David Fortino, NetLine

MTV Everyday News position that we've got hundreds of clients actively on the platform managing over 8,000 pieces of content which includes webinars and podcasts and ebooks and so on. So it allows us to learn a lot about the space of content consumption, content demand, and that matrix as it relates back over to lead generation. I think that technology platforms available most certainly have evolved dramatically from the perspective of engagement really being the centric byproduct. Historically webinars almost was very much of a one-to-many delivery mechanism and it was somewhat of a fancier version of a white paper or an ebook and that yes there were slides that were moving and things like that and you had a voiceover but it really wasn't an engaging or impactful experience and I think that's changed through a lot of more live and dynamic capabilities, interactive polling, video which has been huge to actually make it human and seeing people's reactions, seeing faces and debate. To me that's been the most exciting aspect of the platform progression and evolution in the space. So webinars for us are very much focused on kind of bottom-the-funnel content. It's content that's clearly aligned deeper stages to the buyer's journey. These are people who are more predisposed to be not only registering for it and kind of thinking about topics that are generally covered within a webinar but beyond that they're also cognizant of giving up that much time and scheduling it and so based upon that we're able to not only score the leads appropriately but route them differently too. We found tremendous success over the past year plus diving in and actually our webinar strategy is very much about kind of using a peer approach whereby it's not just us talking about ourselves and it's not just us talking with a client. It's very much about us sharing perspectives and opinions and acknowledgments of other peers in the industry. Sometimes they are truly working with us and other times they're not and I think the benefit there is that you're getting a very human dialogue, a very kind of relatable experience that most professionals can understand and I mean even just being here I just spoke in person which isn't a webinar but that session and you were in the crowd for part of it I believe that session was specifically designed to try to be delivered that way which was Neil and I were on stage. We're trying to have a conversation, trying to include the crowd. It's taking a lot of those philosophies that you're seeing done in the web environment through some more interactive webinars and trying to make it a bit more relevant offline as well. There's far too many panels that you've probably sat in on or watched and it's just four people just sitting there and they're not really interacting as much as just talking to the crowd individually and I think webinar strategies I've seen go wrong when they do that too. It's not about just talking to the crowd. It's about understanding where they're at, understanding the psyche and also like emoting what you're getting back from them. So if you've got interactive capabilities, there's a live poll, don't just ask the poll and don't just cite the answers or the response ratios. Work that into the narrative of the slides and be prepared to do that. I think that's where you get really great experiences where you've got a marketer who on the fly can take whatever the poll results might be and run with it. Oftentimes you'll hear webinars say okay the poll breakdown was X percent for this and Y percent for that and then it's just on to the next slide as if it had no purpose. To me that's always questionable. Why do that? So for us it's a bit more simplistic and linear than that. Most people tend to measure success by registrations, attendance rates and engagement metrics around like time spent and so on. For us that's all interesting and nice to know but realistically the most important metric is ROI and that's about building pipeline and so we're able to track not only all of those top line metrics but the metrics that are of users registering for the webinar attended it. Perhaps even downloaded additional content that's supporting content, has talked with a sales rep or BDR, has received a contract or even built an account in our self-service interface and engaged with the brand and actively started spending money and if they haven't started spending money then at least they've allocated budget towards us over the coming quarter and that allows us vision into our pipeline. So yeah just high level traffic oriented metrics really aren't that exciting to us and I know some brands that's important for them but we are a small nimble company it's very much about doing things that mean something versus just doing things that you know allow me to pat myself on the back and say I got 200 people to attend and wow let's hope for the best. You know it really comes back from sales and so everything that we do in marketing is to feed the engine that exists within the sales organization. If it's not working they are immediately providing feedback back but simultaneously we're measuring that through source code tracking and so on and we can kind of see where the early indicators are and then simultaneously sales will come back to us with feedback saying this one attendee loved this like two-minute segment and that was really what got them engaged. So even those little anecdotal points of feedback allows you to as a marketer hone in on how you want to speak moving forward if there was a two-minute segment out of 40-minute session that really resonated maybe a maybe my next one doesn't need to be as long, b maybe it should dig in more deeply on that two-minute section because it was impactful for people and you can kind of go from there. I think there's a couple different ways that you can use webinars and we commonly see webinars more down funnel oriented content where people are in a more of a decision-making stage of the buyer's journey. That doesn't have to be the case. You can use webinars to deploy something a bit more playful on top of funnel as well where it is something where it could be the the top ten things X type of professional needs to know about their field and that's just a way to expose a personality behind your brand. It's not about developing pipeline at this point it's just trying to develop a relationship with the end user and really kind of be sympathetic to their needs and pain points and ideally you know them already. If not you could even take it so far as to