It is really nighttime in the U.S. right now. Right? So it is great to see that you are all here no matter where you are. I actually think just to be a little bit personal now, you could also type in the chat where you are actually sitting. This is the beautiful thing about webinars. We can be everywhere. So are you sitting in your living room, the kids' playroom, and maybe you have a webinar studio. Yesterday we had somebody sitting at the balcony enjoying the sun while they were learning at the webinar. So where are you actually sitting right now attending this webinar? Just tell me. Just put it in so we have a good idea about where you are. You don't have to share any pictures though. Just type in where you are sitting. So here we have Hansi at the office. Also a good place to be. The couch. Oh, yeah. Really nice. Good. Hopefully with a good cup of coffee when you are in the couch there. Home office where I do my webinars. Yeah, that is great. And home office as well. So great to see. Hopefully just keep on chatting with each other in the chat and send the reactions to the questions. And remember to use the question tab for the questions. Then we will follow up on them when we have the panel debate. Yeah. So I actually think that was that. I think it's time to get started. If you are already out there, let's start the first session. As I mentioned, the first session of today is the future of the webinar program manager. And here we have three exciting speakers. We have Stephen Kemp from NetApp. We have Sanne van Opstal from Topdisk. And we also have Steffen Feierström-Christensen from 23. And they will all be sharing great insights, tips and tricks on how to get success in the role as a webinar program manager. And as I mentioned myself, I'm quite interested in this because we are going to hire some in the future to come. So hopefully I will also get inspired here. So let's kick it all off. The first speaker will be. Stephen Kemp. Sorry. That is Stephen Kemp. He is Global Webinar Executive Specialist at NetApp. And he will enlighten us all on best practices on webinar promotion, formats, content and much more. So, Stephen, I hope you are ready to take it over. Ready to rock and roll. And thanks for inviting me along today. It's actually a pleasure to be here. It's great to see such a wide audience here in Chicago. Cheers for joining in. It's like super early. So I really appreciate it. So let's just start with the presentation. So just checking you guys can see my screen. Give me a thumbs up. Yeah, we can see you. Great. And we also see your screen. So everything is working here. Excellent. All right. Cool. So I'm here today to talk about webinar fatigue. And I've got some hints and tips in terms of best practice and promotions, different types of webinars. Loads of content and more. Now, before we go into the presentation, just wanted to kick it off with a poll. So webinar fatigue, do you think it's real? Do you think it exists? Yeah. You totally agree it's a real thing. You're undecided. You know, maybe you think it's a conspiracy theory or you generally have no idea what webinar fatigue is. So we're going to let the poll roll for just a moment. And while that's happening. I'm just going to introduce myself. So my name is Stephen Kemp. My pronouns are he, him and global webinar execution specialist at NetApp. I've been with the company now for about four and a half years and I've not exclusively done webinars. I've also been part of demand generation campaigns, data and analytics, basically have my fingers in lots of different cookie jars and a kind of a jack of all trade, if you will. So let's have a look at the results from the polls. So, yeah, cool. Good to see 50% of you say, yep, it's real. A couple of you are undecided. And interesting, a couple of you have no idea what webinar fatigue is. So hopefully I'll be able to explain a little bit more about the concept and hopefully we'll be able to discuss some more about it. So webinar fatigue. Let's think. How did we get here today? So let's go jump in my time machine. And I'm going to rewind time to before the pandemic started. So 2019. Okay. So 2019. We're going to these large scale events, networking functions, site visits, on site demos, basically a lot of things where people are mingling in all these confined places. And pretty much that was stripped away from us overnight. And two things pretty much happened. Companies had to completely rewrite their physical in person marketing strategy. And there was this that people said companies had to start competing with other businesses. And we're trying to get that face time with customers, partners and prospects. So fast forward today. And we live in this weird universe that looks a little something like this, right? We've got teams and Zoom and Google Hangouts and Meets and a bunch of other webinars. And I think you'll all agree we're all a little bit done. We're exhausted. It's the same things over and over again. And this is where we start thinking about webinar fatigue. And why does it exist? Because we spent a huge amount of time and energy getting set up. And as you said, you're setting up a brand new webinar studio. And there's a huge lift around that. But we've almost lost that essence of creating engaging content. We basically ticked the box. We've got that. We've got to reflect that for our customers and our partners. But we've stopped making engaging content. And this is a term called marketing myopia. Right? And the definition is it describes a lack of insight into what a business is doing for its customers. And it focuses mainly on only one aspect out of many possible marketing attributes. So basically we've been able to facilitate a tool for us to have that face time with customers. But we've almost lost that creative spark. We're just churning out the same generic content. And it's a bit boring, if I'm honest. So what are the challenges that we're experiencing? So we know that the audience is exhausted. Right? They're tired of these online meetings, virtual conferences, so on and so forth. There was a really good interesting stat which was brought up yesterday in the keynote. Companies were running ten webinars a year, I think it was. So maybe one a month pre-pandemic. And we've just seen that explode in the terms of volume of webinars. So it's created this intense competition in the marketplace to try and get people to come in. To try and have that face time with customers and keep coming back to that. You know, there are more webinars running than there were a year ago. And we know that. But the problem is that it's very similar content. It's usually slides and a presenter or just slides and audio. So let's talk a little bit now about how to create. So how can we change what we're pushing out into the universe and create compelling content? Right? All right. So going back to that Marky Myopia term that I wrote. I mentioned earlier on. So as humans, we're scared to try new things. You know? So you always think to yourself, what if it doesn't work? What if it fails? It's kind of like when you're back at school. You know? What if they don't like me? What if the kids are mean to me? Well, unless you try new things, you're not really going to know. So here are some examples of the different webinar formats that you can try out that potentially aren't going to put your audience to sleep. So start with the one-on-one interviews. So, you know, pre-pandemic, if you wanted to get two very senior people from two different companies. You might have to fly them in from different sides of the country. You might have to pay for accommodation and hotels and, you know, put them up and look after them. Now everything's digital. We can do that online. And we can get two very influential people having an interview together, discussing, you know, relevant topics, having those engaging conversations, and look at things from a different perspective as well. You know, get an outsider's opinion on whatever topic it is you're trying to promote. Panel discussions. This is great for a meeting of the minds, you know, and get their perspective on a certain topic. And you'll get to see that later on when we do have a chat, the four of us later on at the end of the call. But, you know, it's interesting to spark that conversation between a group of people who are working on a similar project or a solution. Most webinars, you know, we fall into this trap of doing something for an hour long, 45 minutes. We've seen some success with the shorter ones. You know, rather than, you know, serving up huge amounts of time. huge pieces of content, why don't you keep it short? Keep it maybe 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, have a little teaser and leave the audience wanting more. So if they want to read about a blog, if they want to read a white paper, if they need to book a meeting with sales, you can enable them to do that. And then customer success stories. These are fantastic and valuable resources. You know, what better way to brag about the success of your products or services than having someone else do it for you? You know, it demonstrates the benefits of all the products and services you have. And it's validating and it's non-bias. It's a non-bias opinion as well. So when you're putting together your webinar agenda, think, you know, rather than having someone, and I'm going to sound very hypocritical using slides and video, what could you do to create something which your audience had not seen before and serve up an exciting new piece of content? All right. So, the dreaded promotion, right? So this is basically your make or break part of the promotion around your webinars. Now, from experience, and I think a lot of people agree here, webinars should not just be a single point in time. Think about how you can create a buzz around your webinars