How To Win With Webinars

So we're talking to marketing, we're talking to sales, we're talking to customer success and all these things. Then it changed, now we're suddenly talking to brands. We need to stand out as a brand. But now it's changing again because we move from a textual to a visual context. So this means that actually now we're talking not B2B or B2C in many communication cases, but human to human. So when we interact human to human, this is also a unique chance for us to communicate as brands. Webinars, video is an amazing way of doing this because we can educate, we can inspire each other, we can learn from each other, and we can watch it on demand. So if we do not have the time, we can access it by demand in a lot of time, which makes it an amazing lead generator as well. But the best thing about video, the best thing about webinars is also what we heard about from Andrew and Petra today, is that it can humanize us as brands. And brands have been doing this for years. I mean, like high funnel Volvo, who doesn't love Jean-Claude. And we watch this, we love Volvo a little more than we did before, right? So it's an easy way to have efficient communication that humanizes our brand. Binder did this as well not long ago where they released this video. This is their entire onboarding team. It's onboarding, it's customer success, and it's support. Telling them what they do. Last week, I was in Amsterdam, Solagi, to attend one of our video marketing meetups. And being me, I walked to the wrong floor. What happened, I was greeted by a guy who came in and we talked, and he told me where to go, and I said, hey, you're that guy from the video. He was, yeah, it was great. And we had like, shared connection. Like something happened. I cannot explain what it was. It was humanization of the brand. I like the brand a bit more. I like everything that happened. And I walked onto the hallway. I realized that this feeling is actually what we meet every day. Because every time we're 23, go out to events, we go out some places, people come and say, hey, I feel like I know you even though I haven't met you. This is my email signature. This is why, this is huge, huge part of it. Because if I send them an email, they know me. They know me a little more than a text that's going on. So I can really use this. It's a really great way of creating engagement because if people push the video, I could put in a play knob that would not work in this case, but I could. Then we can create engagement with our audience even though we haven't talked to them yet. So we tried to experiment a bit by this. So how could this humanization be used in other ways? So I created this video for no shows when I have meetings. It's me sitting alone with two cups of coffee. I'm really sad. I'm really sad. What happened? People started booking me in. People started replying me. People started acting like they owe me something after sending this video. Why? Because this is a human reaction. This is emotions. We connected. This is not an email or some guide that we stood up. This is a person who sat with two cups of coffee waiting for me. But there's also a huge disconnect in this because we as companies are great organizations using this like brand awareness, high funnel. It's so easy to do. But what are the objectives of doing webinars? What are the objectives of doing all these things? Is it creating a lead? No, because creating a lead is not the humanization. First, it did a report a few years back showing that only 1% of the leads created from sales and marketing ever becomes a sale. This means that there's huge potential. Every year we do this state of video marketing and we saw some numbers that's actually quite interesting in relation to this, in relation to webinars and all these things. This is what do people measure in their videos, in the webinars and all these things that they do. And only 55% measures the amount of plays. And plays is a vanity metric. We cannot use plays for like creating engagement, for creating humanization in this way. This just means the number of people who push the plane up. Even worse when we're talking about interactions. But the things that really matters, we're not measuring. So we need to realize that spending time with videos, spending time with webinars is not a vanity metric. This is where we create humanization. This is where we create the engagement with our audiences. And when we look where the audience actually engage, it's just as surprising. Or I don't know if it is, but like numbers are showing that we're not spending time on like social media as much watching these videos. This is of course a metric across 300 teams. And these metrics might be different for each company. Actually they are. But if we don't know how we're gonna act on this, how do we act on six seconds on Facebook? How do we act on only like a minute 14 on YouTube? But more importantly, how do we act when we have people on our own sites? How do we make sure that we like see them, that we create these connections, that we create the user journeys that's relevant to them? Another interesting fact is that we do this today by creating videos no longer than 90 seconds or two minutes because that's what we've been taught. And we see 54% of the videos being produced is actually following these rules. But what's interesting is when we look into where does the engagement come from? And more than 50% of the engagement actually comes from videos longer than 15 minutes. This is really interesting when we're talking about webinars because suddenly we have a form where we can humanize as a brand, we can create the engagement that we want in order to get people engaged to become leads that's actually wanna buy things from us or sign up for things or be part of our organization, whatever it