Deanna Ransom, Clarivate Analytics

My name's Deanna Ransom, and I'm the Director of Global Demand Strategy for Clarivate Analytics. Clarivate Analytics is a global company that helps others to be able to discover, protect, and commercialize their inventions. Wow, how has webinars evolved over the years? You know, I first got started with webinars back in 2008 timeframe, and so a lot has changed, not just the platform, but how webinars are used in your marketing mix. It is very strategic to how you really engage with your customers and even have conversations. Webinars are at the heart of my content marketing strategy, they have a place in every stage of the demand funnel for us, from thought leadership and education, to helping folks to be able to better understand and have value added information for their journey, to helping them to even make that final selection decision at the end, and we continue to nurture them along with webinars. So they play a critical role to me, it is the face and the hands of our brand. We are actually going through a launch of our new brand, and we have just announced also that we are going public. So there is quite a few things that are happening internally that we definitely need to make sure that we maintain a continuity of experience for all of our audiences, and webinars allow us to do that. They allow us not only to communicate, but to hear back, maintain that brand level awareness, and again, engagement is critical. We are all about the experience, because at this point, people are expecting to have a continuous experience with your brand and your message, and webinars are the way to get that done. KPIs around webinars have evolved as well. It used to be around registrations or length of time that they attended the webinar. Now we are able to look at everything from what questions did they ask, did they raise their hand for wanting to be followed up by sales, were they able to download additional pieces of content during the webinar. We look at all of that and utilize engagement scoring, and we are beginning to incorporate that into our lead scoring so that we are starting to get a really rich profile of our audiences that attend our webinars. How much budget do I allocate to my webinars is a great question. I look at it, again, if you are looking at the entire demand lifecycle, I would have to admit that I probably allocated a good 40% of my budget to webinars and also webinar-related content. Typically, in terms of the results that we are seeing, we are looking at sourced pipeline and influenced pipeline, and we are seeing typically anywhere around a 60% increase by using those channels. How do we repurpose webinar content? There are so many ways. We are able and are using video as part of the webinar experience, and so now we can take those video clips and make them almost case studies. We are also able to do video white papers if we are using a webinar that is talking about a white paper. We can take snippets and clips of that and package it up to introduce the white paper or to say if you want a deeper dive into the white paper, you can follow up with this. There are so many ways to repackage and repurpose, even from a global perspective. We are able to share our webinar content, and with translation, they are able to take that content and breathe new life into it again. If I could give some advice to marketers about taking their webinars to the next level, it would be to remove the barrier of thinking of them as a tactical engagement and to really see them as a cornerstone to your strategic success. With the analytics that you are able to get from webinar platforms today, you are really able to optimize and see how you can continue to drive revenue and conversations even from your webinars. I would definitely say follow the best practices, look at webinars strategically at every stage of the demand lifecycle, and make sure that when you are putting your webinars out there, think of it always from a customer experience perspective. We do not have a studio, and it is amazing how with today's technology, you can almost make anything look a bit like a studio. I would definitely say be creative. Find ways to make it fun and engaging, even in the presentation of it. We do not have a studio. We use maybe a great conference room or maybe a different break room and capture things in a very relaxed setting. Again, if you are really focusing on engagement, you want to make it inviting and engaging, and you do not want it to come across as scripted all the time. I have done them in previous roles. In my current role, we are evolving. Our audiences and the company itself has been focused on maintaining a certain tonality, if you will. That is a cultural shift that we have to get to. But again, it is a conversation that is on the table, because when you begin to really accept that you are talking to people and these are human beings, you want to humanize the experience.