and your digital events so that you can leverage the content that's on demand and then you can drive attendance to that. Think of it like this, right? So if you have a target of a 50% conversion of registrants to attendance, then essentially you're neglecting the other half of people who have shown an interest in your event, right? So if you have 100 people register and you want 50 of them to show up, why are you not going to want to push the on-demand to that other 50 people, right? So leading up to the webinar, you know, we've seen that email is the most successful in terms of promotion, but you can also run social media campaigns. You can even get your presenters to record a 30-second teaser. So the promotion is going to start way ahead of the live day. And by this point, you'll have a rough idea of what the agenda is going to be, the topics they're going to talk about. So you can also get your speakers to do a little teaser video in terms of what they're going to bring on the day. And we've seen early bird swags. So register now and we'll send you like a free NetApp pen or, you know, attend on the day and win some AirPods, you know, give them an incentive to sign up and then also attend the webinar. But then we kind of get to the day of the webinar and let's, you know, during the actual live event, create a massive hype on social media. So you've got those 50 people that we've talked about. They've turned up, they're on time, you know, they're here to be here. Let's give these other 50 people who haven't turned up that FOMO, right? Let's make them want to come to the webinars, you know? So you want to have your presenters and moderators keep things engaging in the actual live webinar. Have some seated questions ready to plant because we know the audiences tend to be quite quiet and reserved. So give them a reason to engage in that conversation. And if you're posting stuff on social media, use an exclusive hashtag to your webinar. Obviously don't keep it generic, but it's great to be able to track and see those conversations that are happening on social media. And then after the webinar is finished, you know, you've created this fantastic piece of content. Repurpose it. So what were the top three takeaways, you know, to these people, the FOMO group, you know, what did they miss out on? Get them to come back and watch. And fundamentally, try and see what you can do to drive that registration to your on-demand content so it isn't just that single point in time. All right. So what is the secret sauce? And I've got a band which I want to introduce to you guys. They're quite new on the scene. I don't know if anyone's going to have heard of them yet, but the money favorite band, and they're called the Weather Years, right? And when I go see them perform, they have this, you know, this incredible stage, right? The stage is quite literally on fire. They have confetti going on. There's lights, streamers, pyrotechnics. The audio is incredible. The sound is just fantastic. It's this awesome experience. You know, this is why I love to go see this band play, but it's not just, you know, the music they play and the show that they put on, you know. Whenever I go to one of their gigs, I get a very unique experience. They invite local breweries to come, like, sell their local beers. Craft beer and cider. Little fun fact, my strawberry beer is my new current favorite beer. So I know that when I go see my favorite band play, I'm also going to get this awesome experience, and I'm going to see something new that I've not tasted or seen before. But, you know, it's not just about getting drunk. It's also about taking a bit of that experience away and taking it home with you. So when I go to see them, they have this incredible merchandise stand, tons of pieces of content. You know, they might have, like, T-shirts. CDs, EPs, posters. You know, stuff that I can take home and remember my time and my experience at the event. So just in case anyone's Googling or looking on some Spotify or Apple Music, the webinars are not real, okay? But this is an example of, like, three of the many ingredients that can elevate your webinar experiences, right? So you want to try and create something that's visually stimulating, you know, something which is exciting. You know, we saw the introduction video, that was totally awesome. The music was great. I want to see something I've not seen before. I want to see people talk about something which is new and to me and something which is, you know, going to be valuable. I want to be served up additional pieces of content to enhance my experience. So, you know, with your webinars, you know, I want to be able to download white papers, PDFs. I want to be linked to websites to be able to learn more and, like, enrich my knowledge. And, you know, if you take these three pieces of information, you know, these secret ingredients, you can turn your webinars into webby-yayers. All right. So I've waffled on a lot, talked a little bit about promotion, different types of webinars, how to create that engaging content. So just going to run the poll again that we did at the start, just to put the feelers out there. Really want to understand, you know, again, do you still think that webinar fatigue is real? So, yeah, it's still a real thing. It still exists, you know. I'm done. I'm bored of it. Still undecided. Let's have a look to see if people think it's still a conspiracy theory or some of the people think it's 23%. You know, do you still think the webinar fatigue is a real thing? And, you know, while I'm just going to let you have a think about that, how does this all relate back to today's topic of, you know, the future of the webinar program manager, right? So today we've been back and forth on my time machine. We've talked about webinars, marketing my OPs. and all the issues that are involved around that. And my prediction is we're going to start seeing this new wave of creative webinar program managers. You know, they exist, they're already out there, they're on our doorstep. So let's go out there and start creating compelling content. There was another quote from yesterday and from the keynote. And I think they were saying something about 41% of companies have an internal team running webinars. And, you know, myself and some of the presenters, and I hope some of you are home or in the office you're in the same opportunity or same situation as myself but um you know we've been doing this for the past like 12 months 12 18 months so we've we've done all the learning and we're now at a point now where we can go to the next step of the program manager role and you've got people that are starting today and they have not got the same experience but the reality is that they have a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips something we didn't have when we started executing and putting on webinars and everything so just wanted to uh put out there you know we we are going to start seeing this new creative webinars experience come through you know we are in a fantastic opportunity let's not drop the ball let us get out there put creative content so these new these competitors these new webinar program managers have come into the market um you know we they're not going to catch us up you know we are uh setting the precedent for that and i've not been paying attention in the uh in the chat i don't know if the a so everyone thinks the webinar fatigue is real all right so i have to do a better job next time um getting that across but the thing is like the webinar fatigue right we are tired we're exhausted if i have to join a webinar and i'm i'm done i'm gonna tune off in the first 15 minutes right i want it to be exciting i want it i want the presentation to think about me right so i've got a couple of call to actions here for everyone to just go and think about and you can do this today take a screenshot think about it in a week you know just stuff it in your to-do pile but start creating visually stimulating and exciting experiences you know show your audiences something new you know let's stop putting them to sleep and think about it is what you want them to do after the webinar you know you've got all these people who are attending today you know don't let them run away don't let them run away don't let them disappear what is the next step in their customer journey how can you nurture them to making a sale or you know anything else what is part of their journey right so that's uh that's my presentation i've waffled on for for quite a bit now um let's have a look at the chat or do we want to pick up the chat afterwards and as i'll hand over to you all right well thank you for that steven quite interesting poll we had there work well i should have practiced a little bit more i think on my pitch there so yeah we all need something to work on so no so now you know what you're going to do today but uh thank you very much steven we will we will get back to you and the panel debate here at the end of this session if any of you have any questions or comments for steven just put them in the question tab that is just above the the chat function and then we will gather them all so we'll we'll see you later steven thank you for now uh the next speaker here of the second day of webinar days 2021 is a webinar program manager who is involved in almost everything webinar related she is hosting her own webinars she is producing other webinars she is coaching presenters and she's also analyzing the company's own webinar data I hope you will all help me welcome here from now. She is the webinar program manager at Topdesk. Her name is Sanne van Opstael-Bragen. She will talk about why Harry Potter and webinar go so well together. That will be quite interesting. Sanne, over to you. Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Sanne. I'm happy to tell you a bit more about my role as a program manager. I am going to start share my screen. And please be kind to me because I'm just working on a laptop. So you might see me first. So welcome to my presentation, A Magical Day in the Life of a Webinar Program Manager, Why Harry Potter and Webinars Go So Well Together. First, I wanted to give you a quick introduction on myself. Well, I'm Sanne. I've been at Topdesk for nearly 13 years. And I have different roles from sales to all-round marketing, event manager. And I'm married to one of the product owners at Topdesk. Together, we have two little girls. And in my spare time, I like to read, especially Harry Potter. And this is me with Stan Shumpike in Orlando. And this is me in my element hosting my own webinars. And really being in the role of webinar program manager. When webinars came on my path, it sort of felt like this. In Harry Potter, it's like the one chooses the wizard. For me, it felt like webinars chose me. Because I've been at Topdesk for quite some time, and I've done a lot of things, and I've done the magical tricks. It wasn't really new for me. And then webinars came across. And I really felt like this. And this was early 2019. And I picked up on some webinars by just start doing them, start promoting them. And in 2019, in the end, we had 49 webinars. This is all numbers that I'm showing here are globally. We have offices all around the world, and I collaborate closely with all my colleagues. So, and in 2020, beginning of 2020, I decided I'm going to stop all my other projects and really pick up the role of webinar. Program Manager. At that time, I didn't really have a title for it yet. We didn't have it. The rule didn't exist. So I created it myself. And in 2020, we did a whopping 149 webinars. And to a lot of you, that might not seem as a lot. But to us, it was because we came from 49. We tripled our numbers. And we also, for instance, tripled our sales or our leads requests in that year. And I know COVID had a lot to do with it. But in the end, it was a huge result for us. And up until this year, we are up at 110. And we expect to do around 150 this year. And our lead requests are at this moment around the same that we did in 2020 in total. So today, I'm going to compare creating webinars with creating a potion in Professor Snape's potion class. And I'm going to give you a bit more practical. I'm going to give you a bit more practical presentation on the things that I learned while creating my role, creating my job, and the things that I do and steps that I take while setting up a webinar. And those are things that I do in a day-to-day life or my work. I've split them up in a few steps, coming up with the webinar ideas, creating the content and promote it. One of the big things that I'm focusing on heavily as well is coaching presenters. Well, then you have to producing or hosting it yourself. So first, the webinar ideas. I know there's been a lot of webinar fatigue. Steven just told us all about it and I was really happy that he touched up on this topic because we noticed it as well. And it's hard to come up with new topics that customers actually want to hear. And what I want to emphasize here is really. Listen, start the conversation with your customers or with your webinars, attendees. What do they want to hear from your webinars? For instance, we do a survey each year, each every other year to hear what they like about our webinars, what they want to hear more on. And this is especially relevant for all the webinars that we are hosting for customers because 80% of our webinars are customer focused. But we also connect with our customer facing colleagues. So, Sil. we try to form our which is an MBA here at fitness of course we're still in our knowledge of business technologies. To rely also on people. um then we have content creation i would see this this is our the recipe for your potion creating finding all the ingredients that you would need uh to make your potion and what i really want to emphasize is don't do a static slide presentation i know we are doing it right now but um to be honest i prefer to be in the camera but i also love the have to support from slides but there are so many other experience that you can create like the example steven just showed and in 2019 webinars for us were like really the slide presentation but quickly i made the change internally that i demanded people that hosted webinars to turn their camera on just like we're doing now we have a human touch we can connect with each other um and we do that on on low on the lower scale as in just a regular webcam that we do that we have on now um or at least what i have now but we also host webinars at a larger scale production where we have a professional crew coming in and directors that are that we are collaborating with to sending out a bigger show and then our slides will be more supportive as you can see they would be on the back yeah background um and we could engagement of webinars steven also touched upon it to make your webinars more fun uh and and and to keep people engaged because if they just listen and you don't interact with them they'll drop off keep engaging with them there are different ways you can do that for instance ask them open questions um for instance like i'm asking now if you are a habitary harry potter fan let me know what do you think is the best or the worst book or movie you can do that by the chat you can imagine you can ask different type of questions for your own organization as well polling like steven just did is a really great option as well and if you really think on the questions that you're asking valuables you can get a lot of valuable information from your sales for your sales people as well and this could turn into two leads and i had another thing that i always do for content the presentation because that's where we have the experts coming in but the content creation is in the webinar in its own how to create it and how to get the best results i like to script my webinars a bit you might think that's weird but no it's good to know when you have an opening when you have a video starting when you're asking the first poll when you are getting back to the answer of the first poll just know when everything is happening have an opening have a poll have part one have a poll go to q a just know where you are this way you will also know um where you are in a in a webinar and when you're nearly at the end and one thing i'd like to add is have fun make them an experience as steven said um do something fun that i did here with adding harry potter into it and i'm also happy that that steven already touched upon the project the topic of promoting your webinar i'm not really going to touch upon uh the promoting that much because we all know how to promote webinars uh but i do want to share a few uh yeah experience that we found that were really quite successful for instance start experimenting with different types of invites and i'm going to show you three examples that we that we did and and tell a bit more about results that we got from them so quite often when we run webinars we have well three different types of invites that we send out this is actually the first one it's really nicely put email uh on hey this is coming up um quite often sent either to people that we know are interested in this topic or that have attended previous webinars on this topic and it's just a quick sign up that we usually send around five to six weeks before the webinar you might think that's a long time but for us it works and then about two to three weeks maybe one to two weeks beforehand we do a totally different type of invite and this is the plain text invite that we send um because i noticed that different people trigger on different types of invites and this is a web type of invite that is more from a personal note hi how are you i quite often get responses on this fine thanks son for reaching out it's it's more that i want them to think that i personally sent this invite and that that that they might be interested in this and to be honest this is like the invite that we get most response uh on and then as a third invite maybe a few days before or the day before uh we send out a fancy html email for the last minute interest people one thing that we do is that we do filter out all people that either signed up for for webinars or opened emails and didn't find it interesting we keep track of all the data and then we just keep inviting the people that it's most relevant for and then um something that we are really doing as well is cross promoting so during webinars we are promoting other webinars uh we make sure that people can sign up easily for another webinars if we have blog posts we will promote blog posts so it's all about also promoting the content that you have during the webinar before the webinar and after the webinar so before the webinar i will also have a cta and in the end have a cta when i learn more join a webinar on this topic but during the webinar i can also refer to that blog post again the same goes for ebooks well perhaps an ebook might be more beneficial after the webinar but it could also be beforehand uh though so think of all the channels that you have where you have content on a specific topic where you could cross promote um yeah your webinar and uh keep promoting after the webinar as well because it just ends at the live event quite often for us at least it is we have our webinars available on demand so we keep promoting our on-demand webinars as well to generate leads and to keep your customers informed and i know a lot of people already talked about it yesterday as well make sure that your webinar is a source to create more content you can create blog posts on it as well we do that for instance if we have a product update webinar we create blogs based on that read it again afterwards