have it be somewhat open and collaborative and it's a debrief kind of like they're sharing content ideas with you and their pain points then you turn that into a series where you're getting feedback and you're saying okay well next up next week we're going to dive in deeper to this and they're feeding your content narrative without any work and so that's beautiful you've got customers or prospects telling you where to go next. The bottom of funnel side of things makes just complete sense. It's if you orient your content around decision making steps and the mindset of someone deeper in their journey it most certainly will translate into actionable results for the attendees but also your sales team because they know that a user spent 40 minutes in a webinar talking about like a vendor you know comparison matrix or something like that. It's very very specific and very product decision oriented. With that in hand the sales person then can reach out say it looks like you've gone through this you understand the landscape of a number of different vendors the pros and the cons of all of them you know what's your take where do you stand what are the most important features you might discover that maybe the most important features are ones that you don't have and then that goes back to feed your product team so that you can address them down the road. Conversely you can hear that the pros that they are describing back to you are the ones you do have and now it's just closing the business and that's it. Yeah I think the one commonality especially being at this event has been to understand the challenges that many marketers are facing and the one is that they've spent a ton of time thinking about content creation, content curation, content narratives, guest speakers, all of that. It's just a significant investment of time and resources to do that and I find that a lot of marketers fail to think about the amplification strategy of getting people to know that these things that you've spent the last quarter architecting will actually exist and so more often than not I hear marketers say well we've promoted via social and we're running a paid search campaign to drive traffic to a landing page, we've promoted on our newsletter 13 times, all of our sales reps and client services reps are reaching out to all of our accounts and prospects and they let them know and there's only so much you can do there and so if that's enough for you to reach your own goals that's great but if it's not then that shouldn't be a moment of panic that should be a moment where you can reach out this is a plug shamelessly that you can use a company like NetLine. We tend to work pretty fluidly with opportunities as they come along so full transparency we don't work with a dedicated production agency we leverage some licensed tools that we're all aware of in terms of talent and production skills people like you have certainly helped us a lot over time but yeah we don't have a dedicated group of people that we work with so depending upon who we are working with and actually who's asking us to participate sometimes they might so if it's a large client and they're thinking about perhaps doing like a collaborative session they most likely have a big studio maybe even in-house conversely if it's a smaller agency they might have contract talent that they're working with and or post-production studio something like that as well but yes we're very fluid and preferably like working with just great people so it depends on the nature of the scope of that webinar who's participating as to how it gets executed but if they're bright people and they're clear in their actions and and what their deliverables are we're very open to it. We just started there was a video webinar that we did in like prep for this event it was myself and four other speakers on it and that was really cool and that was the first time that we've done four speakers I've done others where it's just two of us and it's more conversational I loved having five people on simultaneously it felt like we were really you know at the bar just talking right it was very casual and I think that's something that we want to replicate moving forward taking that really removing a lot of the rigidness and structure typically associated to like oh this is a professional discussion we've got to keep it that way I don't believe in that at all it's like these are they're humans it's okay to have a personality it's okay to have fun it's okay to be joking about certain things just make sure it's appropriate but it's like by and large show your personality as a marketer that's what you're supposed to do I don't know why so many people fall back and they don't want to do that but really that's your identity and especially on a webinar right it's what you show and say is how people perceive your brand unfortunately or fortunately so do I use personal videos as a way to reach out with prospects and clients and partners I've most certainly used that in the past it's something that I should use more I'm not religious to using it it has to feel right to me and maybe that's the difficulty in deciding when and where to use that capability I love it when it comes off very very casual it's as if some something happened that day that triggered me to see an email that they sent out and it was like we should be working the other on this and then immediately having that as a point of reference to work into it there is no script there's no nothing it's open the webcam and go to me that's exciting and it gets delivered through to the prospect or the partner or the client whoever it might be because it's genuine and it has context it's literally taking what you just saw on their website or in their marketing materials working that in and saying like we need to talk about this because it's either a great idea or a terrible one but there's something here that we can work on together and that's why I'm reaching out and sending it this way versus it being just another email that most likely is going to get deleted so I've done that there I know sporadically our sales team has tested that I think they're even less kind of committed to doing that but quite honestly I think they'd probably have more success if they did based upon sales people generally have great personalities and they show well and they're very excited and I think prospects want to hear that from a vendor who's pursuing them so it could be something that yeah that we dig into a little further so I like the question it kind of forces me to think about it a little bit too