might be. So using webinars can really make this easy. And we heard two great talks today about how we can use different webinars. I totally agree with everything these guys says. It's great. We should do this more and we should experiment and we should test what works, we should share this knowledge. But there's also a huge challenge when we talk about webinars. Because we as marketers or salesperson or whoever uses these webinars have a big challenge in the way we create them. 70% would not recommend the webinar tools they're using today because they're simply too complicated. What we see is that invites, I don't know how this makes you feel, I wanna disappear from the surface of earth. What is this? Do I really engage in this? This is a confirmation or something. There's no brand experience in this. Furthermore, downloads. If I'm a B2B, like my audience disappeared there by security reasons, stuff like this, I'm never being able to download anything from my company computer. Why do we do this? Why do we do it off-brand at least? And because it's so complicated, most marketers actually don't measure the effect of their webinars. So how do we even know if it works? It's too complicated. So 23, we set out to solve this as part of a video marketing platform. So we took all the steps that we're using, we're doing, and put it into one tool. Make sure that we can do on-brand invitations, on-brand landing pages, the actual webinar flow, the follow-up flow, the engagement tracking, all the lead scoring going out and collecting it in one place so we have everything in one platform. But as much as you would all like me to do a 30-minute demo, this is not gonna happen today because what we saw when we released this as part of a video marketing tool is actually something I can't see even more interesting, but it's really, really, really interesting. It's like how we act around these webinars. So suddenly we had new eyes when we saw the knowledge we had from the video marketing platform put into this webinar flow. And we've heard great stories about webinars, so now I'm gonna touch upon something else. Like how do we maintain this engagement? How do we make sure that people are engaged when they pop up to the webinars, when they're invited? How do we make sure that after the webinar, we use this personalization, this humanization of our brand to actually get in conversion that we want, that our bosses are asking us for? So how many people did you convert? Yeah, I got so many sign-ups, I got like this and that, got these engagement minutes, but how do we convert it? How do we use it? And just to set the scene, we've done this test with one of our clients, Oustedene, who started testing out what would happen when we send out emails if we put in small GIFs instead of still images. The click-through rate went up 62%. So this is really efficient, and we've done tests after this that gives even better results. What is important in this is that we do not use our videos afterwards, we do not use our invites, we do not use all this to send people away again. Like if I have a newsletter receiver, how much money did I spend getting this newsletter? Sign-up. So if I do use video and I send them off to YouTube, I put them into what we call the infinity loop. Because I'm attracting, I'm paying a lot of money to attract, and then I'm pushing my way to YouTube again and my links and whatever I do. So of course we wanna take this knowledge and we wanna welcome people on our own side. We wanna welcome people in our own embeds where we control everything, where we can collect their engagement, where we can look at how the user journey should be set up for these guys. So what if we put it in relation to this? How are we gonna use it in invites? Why don't we use videos? This is me welcoming for a webinar, saying, hey, I'm just doing the last preparation for this webinar you signed up for. I can't wait to see you tomorrow. So now I'm not just sending an invite that everyone won't look at. Now I'm suddenly creating engagement before the actual webinar. And of course there are scenarios in each way we use it. When we use it to our existing partners and stuff, we need to do it in a different flow. But the efficiency is still the same because now we create time spent with brand before the actual webinar. We create this humanized connection with the audiences that we have. And even more interesting, and I'm sorry I'm so bad at drawing, but I did this just to say, now we did the webinar, which is the main thing which creates such great things. Why don't we use it in our follow-up flow? Why don't we use this knowledge that we have for everyone who showed up to use like this humanization of the brand, the brand of trust, the relation that we created. Why don't we use this educational, this learning stuff, inspirational stuff to actually communicate? So how is this put in relation to our brand? And once we've done this, this could be a sequence of four emails going out with me as a webinar speaker saying, hey, thank you so much for attending the webinar. And once we have an engagement, we actually have a chance to create personalized videos saying, hey, I actually looked at your company page and I think that this could be really interesting. This is not coming from some random person. This is coming from someone you spent half an hour and an hour with in a webinar. Do you engage with this stuff? If we book a meeting from this, if this is the objective, why don't we use this as follow-up? Why don't we use the video flow as follow-up in our webinar flow? So just to give you a few cases where we tested this. Instamagazine is a Dutch company, right, Stine? Yeah, we talked to them last week at VMM. We didn't want to meet up and we talked about this flow and they said, it's funny you mention it because