we even go as far sometimes as to put timestamps in it so that people can really go to the correct time in the webinar to learn more on a specific topic but also use social images to keep promoting your webinars or create content out if you have an interesting poll results for instance 41 of the people see that the biggest fear is going back to the webinar or a piece of content that you created really make more use of your webinar one of the topics that i really wanted to to touch up on as well is coaching presenters and i see that as being professor snape in a potion classroom and explaining how to best host your presenters and there are lots of trainings out there available but here are a few tips that really work for us um make sure to look into the camera um i often see webinars where people are doing this because their webcam is over here and their presentation is over there and that's not really engaging you're not really talking to the audience and that's something that i find really important and a simple trick on how i make sure that people look into the camera is just put a post-it next to your webcam actually here's my post-it just to keep reminding me that i need to look into the camera um prep seed questions with your presenters uh i really like that that steven touched this as well ask questions on your audience during your session to keep the engagement going but the other way around we also use seed questions um to prepare questions that when you have a q a moment that you have some questions that are from the audience or that you will expect audience members to say so that when you have a q a moment that's quite often the time that people also start thinking do i have a question and then they start typing and before you actually have questions coming in you might be 10 20 30 seconds further along the road but you don't wanna have that time um as in not nothing not having to say anything so i always tell my presenters prepare one or two questions that you expect your audience to say and ideally you cover this in your presentation but you can't do that in the presentation but if you have a topic you could also use that as a question as if the audience would say so so this is also something that you can use to cover time before the actual questions are coming in you can do the questions during the presentation or at the end just have that q a moment and have something prepared uh prepare polling well steven already used the polling but actually prepare them with the presenters also let them think of what they want to get out of it and how they how they or or other members in the organization are going to use the results if it's just informative or if you really want to do anything with it i always think it's good to have the first polling within the first five minutes of your webinar because it keeps the audience engaged they really need quite often people start the webinar on a second screen they'll just listen in but do something other other work in the meantime you have a poll at the beginning they will be activated and watch the webinar again That really works for us, and I would encourage you to experiment with it. And one thing I really do as well, and it might be an open door, but really explain your webinar and presenter tool beforehand and test the audio and video. I've seen webinars where people just signed in a few minutes beforehand and then it doesn't work or the internet connection is bad. Yeah, well, that's not the way you want to present yourself. And some tips and tricks for the presentation to make them look more engaging. One of the things that I always keep track on is to keep the font of your text at least 18, because if you go smaller, quite often it's hard to read. But also to make them more engaging, or if they do polling, announce those sort of things. Producing or hosting your own webinar, I'm not going to talk a bit too much about that. I'm going to talk a bit more about this because I hear, at least I expect you to know this. You're either hosting or you are producing. You will know what to do. For me, I do this at least once a week, sometimes two, three times a week. Next week I have four going on. And that's just the producing part. But one thing I do want to keep, well, that I want to tell you is put your phone on flight mode. Put all your other tools on your phone. If you have a laptop, do not disturb or close them, because I've been in a lot of webinars, and not just our own, also the webinars that I follow, where you hear a WhatsApp message coming in, or somebody's being called, or you hear the buzzing, or other tools are popping up at the screen share. It's not what you want. Just put them in flight mode. If you are busy doing your webinar right now, you shouldn't be focused on anything else. And then I want to touch upon the topic of data. This is something that I work on closely. I work on a daily basis, because our data is our knowledge. We have extensive reporting functionalities in our tool, and we use the data to benchmark. And if you're not doing it, I would encourage you to start keeping track of your data. Find a way that works for you, and act on the results. For us, it's still in Excel. I would really like to do this in our marketing automation tool, but everything that we want to keep track of. It's just not as easy. And for now, Excel works for us. Things that we keep track on are the views on the registration page, the amount of subscribers, conversion on the page. Because if we see if a certain page does really well, and other pages are not, we will compare those and learn from them. Same goes for attendees or absentees, so that we can act on it. But also, we keep track on the days that webinars are hosted and the times. This way, for instance, we know that a lot of global benchmarks say that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to host webinars. If I compare my own results to them, we come to Tuesdays and Wednesdays, especially for the Dutch market Wednesdays work. So that's why we are now going to schedule more webinars on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, because apparently our customers like that time better. Same goes for times. For us, 1.30 p.m. works really well. Those are also types of things that I'm experimenting with. I heard last time during another webinar that Fridays were really hot and happening last year. Well, we tried it, and it didn't work for us. But the main thing is, if you collect your data, act on it. Do something with it. Compare your data. Basically, create your own benchmark. And we compare data on a quarterly basis, on a yearly basis, just to see how we are going, how we are. And we also try to see how we are growing and what we can learn from the data as well. The last topic that I'm actually working on on a daily basis as well is experimenting. And we are experimenting with different types of formats of webinars. I like the ideas that Stephen just had. But we also experiment more with Simulife webinars or on-demand webinars, creating more content and just having it available on demand. So there is no live as a whole. But it's good to have that content. Emo invites already touched upon the topic and showed you what we are doing. We are actually now experimenting with the plain text follow-up emails just to see if we can send them out from the presenter and have it a more personal note and see if that works better in our follow-up emails for the attendees and the absentees. I already mentioned times and dates. If different colors, different images, different types of content. We are just experimenting with what works best. And as I mentioned, the follow-up as well, another experiment sort of falls in the follow-up is we have been experimenting with asking lead questions via polling. And in the Netherlands, we are quite direct and we can still pull it up pretty well. We are now seeing how we can turn it off. But in a poll question near the end, we are asking them after this webinar, how can I help you? And we have different option types. We offer I want to receive information on topic X by email. I want to have my customer success manager contact me on this and this topic. We really give them a few specific options, also an open option or just a no, that's not relevant. And to be honest, this gives on an average, this gives off 30% of the time. So we are trying to get them to send more leads of a webinar than it did before. So this is something we are currently running until the end of this quarter. So another two weeks. But all results are looking really positive that this might be something that we are keeping on and fine tuning it further. But it really works for us. And I felt this was a really cool idea from one of my colleagues that I really want to share with you because it might be something that might work for you as well. So these are all things that I do on a typical basis and that I sort of learned myself that I formed my role into, which I think are also a lot of responsibilities as a webinar program manager. But I also think that we need to look into the future. As current webinar program manager, we can share a lot of knowledge, just like Stephen said, but it's also good to look for our own future. And one of the things that I do believe in, that it goes from global to global. For now, I am the global webinar program manager. But I believe there's going to be a huge responsibility for local marketers and local webinar program managers as well. The reason why is because I don't know, for instance, what's going on in the Brazilian market or in the Canadian market. They know so much better what their customers are wanting from our webinars or what their potentials need in webinars. So I think there will become for us a move from global to local responsibilities as well with more of a coordinating role. I think we