Emilie Neumeier, Morningstar

Manager at Morningstar. It's an investment research company. We provide services to a big range of financial professionals such as financial advisors, asset managers, workplace retirement solutions, as well as individual investors. We have a mission to support and investors by bringing software solutions to their advisors. Overall, we're in it for the investor. How can we help the financial community work with investors to reach their goals? We use webinars across our entire sales pipeline funnel. At the very beginning of that funnel looking to educate and inspire clients and prospects, we have all of our thought leadership. So those are things that our analysts are putting together new ratings. So things like our carbon metrics that our sustainability team worked to develop, bringing that into the conversation. How can they use this? What do they have to know? And especially for product launches like that, or bringing those new things to market. Webinars are really useful because for one, in that case, we had our analysts actually talking through their methodology. People could also go to the side and they could download the methodology. They could download our blog posts on it to get directed there. And then they could also see where it was located in our products. But overall, those thought leadership ones that we have at the very top of the funnel are all research oriented. They're coming from that team of 350 plus analysts. We've then got our mid funnel webinars. So these are our research in action. So more deep dive into where they can do new things in the product. One of the examples of that is our new market shot capability that we have in our risk modeling products. So in our risk modeling products, people can now do these tests on very specific securities using one index. So seeing if the S&P 500 were to shock by 20 percent, if that effect happens, what does that do to this specific security? And how that helps you analyze. So that blog post we're actually launching later this week, it's called the Oracle of the Midway. And our analysts on our quantitative team are talking about how advisors can use this information to make informed financial decisions. So that's more of our research in practice that we have in that second level. And then finally, we have our third level. So that's the lowest part of the funnel and it's product demos. So having that information already that you want to use our risk analysis, what does the complete workflow look like? Not just that research in practice. So we use it all across the funnel because we find it's a very engaging experience for people. We've also found that it creates evergreen content, especially with on-demand viewership. I think webinars have evolved in a number of ways over the last couple years. I would say the biggest change is engagement. Previously, I think that the most webinars, it was basically seeing a PowerPoint presentation and hearing somebody's audio. And you went through your presentation deck and it was basically like going to an event and getting pitched something. There wasn't really any room for questions. There wasn't any polling. There wasn't really anything there for people to engage further. Within the last few years, that engagement has really spiked. So now you have people, they want to ask questions mid-webinar. They want to be surveyed. And our presenters want to see the information on surveys to incorporate into their talk track. So if you ask people, do you use this? Do you know what this is? And the answer is no, then that's a very different conversation than if the answer is yes. So it helps us bring more targeted information to people in a way that is exciting for them or sparking joy, as people keep saying lately with Marie Kondo. So I would say for one, people expect it to be interactive. They expect it to be on their schedule. So they expect that they're going to be able to access it on the device of their choice, that it's going to be very easy for them. People don't like to have multiple steps to access content. That's when they reach the point of, I don't care this much. You're only going to get people who are going to continue with you in a difficult user experience if you're offering them something that they absolutely can't get anywhere else. So you're offering them a continuing education credit and they desperately need it. That's when people will look past a bulky user experience to continue on with you. But now I would say the standards are very high in what people expect out of a webinar experience. And that's something that now we have almost every single one of our webinars on our product side has a screen share. It's mainly screen shared. There's very few PowerPoint slides. We have our presenter information up there. We have clear steps on where to go next. So they can click what we call the get started button at the bottom of their screen and they can enter in their information to talk with our salespeople. Those are all things that make it a very much, you know, choose your own adventure of how engaged you would like to be with us. We've seen our MQLs go up by 500%. We've seen our on-demand viewership go up by 1700%. And we've seen that our overall attendees are up 700%. So those are all pretty big figures. And really where all of that stems from is the types of analytics that we can use now. So our measure of success is no longer how many registrants, you know, how many attendees. What we're looking at in terms of success is what is our conversion rate. And that conversion rate is something we have to keep checking back in on because all of our content is now accessible on demand. Before it wasn't on demand. We had a recording but it wasn't tracked. So we had no idea if somebody, you know, sat through a 30-minute product demo. So obviously that's somebody you want to get to your sales team. We had no idea. So they just kind of sat there and got lost. And we didn't know that they'd even watched it unless they maybe emailed us and said, can I get, you know, XYZ? I just saw it here. So it wasn't a great user experience and it created a gap in our overall sales cycle of these clearly qualified leads that weren't making it to them. So now, you know, with that conversion rate, the industry standard is 35 to 45%. We are seeing