actually we did this test. We had a 70 people seminar where we sent out a short email and he promised me, even though it's Dutch, that it says nothing about getting a million dollars for pushing the link. He said, we did this. And this is not even the person, like the host, this is not even like a person, this is just a recap video. And what they saw from these emails going out was actually that they had a click-through rate of almost 85%. And one of the main reasons that most are not using video in emails is because we're scared of the bounce rate. How much is gonna bounce from this? The video's not gonna be denied, not if we use GIFs. Because GIFs is a very short file and we can do this with a company logo, we can do this with a play button, and people are gonna push this because when we see a play button, we wanna push it. And especially if there's a person saying hi, my name, or whatever might be done behind this play button. Like something that shows that it's humanized is personalized to my needs. In the same way, we're using this for the personalized emails. So this is a GIF going out in an email saying, hi, your name, it's Williamina from 23. It's very personalized and we see these results as we saw in the marketing. We see people pushing it, we see people watching it, we see people engaging with it, creating engagement minutes on their profiles. And I'm sorry about it's my face on all these videos, but we actually see it in the lower funnel as well because now we can start converting this data from our webinars, from our engagement minutes we have here, into actual sales minutes. And what's interesting about this is now we're not talking about click rates, now we're not talking about conversion rates. Now we're actually talking about 25 videos generating 131 plays. We have 77 engagement minutes from these short videos. They're being shared within the organizations. It's a very easy way to communicate these things, it's a very easy way to get out. We humanize our brand, we use the data, we use the connection and the trust that we create in webinars to actually create results that we can show. This works, dear boss, here are my numbers. And going back to this slide, Pitchford's also talking about the repurpose of this. It's an amazing way, webinars are an amazing way of repurposing the content. If we know our engagement numbers, now we know we need to produce 10 second, 15 second video for Facebook, leading people to our site if these were our numbers. Because there are people who wanna engage. And if we lead them to our site, if we track them in our own players, we actually know their engagement minutes and we can actually follow up based on what they watch, what they're interested in. So we can cut it short a bit, we can cut it to teases, we can cut it to whatever we want to create the conversions that we're looking for in this. Now you are asking yourself, is it really that simple to start seeing results? And to that I say yes. And you can quote me on that. Of course there's different scenarios, of course there's different setup in this. But the power of video that we see from video marketing all over the world right now, works exactly the same way in webinars when we use this flow. Work exactly the same way when we, as you talked about, start to integrate videos in our webinars when we start to do all these things in a simple flow that creates humanization of the brand and that allows us to follow up in a personalized and relevant way. Because everything has to be relevant. Otherwise we have thousands of emails, thousands of engagements that we can actually use our time on, right? But of course if we want to have the engagement where it really becomes value, we need to use the video marketing platform. Use any, use your favorite. As long as you use one to collect this engagement and make sure you have next steps in this data so we can follow up with relevant emails. But we can collect all the engagement in one place and most importantly if you use automation, if you use CRM, we can engage this data with the other things that we're doing. Because video and webinars are never gonna be a single touch point. There's always multiple touch points that we use as companies and we need to integrate video as a part of this. So three takeaways from this that we see is video is not a manager metric. We all know this probably. Otherwise we wouldn't do like engaging stuff like webinars. But like we need to know the engagement otherwise how would we know how to act on these numbers that we get in? Furthermore, humanization is key, of course. But humanization in a way that we can relate to. We all have a camera phone in our pockets. And when you go out here you all have a microphone you can put in that camera phone and have great sound as well. So we can easily record these videos. Instead of sending this email, what would it mean if we just sent the email or a gift with the link to the email to a person who could watch this, who can relate to this. Even though if it's a gift in my email signature, even though it's a follow up email in sales process or marketing process or like Drift, do you guys know Drift? Like an American company, the VP of Marketing, Dave, is like all over LinkedIn and places with videos. Records videos of himself. So next week I'm gonna do sales, I'm gonna do 20 sales calls because I wanna know how we can limit the gap between sales and marketing. And this is exactly the point if we wanna create results, if we wanna take that one percentage, reach becoming sales and up that because that's where our business is, right? And lastly, use a video marketing platform. And Danny, use something that can collect engagement, that can make sure that you collect everything that you get from these engagement minutes. That's all for me. Thank you.