as webinar program managers could also be more data driven, not just have the data there, but act upon it and really do more with that data. And one thing I think we can focus more on is the always on as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be. It doesn't necessarily have to be a live event anymore. Yes, I do like the engagement and the interaction of a live event like we are having now. But I also like to watch webinars when I'm not at work just to gain that knowledge on that topic. So it's good to have, I would call, an always on and on demand strategy. Just like when you can stream or watch your favorite streaming service offer always on content that you can't watch. And create experiences. Steven just explained it perfectly. Create experience with a webinar. Yes, I really like that, Steven. It keeps you top of mind. That's something that I think we should do more of instead of just having a regular presentation. So that's a bit about me on my regular working day, why I find it so magical to be a webinar program manager. Thanks for being here. If you want to reach out, have questions, get in touch, you can see my email over here or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to help you answer questions or just connect with you all. And then I think I hand it back over to you, Anders. Well, thank you for that, Sanne. And for all of you viewing, give some reactions to Sanne and her presentations. Clap, enlightened, light bulb, hearts, whatever. Just share. Show her that you're all here. We also forgot to send reactions to Steven. So double up your reactions now so he can also feel the reactions from his presentations. And just quickly because both Steven and Sanne has talked about this engagement and one of the things coming up all the time is polls. So we just made a quick poll, just sending it up now for all of you just to know how many of you watching right now is actually using polls in your own. Okay. So the polls are up now. Just type in if you are using polls in your own webinars or if you're thinking about using polls after you have heard the last two speakers here, Steven and Sanne. So type in your answers there. And Sanne as well will be back in the panel debate. So if you have any questions for her, put them in the question tab and we will follow up on all of them. And here we have the poll up. I can see 75% of you is all in. 25% of you is always using polls, 25% sometimes. So it is something that is being used quite good. And again, also as we heard both Steven and Sanne said, it is a great easy way to engage your audience. So thank you very much also to all of you. Now it's time for the next and last speaker in this session. He is the CTO and co-founder of 23. It is Steffen Fagerström Christensen. Steffen will share his view on how to succeed in the role. As a webinar program manager. And why now is the time for companies to create this role. And of course hire for the role. So please welcome on the virtual stage, Steffen. Thanks, Anas. I love the impetus of hiring in this one. I think when you said before, we have just built the studio. We have just come on the back of this whole experience of figuring out how webinars work for our company. How we build for it. And a lot of that is kind of help with the, well, with string and duct tape in a way. And a lot of what I'll hopefully be talking about here is how to keep some of that energy of experimentation and the vibe of what webinars can do. But marrying that with the structure of setting up a webinar program. And well, before I go into it, I'll say that it's fun standing here and listening to Steven and to Sanne. Because I was kind of struggling a bit like building the slides yesterday. What are the good examples that I want to be highlighting? And I've been furiously noting down for the last hour all of the great examples that I maybe should have brought. So that's what you get for doing this. Hopefully I capture a lot of it. And actually I'll probably bring up some of the same points that we've covered so far. And give a bit of like a framework or this idea of what a webinar program manager can do. And why it's potentially the fix maybe to a lot of this kind of encapsulating what webinars can do. So first, I'm Stefan. And I love that everyone is saying my middle name differently. I married into it. I can't pronounce it myself. But in other case, I'm the CTO and co-founder here at 23. I spend a lot of my day essentially building products around webinars. So it also means that I am on way fewer webinars, speaking at fewer webinars than I am doing. Than I kind of see customers do. So this year so far on the platform, we've run 10,000 webinars with a million attendees and a conversion rate of roughly 70 % on every landing page view that we show to our customers. So I take this from a different vantage point. And this is not because I'm actually staggeringly impressed when Santa says that they grew from, well, 50 webinars in 2019 and 3x that in terms of how many webinars run. How many leads generated in the span of a year. We've been on some of that same journey. But from the outside in, at least there are a few trends that are starting to come into the fore. And it is this emerging role of the webinar program manager. Somebody who has maybe, well, been given the challenge of, well, making the first webinar. Figure out if we have some of the software in our stack that will let you assemble some people online. And certainly the recent war crisis with COVID -19 has brought that very much into the fore. A lot of events were just like moved online in the span of a few days. So we've all been asked to experiment. Thomas showed this slide yesterday in one of the keynotes. And I think the important thing I wanted to take from this one is, well, I don't really agree with the only part of it. I think it's actually quite extraordinary that 40% of the companies in our service are not doing this. And 40% of the companies in our survey had people that are dedicated for running webinars. It might not be that they run exclusively webinars. But they have webinars as part of their job description. This is a number that grew immensely in our survey from 2019 to 2020. And I'm expecting this to grow even further. And that's why this is an important thing. I don't think it's only. But I think it's something that is still very much, well, there's a trend line upwards in terms of the growth of this role. Of the webinar program manager. Anna's hinted at it that this is a role that we're all hiring for. This is actually one of our own job posts. We're also hiring for a webinar program manager. And we are seeing this emergence of the new role that's kind of charged with delivering webinars but also delivering webinars at scale to kind of make it programmatic. And this comes from a bit of a focus in shifting from running physical events. These were dedicated people dedicated to running events before. To building these more physical events. To building these more well bespoke or dedicated audiences online. And a part of that is about the facilitation. Santa had the beautiful image of the look here for Post-it Note. A lot of that is about not being able just to run webinars yourself. But setting up the rest of the organization to be comfortable being on camera. To be always on. To see webinars as a solution to common problems. So that's basically like there's an agent of change in this role as well. So there's a lot of things to start defining here. But the webinar program manager comes from a set of shifts that we've certainly seen our customers go through in the last few years. So certainly there's a shift from that single yearly event. Well, multi-million, well, kroner, euro, dollars spent on getting, well, a lot of people into a room for a day or two. And a lot of people on stage. And this kind of shift into running webinars every day. But also shifting focus from maybe doing, well, the event where you have thousands of people that are signed up. But also the small webinars where you have 12 people that are particularly interested in whatever, in the best way of framing polls in the context of this. We do this ourselves as well, right? We have webinars that are hugely successful just by the right 10 people showing up because they're interested in a particular thing that 23 does. Or we're interested. We're particularly interested in having a conversation with them about a specific niche topic. And this shift is ongoing. This isn't a shift that both Stephen and Sena has been talking to. That this shift from being, well, the big-ass events into the ongoing practice of running webinars. It's also a shift from being focused on the video technology. The webinar program manager is not the person who builds the studio in the basement. It's fun to build a studio in the basement. And it might even be that building the studio is a prerequisite. For being able to run webinars at scale. But in order to succeed in webinars and as a webinar program manager, you don't have to be, well, skilled in the different standards of HDMI cables. Well, you probably need to be good about making sure that light is set correctly, that people look into the camera. But mainly it's a communication role that switches what the webinars are, the communities that are being built from webinars into the strategic communication role or marketing role even. I stole this slide from Bertrand who spoke yesterday. Who said that in order to make webinars interesting, we need to surround ourselves with a team of experts that can speak in front of a camera and that are not afraid of pushing their own boundaries. This is certainly true. A lot of this becomes about taking the role of webinars. And I'm pretty much assuming that that's how you're able to scale from running, well, 10 webinars to 50 webinars to 150 webinars. As in the case of