TwentyThree Summit 2025 Interview: Geoffrey Brown, Marketing Manager at GoDaddy

Geoffrey, what a pleasure to be with a legend and another legend. Okay, so my first question for you is a little bit about your journey and your role, what you've been up to and what do you do at GoDaddy? Yes, and how have you been using webinars there? Yeah, so essentially I started with GoDaddy in sales and then worked my way up to our webinar program to be our webinar manager and then led our webinar program. And now what we do is we take all of our webinars that we've done and now we're dissecting them into social content on social media. So like for instance, we had a webinar not too long ago about building your business with AI. That's now 10 episodes of social content for us, sub 30 seconds. That leads out to a longer version of our webinar, blog posts on the webinar, different cut-ups of it. So that way we can create more engagement. We're entertaining and educating our folks, but we're doing it in a more social first way while still making it about the webinar as well. We want them to have the full education while also getting snack and bite-sized down versions as well. And then what we also do now is we'll transform some of our old webinars and turn them into courses. Ah, yes, of course. Okay, like on-demand education. Yeah. So not only the webinar, the live, but on-demand content. Yes, exactly. And so those are broken up into like maybe five or six episodes per course. Yeah. And we usually do it lo-fi or we do it like a production and we go into a studio and we do it like that as well. So just really making sure we're giving our customers, our current and future audiences, different ways to educate, different ways to learn. Yeah. So you talked about high production, also simple productions. Can you talk more about this? Yeah. Oh my gosh. So it's so interesting when you're dealing with lo-fi content and like high production content. So whenever we're doing like low production content, we're doing like more lo-fi. So UGC creators, even some of our employee talents to do our webinars, create the content, help really educate our audience. When we're navigating from simple to like more high production, complicated formats, it's a whole thing. Yeah. So like we have like a red light, green light, yellow light system for our content. Even with webinar content, do we need to run it by legal? Does it need to go by a project manager? So many sign-offs. So many things. Yeah. And you want to make sure like you don't have to go back and they're like, oh, we just saw this webinar content out. You're talking about this. Wait, no. You want to make sure you go through all of that stuff before it's even, you press record, you invite the guest. So we do all of our script, everything upfront with our legal team. Yeah. And then brand, all that stuff. And then for our higher production, that's like a month or two out that we start planning, maybe even more. And so we're just really making sure everyone's on their A game. They have everything, they're prepared. But also more importantly, that we're making the space for the content that's going to be scheduled out later. Yeah. So it makes sense. It's following up with where we want to be. It's on trend. By on trend, it means it's on trend within our B2B world. Yeah. You know, is it right for entrepreneurs? We are getting out of that hustle grind culture in life, I feel like. And we're trying to navigate our customers away from that and like to really be authentic and feel and really get in touch with themselves. So we also want to bring that to our webinar content as well to have like good conversations, in-depth conversations. We want you to walk away with something tangible that you can do that day. Not that you're like, okay, I can do this. I can do this in a couple of weeks. We want you to walk away with do something today. Yeah. It's so much work right before you actually press record. Yes. Yeah. So I wanted to understand how does actually GoDaddy use the webinar? So you talk about education a lot, right? What are different marketing goals that you have with the webinars? For example, thought leadership, lead generation. How does that go? Oh my gosh. Yes. So right now we're really more focused on thought leadership. It used to be all about lead gen. We're working with our warm sales team, like, you know, bringing in leads, helping out those entrepreneurs, those local business owners. Now it's all about thought leadership. We are bringing in, and I love this part about our webinars. We're actually bringing in our customers to talk about the things that they love. So one of our customers is not only a candle maker, but she's also a therapist. So she not only talks about her small business, but then she'll also talk about, you know, what that takes on you, like the toll it takes on your mind, your family, your life, but then bringing it back to like making sure that you're creating a successful business and you're doing it the right way. So we're really making sure we're not only including our customers, but also our leadership leadership as well at GoDaddy. It's like the people that we work with, whether that's our execs, your managers, your directors, or even me, like a social media manager. Yeah. Can you share some examples of some webinar campaigns that you did with GoDaddy that was like super successful or on the flip side? Oh my God. Yes. So we've done partnerships before. Yeah. And you always want to make sure that you're with a partnership. If you're having a webinar, you're carrying equal sides of the work. This partner didn't. So I was having to carry more of that work. So I think whenever you're trying to do webinars, you want to be successful. Always make sure you get all that work done upfront and you're communicative with that partner. So we developed like all these things to make sure we're checking things off with our partners. And that was like a real, I'm not gonna lie, a gut punch of like, Hey, Jeffrey, this isn't a perfect world. You're not gonna get everything right. And so I actually had to like, like swallow that down and be like, okay, I have to work on this. I have to create something to make sure that this is a seamless process. Yeah. Now on the flip side of that, with our courses, that's been great for us. Yeah. And we've learned that because people want to see things in not only long format, but also snackable sizes as well. Yes. But things they can come back to and they can keep on learning from. We learned that in our webinars in long format, we're like, let's try it out in like a little bit shorter format as well. And they come back to that. They love that kind of content and it's good educational content, but it's also thought provoking content as well. Of course. So for companies that are just starting to do webinars, do you have any golden tips of what is the thing that they should not miss? Plan everything out. Okay. Plan everything out and over communicate with your team, whether that's your email team, your social team, your, your social media people, your director, your content, everybody you want to over communicate with them. So that way when it, when it comes time to promote the email, when you're posting about it on social, when the webinar is over, it's a team effort versus like one solo individual person working on this. Cause I've dealt with that and it is not fun. No. So really make sure you're communicative. You have a good team supporting you and you're very open to feedback as well. And you were just talking about putting your customers in your webinars and how that's super valuable. And that really resonates with this year's theme of the TwentyThree summit, right? The human side of digital. Yep. What does that mean to you? I can go on about this. All day. Like, I mean, let's do it. Okay. When I'm thinking about us being authentic and human, the digital side, I think of things like this. You're asking me real questions. We're getting down to the nitty gritty, but at the same time, there's no script. And while I do love a talking point, I do love a script. I think that's something, if we want to be authentic now, especially in 2025, where everything is quick, it's brain rot, it's unhinged, or you're trying to chase a trend. What really makes people come back to you and stay with you is that you speak true to not only your brain, but about your real experiences that you have with your customers, but also in your journey as well. So as long as you're true, you're authentic and you speak with experience and from the heart, then you have nothing to worry about. Thank you so much. No, thank you. Oh my God. This was so much fun. Yeah. We should go on. Let's just go. What are we going to talk about? Like, okay. Coffee, pastries. Where should I go? Have you already eaten some Danish? I have not this trip. Okay. We need to go to some bakeries right now. Let's go.