pretty consistently between 47 and 65% with our webinars now on those conversion rates. And that's what tells us that the content was engaging and the topic interesting enough. Because we're looking to create content that delights our customers and that informs them on, you know, our products and services. We started our pilot program about this time last year. We ran one webinar and after that it was a very easy sell to show, you know, to our executive team, we need this because, you know, just on our carbon webinar alone, we found that I think it was actually 365 on the dot attendees. Over half of those came from on-demand viewership. And since we had all of their information now, you know, we basically said to our team, we're like, look, these are people that got thrown away before because we didn't even know they existed. So that's, you know, what, 190 new people to engage with from one webinar alone. And so just seeing the kinds of results that we could drive with having a more comprehensive platform that gave us access to those analytics, that was really what drove the needle for our company in terms of purchasing this software. I don't know what portion of our budget it is. That's, I'm not part of that buying process. So tips for marketers to kickstart their webinars. I'd say start with your topic. Your topic is the most important thing of your webinar and communication between your product and sales team is really important there. And on our product marketing side, I sit between product and sales and the rest of our marketing organization. And so within that, normally what I do to get topics for our webinars is I'll go hang out with our product team and I'll ask them, you know, what's new? What are you working on? How is this game changing? Is it game changing? You know, getting from them what they think, you know, what is coming through that product roadmap? Then I go to our sales team and say, you know, what questions do clients have for you? What are our prospects asking? What are the key pieces of the workflow that are your selling points when, you know, you're going through that sales process that are closing the deal? And so within those two things, we generally find topics that align with each other. So for example, we did a big webinar called Tell Your Story on Custom Reporting in Morningstar Direct, which is a product that I work on. And the whole basis of the webinar was on how you could build these custom reports inside of the product, which our sales team was saying was an important problem to solve. From our product team, they had new updates to our reporting capabilities. So for them, they were saying, you know what, this is a great feature to showcase because you can also point out, you know, our new batching capabilities. So without needing to even go into the system, you can have it send you reports at a certain schedule. So, you know, working with your team to figure out what topic you should focus on, I'd say that is probably the most important thing you can do. And then once you have that topic, thinking about the people that you're going to send it to, because you don't just want to send it to everybody, especially in today's privacy laws, you have to be really careful about who you contact and when you contact them. And, you know, think about it from yourself. Like, I love certain stores, I don't love them so much when they email me three times a day. And it's because as much as I love them, I don't need that much information. It's not relevant to me. And so I've unsubscribed from places I love because I just, I can't take it anymore. And so thinking about how you're going to communicate that out, you know, in our Tell Your Story webinar, that was a very specific audience. We sent it specifically to wealth management professionals. So people dealing with high net worth clients that were, they had the ability to do custom reports because not every financial advisor can do a custom report. There are legal restrictions that prevent, you know, for instance, broker dealers, representatives from doing custom reports because they have to follow FINRA reviewed guidelines. Our IAs don't. So, you know, making sure that everybody we were giving this content to, that for one, it was something that they legally could do. And that two, that our sales partners could sell to them, because we have accounts that our salespeople can't sell to because we have bigger enterprise relationships with the firm. So, you know, really honing in on who you are sending this to and picking a good time. So in the financial services industry, quarter end is a terrible time to host a webinar because everyone is, you know, in crunch time, trying to get reports out, trying to do, you know, all of these communications that they're having, year end, it's the same thing, tax season, those are just really bad times to talk to people. And the only exception is if something really drastic happens. So, you know, with Brexit, if Brexit goes completely through the day that Brexit goes completely through, we will probably have a webinar that day talking about what our analysts see as happening. But you don't know until it actually happens. You see some fluctuations in the markets with people thinking, well, this could go really well, this could go really bad. But until it actually happens, you won't see the true effect. And so when there's those times of uncertainty, we try to get webinar content out there right away so that we can engage with people and they know, you know, what does Morningstar think. So I would say, you know, that timeliness, so the topic, the timeliness, and really your target audience, I would say like those are the three core pieces of any webinar. And, you know, then taking a step further is thinking about your overall user experience. What are you giving them as a takeaway? So you should always be able to give somebody a very clear takeaway from your webinar experience. Is it trying to drive registrations to another conference? Is it trying to drive to another webinar? Are you looking to get product demos? You know, do you want more followers on social media? There's a lot of different things that you're looking to drive traffic for. But you have to make sure it's a very clear call to action or else you're going to bog people down with too many calls.