the talk that Sena just gave. But also the same vibe of going from, well, there's one global webinar program manager into these more local bespoke roles. It's all about figuring out how to get from this, well, fairly closely controlled, we run a few events, we run a few webinars into empowering everyone to be running webinars in the organization. And that's a hard trick to pull off, right? Because it's, well, it's about setting the technology up. It's about setting up, well, the management. It's about setting up the mandate to go run stuff. But it's also about allowing people, well, to fail and to experiment and to innovate themselves as they're running webinars. Certainly, if you want to scale out globally with DoCo webinars running that, well, you don't even understand what's going on, right? We have customers that are running webinars from 70 different countries. And in some cases, well, you can see that they're the same slides and they're the same general topics, but you don't really have a sense of language. You don't have a sense of... Of what the actual content is. You just get a sense, is the presenter actually burning through? Is he telling a good story or is she telling a good story? And that's the trick of figuring out how to, well, cast the right people to empower everyone. Then there's the challenge of getting webinar programs at scale. This is related a bit to that kind of the event thinking. We also, as well, as a SaaS company come from this vibe where we ran, well, one or two events a year. We got as many people into a room as we were able to. And we spent, probably overspent energy, certainly, money maybe on getting those events pulled off. But webinar programs at scale becomes about taking, well, you probably still want to run that launch. You still want to run product updates. But you also want to have different formats that feed into a different way of maybe shorter, maybe more geeky. And webinars that are runnable by other people all the way into the webinars that are just runnable, well, every week, every month, every quarter by the account managers specifically for their leads as a part of the sales funnel. This slide has, well, nice colors and good ideas. But this is really, really tough. And this is really the challenge of how you move from something that is successful, again, at 10 or at 50 into something that is successful at a few hundred or even a few thousand webinars a year. And the customers that we are. We are seeing kind of push into the thousands of webinars are really meeting this challenge head on by not having the same webinar but finding the right audiences, the right kinds of content. And also challenging themselves to not say, well, a webinar is only successful if I have X number of attendees but actually finding value in different metrics for the different audiences. And certainly, I mean, we've spoken about this already, right? There is this vibe of being the pioneers. We have all gone out. We've all tested out stuff. But in order to move from being, well, the guy or the girl doing webinars into being the webinar program manager that can set a program successfully up for the entire organization, there is this need for the role to move from the scattered experience into scaling for those many different formats. And that's certainly a move that we're seeing more and more. And that's an exciting one also as product people to see how can we as toolmakers help them. Help people who have built in their format into how theổi23 webinar platform is run. So, I'm a pusher of webinars. I've shown in the slides.. Hang on. I'll just. All right, I'll ask if I'm visible. Yeah, it's working now. We can see you. That's good. That's good. Let's see here. You can also see my screen, right? Perfect. All right. Well, I'm in flow here. So it's hopefully good. So what I was about to say is that I'm a pushover of webinars. So I've shown this slide a million times. It's a few years old and it comes from Marketo. Marketo is a marketing automation platform. And they kind of showed this slide showing kind of like how much pipeline was created from different investment. And you can kind of see this as being, well, you don't really need to invest. Anything in webinars or in demos, whatever it costs us like zero dollars and it generated $40 million of pipeline, which is fucking amazing, right? That's what you want to do. But it highlights a particular problem that I think has been haunting webinars and is impeding the growth from kind of the few webinars that you could do on a shoestring budget, hold together with Doctate and into scaling it up into a full on program. Because you basically want to go from having soft goals to clearly defined performance metrics. And I'll talk a bit about that in a second. But really, it's about narrowing down from, well, we have all these things that we know. Sander spoke about this eloquently as well. And there are these things that we want to like, there are these one or two things that we want to be optimizing for and acting towards. I'll come back to that. Okay. So I've spoken about this new role that's programmatic. It's scalable. It's about formal multiplication. It's iterative and experimental. It's always on. And it's about, well, basically improving and setting people up to be both on camera, behind the camera and so on. So it's a pretty staggering role. I've read through a lot of job posts that are trying to capture this role. And everyone is trying to kind of marry the two sides of, well, basically, well, being the innovator who is the pioneer at the forefront, who is also then creating structure. And I'll show a slide that hopefully synthesizes all of that in a second. But I just wanted to say that Sander also said it, right? When she's listing up, well, I'm coming up with webinars. I'm producing and hosting, but also need to coach the presenters. And ultimately, I need to do experimentation and data analysis to keep improving the funnel. And this is like the perfect image of what you really want to be curious about. How can you be curious on behalf of the organization in how webinars are made while also setting other people up to just run at scale? So for me, a lot of this comes the energetic and the programmatic part of it, basically being good at storytelling, being like the conceptualizer. Who can be facilitative and curious and also experimenting while being able to set up repeatable enforceable formats with clear performance tracking. So the real challenge here is finding those people that marry the two different sides of the brain. Okay, so it makes for all kinds of fun challenges, right? This is highlighting who are the people that you're looking for. They're out there and they're tough. It might even be that they're in the chat room. So a lot of people can raise your hand. Like this describes me perfectly. I am fun and energetic, but also programmatic. But certainly it highlights a bunch of challenges, right? This kind of balancing act, right? Where your job is to be kicking up sand, constantly being the pioneer who does experiments and wants to find new formats, but also letting the dust settle and set up the entire organization to scale on your behalf, right? So you're not the person running the webinars, but rather you're facilitating the rest of the organization to succeed on their goals and webinars. So whether those are sales goals or engagement goals or just lead gen goals or whatever else. I'll highlight a few different ways of making sure this balance can be struck. There's certainly finding your core metric. For metrics around webinars, there are a lot of different contenders. Kind of what are you actually focusing towards and which one you'll ultimately pick will depend vastly on the different formats and particularly on what the program goal is. But before you start kind of scaling up, it's very important to make sure you at least have a sense of how do I measure this one and how do I make sure that this particular one is the one that I'm heading towards. So three common ones will be the conversion rate, the attendance rate, and the engagement time. I'll define them quickly. Conversion rate is how many people hit your landing page and actually convert into signing up for a webinar. These are the people that actually come in to see the webinar. These are just the leads generated. But webinars are an amazing source of leads with the average conversion rates in most landing pages going above 70%. If you write a really good landing page, images, all that kind of stuff, you can actually get a lot of leads very, very quickly and efficiently. And in some cases, that's enough, right? It's enough to start engaging leads that might be interested in what you're doing, in your product, in your services. But webinars, though, won't be content just getting people's names and email addresses. You actually want people to attend the webinar. So the attendance rate goes a bit deeper in the funnel, and you're not here looking for leads but actually for people to show up. And the crazy thing is here that the attendance rate differs greatly. We've seen webinars that have an attendance rate even with hundreds of registrants of 98%. I don't know how they did it. Or rather, I know. They were just very bullish about it. They were just very bullish about being able to say, this is exclusive content. We want you to show up. And this is what you're going to get, all that kind of stuff. Core communication skills, not really about promotion but actually about saying, well, it's not enough for us to have a high conversion rate. We actually want the attendance rate to be high. In other cases where conversion rates is what matters, maybe the lower attendance rates in the 20s won't matter too much. Finally, the core metric could also be engagement time. In some cases, you can do that. You're actually interested in the content of the webinar more than the fact that people are there. So the difference between people being in a room for five minutes or 30 minutes matters a tremendous amount. When we look across the entire platform, the average attendance time is roughly 38 minutes. That's not even roughly. That's very specifically, I guess. But again, it varies heavily between different webinars. But it's also a reminder to say, well, you can do short webinars, be really good about setting the expectations. But average attendance time actually does exist. And actually has potential to be high. You need to find your storytellers. So this is all about figuring out how do I go from being one person on camera to multiple people that can actually all go and tell the stories of the company. One of my favorite examples here is the people that build the Lego sets. So the people that will come up with new products from Lego, essentially. Their webinars are hugely sought after internally in Lego. Because they're just, well, fun people that can tell a great story about what is the new product that we're putting out there. And those exist in all organizations. We're all passionate about what we do. So it's not that hard to find people who can be passionate with an audience to really kind of get people around the fireside and tell the stories. And then finally, we spoke a lot about actually in the two first sessions here about, well, what are the hacks? What is the unique approach to webinars that can allow you to, well, to scale your, to work with your clients? To scale your, to hit your core metric and to scale? And, well, this is where, well, I have worse examples than what you just listened to. But in either case, we've seen great examples of kind of the entire sales team running exclusive webinars. How to make on-demand work for continuous lead gen. How to have advertising drive direct registration. How webinars can be promoted repeatedly in the run-up because, well, you have multiple different marketing opportunities. We have customers that are running webinars. We have customers that are running their lead scoring based on poll answers. So give people four poll options. If they say, I'm really likely to buy this thing in the next two weeks, well, that's really good for lead scoring. So these are just examples. But more, they're about figuring out, like, what is the hack that kind of makes you uniquely positioned in order to get value out of your webinars? And actually, Sander spoke about the time of, well, the day of week. We surveyed. We asked something like 15,000 webinars and the performance of those by week. So these are actually how many webinars are on the 23 platform and how do they shake out during the week. There are a few webinars over the weekend. It's not a lot. But as you can see, it's also everyone is doing, well, Thursdays for the most part, but actually midweek. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays. Mondays, not really that much. So obviously, people have, well, listened to advice. And they're figuring out, well, I don't really get a lot of conversion rates. I don't get a lot of engagement rates on Mondays and Fridays. It's not really true, though. So this is the conversion rates on webinars by day. Essentially, conversion rates when surveyed here are roughly the same by every day. Actually, Mondays over perform Tuesdays heavily. Fridays is pretty much in the middle. But attendance, though, is staggeringly different. Well, basically, attendance is much higher generally across the entire platform. This will vary in your businesses, obviously, but very different from Mondays and Fridays. So those two effects, right, higher conversion rates and higher attendance rates on Mondays and Fridays, essentially gives you this vibe of being, well, you can overperform and you can underperform. So what this chart shows is kind of fun, right? Essentially, engagement is much lower on Tuesdays and Fridays. Basically, on Fridays, people, like, they might sign up. They actually attend your webinars. But they don't stick around for hours. So there's a lot of different ways of looking at data. And it all comes back to those North Star metrics. If you're optimizing for conversion, some days matter more than anything. If you're optimizing for people to actually stay around and watch your webinars, engagement, maybe Friday is not the perfect day for you. So these are just some examples of kind of looking at data and looking at scale and looking at the organization to find, well, the hacks and the metrics that will allow you to scale up your webinar program and to be a successful webinar program. And then I think it's back to you, Anas. Okay. Well, great. Thank you for that, Steffen. And I actually think you need to give a round of reactions for Steffen as well in the chat now. So thank you very much for that. And it's also time to get all of our three speakers back in the chat. So we will have Steffen, Sanne, and Steffen back with us here. So this webinar manager, I would like to kick off the debate. But actually, one thing is hiring a new role to this position. But if you're looking in your company, are there any roles where you should be looking to where is, how do you say, the easiest role to convert in your organization into a webinar program manager? What role should you look at? Raise your hands if you have a good idea. You're just laughing. Okay. I'll put it over. Steffen, what do you think? So I think define what the program manager role is going to be, that role is in responsibilities, right? So are they going to be solely responsible for recruiting an audience? Is it everything that we have talked about today? Or is it rather specific, unique kind of roles? So once you've defined how you want your program manager to be, then go through your company and just see what talent you have and align that with the role. I know it's a very flaky answer, but that's probably the best place to start because I think everyone's different and, you know, different teams, different talents. So I guess, yeah, that's probably the best starting point. Yeah. Well, then we'll start it off. Steffen, you're around in a lot of companies during, of course, the customers in 23. Have you seen which roles companies are, you know, giving new management or are they all hiring new staff for this webinar program manager? I mean, it feels for the last, well, few years as if people have been, well, promoting people or finding this kind of maybe not even like strategic finding. Honestly, probably they've been like somebody has been taking on this role simply because they were in marketing or whatever. I think in terms of finding the right person, one thing that is an immense shift is going from, well, it used to be the studio manager who was also the webinar manager. So somebody who would be able to run, well, I'm not apparently able to run my camera that well today, but that's a different conversation down to the technology of things. But moving from somebody who is like hardware light video guy, DSLR, something like that into somebody who's a marketer. Because I think what we've been talking a lot about here today is data optimization. So if you're looking for that right kind of dual agents of change, I think it's really good to start with somebody who has seen, well, marketing and marketing metrics, well, firsthand, right? Rather than somebody who's being promoted from the gear manager. Okay. Yeah. Sanne, anything on this? Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I do think like Stefan already said, it's good to have somebody with a marketing background because a lot of the things also involves on how are you going to convey that message? And it's quite often something marketeers have experienced as well. And it all depends on what Stefan said. What do you think is the responsibility of said person? Is it just the producing part or is it also the entire project management part? Or is it also the marketing part of it? It really depends on what's the main focus of the role where you would find a new webinar program manager. Okay. Well, thank you for that. Sanne, during your talk, Sonja actually sent in a question. Do you think it's an interesting idea to have a standardized webinar like once a month? Yeah, why not? Yeah. If it matches the request from your audience, do so. To be honest, I host a webinar myself each month. It's called What's New at Topdesk. And it's a pretty standardized webinar. Each month we have the same sort of format, but all the content is different and it works perfectly for our audience. So if that works and it is what your audience is waiting for, do so. But do try to lighten it up every now and then. Make some changes. Experiment with different things to see what also works with them. Don't keep doing it the same way around each and every month. Okay. And just to echo that, so we run a German monthly series. And the benefit is the audience know exactly when it is. It's the first Tuesday of every month. We've created a microsite so all of the on-demand content is available for them to watch in their own time. Not only is the sales team promoting it, you know, we have buy-in from the sales leads. And it's promoted mostly through word of mouth. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a reoccurring monthly series. Just make sure it's, just to go back to what Estelle said, keep it relevant. Make sure that what you're putting is what your customers or partners want to see. And don't be scared to try new things. Get an external speaker in. You know, maybe make it a little bit longer with a more technical demo. But yeah. I think monthly reoccurring series are really good just to keep that salience with your audience. Yeah. And also keep them, like I said, keep them fun. For instance, during my series in December, it's a Christmas edition. I'm going full on Christmas style with Christmas sweaters, Christmas background, Christmas jingles in the waiting room. Love it. Love it. Yeah. Jingle bells all the way. Yeah. But isn't there also something about the audience? There's also something about, you know, not having to create new ideas all the time. But as you say, we have a standard and then we make small additions, small changes. But, you know, it's the same with the TV program. They don't change it every week. You still need to know what you're logging into and what you want to see, right? Yeah. I think as long as the content is relevant and what your audience is waiting for, it could perfectly work. But just don't be afraid to spice it up every now and then. Don't get too wild. Then you can make another one. Another question. It also came during your talk, Sanne, from Dina. But I actually think you all have some. I can change that a little bit. The question is how many of the registered participants watch your live broadcast in terms of percentage? So we can change it a little bit and open it up and say what is the successful percentage of the people watching? So if you have a number of the people who have signed up, what should you go for? How many should be watching it live? What's a good success number to go for? In general, our live events run anywhere between 55 and 60 percent live attendees. But we do see difference in really specific niches. Also other countries that perform better than or regions than others. For instance, Europe, it's quite often around 55 to 60 percent. But in those regions, we are more happy if we reach 30 to 40 percent. Those are all things that we measure as well and keep track of. Do you agree as well, Steven? Yes. So our team, the standard is just kind of 50 percent above. That's kind of our goal. But we have noticed maybe with something like an ABM campaign, because it's a very niche audience and it's very targeted, we get less bums on seats. So we have maybe 50 percent. But we do get 20 to 30 people sometimes registered, but then we get a really high attendance rate. But also, again, it really depends with the US webinars. Sometimes we do get a lower conversion rate, but we might be doing something like an awareness campaign. So we're just really happy to just collect data. So as a standard, 50 percent. But again, it's determined what your goal and what your KPIs and what's the objective of the webinar. Okay. I think I can echo that a bit with saying that it feels like the... Well, the averages here will range vastly. I said that before in terms of the turnout. A lot of it comes down to how is the registration recorded. This is like if people are on a landing page specifically registering for this single event, you probably want to aim slightly above 50 percent. And certainly if you go above 60 percent, you're really good. So those would kind of usually be the guidances more than, hey, if I'm only clicking an email to sign up in marketing automation and we send out 10,000 invites and we didn't do all the things that we were supposed to do, then I'm not going to be able to do that. We didn't do all the things that Santa said in terms of personalizing it and stuff coming from the speaker. Well, you can drive conversions and that might be a really good thing. But certainly attendance rates are very high to drive well above 20, 30 percent. Okay. To add a bit to that, I would also say don't be afraid to kill your darlings. If you have a webinar that isn't performing or a series that isn't performing the way you want them to be, don't be afraid to stop them because it might just be not what your audience is looking for. Yeah. Other takes on this question on successful percentage? We covered it. That's great. Then we have another question. It is for you, Stefan, but again, Steven, Santa, just to come in with your comments. This is what do you mean by conversion when talking about your webinar statistics? So conversion in this particular parlance will be we show a form, people type in that and we will have a conversion. So it's very much like landing page conversion driven, right? It is like how many people hit a page measured against how many people signed up in this one. And conversion here, I mean, it becomes like we try to lean on marketing and start talking about like the more softer sides in webinars around like attendance and engagement. But yeah, when I talk about conversion, it's very specifically about how many people hit a landing page. And I also alluded to before that we get this, you know, this is a very specific topic. We get different kinds of signups. A lot of the more kind of like the people that are maybe, well, enrolled in different programs where you have thousands of people sign up for a webinar. It's much harder to demonstrate interest for the particular people. So maybe related to this question, but maybe even the one before, there is this trick of figuring out, well, what is the ideal amount of people that I want in my webinar? And in a lot of cases, the best webinars are the ones that have, well, obviously audiences. You want to be doing that. You want to be doing them for somebody. But also that has a specifically enough well-defined audience that you can actually talk to their interest, right? It means that, well, engagement rates also go down when the audience goes up just because, well, you watered down the content. We also heard yesterday also, you also mentioned it earlier, this about having more niche webinars really going in totally specific in a topic or actually working more exclusively. So we have an exclusive offer for watching your webinar. Are you working with the exclusivity or niche in some of your webinars, Stephen? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like just going back to looking at the data, right? And what is it you want to see? Is the content compelling? And it's... I don't know. Sorry. My mind just went blank then. I'm really sorry. Well, that's fine. Sanne, do you work... Can you see a higher percentage in people that are attending if you work with exclusivity or niche? Well, it's not necessarily exclusivity, but I know one of my Dutch marketing colleagues, she's running a monthly webinar specifically for healthcare customers. And the topics are really healthcare specific. All the examples that she's giving are healthcare specific. We noticed that people from other branches are also joining. And then that the way they rate or the comments that they leave on the webinar is why was it healthcare specific? But we really communicated on it. And the people from healthcare actually rate these webinars higher than just our regular webinars. So it really paid off. It pays off for this business unit we have internally to really make their webinars more specific and healthcare specific. Okay. And then just to wrap it up, now we have you. How do you know in your organization that it's time to hire a webinar program manager? Who will take it first? We'll send it to Stefan. We'll send it to Stefan. I mean, honestly, for us, and I can speak for 23 more than for all of you, we're 60 people. We're a bit of a startup. And a lot of what we're looking for in the person that fills the role and actually the people that have been filling the role before has been kind of the energy to come in and insist on new things happening. And I think at times that has been really good, got a lot of things started. But I think the thing that we'll be looking for, that we are looking for, is somebody who comes in with that energy to want to do new stuff all the time, but who honestly can also run a spreadsheet to say, what are we looking for? What should we kill? What should we repeat? Because that magic of having, well, energy to start stuff and making stuff repeatable is going to be what makes or breaks this role. Okay. Agree? Sanna? Steven? Yeah. Great. I mean, I think I have, I think I've got the coolest job in the world, right? A webinar program manager is awesome. But my thought is I'll take on way too many projects. And we're now planning for our next webinar. And we're starting to realize how many projects we're already taking on, how many product launches we've got coming up, announcements, et cetera. And it's about realizing, do you have enough resources, right? So going back to, you know, you want to find all those people that can read your data and, you know, work by producing or even training speakers. But does the team have enough resources to actually put on the volume of webinars which you think you'll need to support the business? So I'd like to thank you all, Steven, Sanna, and Steven for participating in this first session of today. So thank you. And thank you for all your insights and your answers. And I hope you will be with us for our next session. Send some reactions to our three speakers here, Steven, Sanna, and Steven. Thank you very much. And that is actually it for the first session of today here at Webinar 2021. But we have two more sessions for today. The next session will be, we'll have a few more. We will have the theme, Creating Attention and Engagement in Digital Events. And we will have a group of really experienced event experts talking. We will have Alistair Crowell and Emily Ross who will talk about the best events subverb, the norms. And we will have Pep Rosenfeld who will talk about the humor makes webinar better. Yes, even yours. And Dr. Phil Hillman is the name. He will talk about how to engage a global audience. So there will be quite some numbers there. This next session will start at 3 p.m. Central Europe time. That is 2 p.m. U.K. time. And if you are in the eastern U.S., then it will be 9 a.m. You will all receive a reminder e-mail 30 minutes before we go live. And again, the theme is Creating Attention and Engagement in Digital Events. I hope we will see all of you there. Take care.