 Hello, and welcome to today's first Business Skills webinar for 2015, Making Money with Online Events. My name is Michael Bunker and today I will be interviewing Sarah Gonzalez. We will be discussing how we can engage and increase revenue opportunities through webinars and webcasts. Welcome Sarah, thank you for joining us today. Hi Michael, how are you? I'm very good. Okay, can you give us a brief overview as to what our audience can expect today? Yeah, so I just really want to set the agenda quickly based on what you are registered for and give you an overview of what we will delve into over the next 30 minutes to 45 minutes. Firstly, I just want to define online events as webinars and webcasts and make sure every single person is across the differences between them and how they can be used when it comes to making money from them. And then really go into the three main ways that we consider making money from online events. So that's sponsorship, lead generation and paid versus unpaid. So chances are everyone who is on this webinar today has attended an event that has been sponsored, has been charged or maybe is a lead generation event. So I really encourage you all to get involved in the discussion and share your experiences to the chat box and share any tips that maybe you have to provide us with as well. What I also want to do is I just want to, you've had a chance to see us now. Hi. I just want to get Michael to turn the webcams off because then we can focus on the content and there may be some people who may experience some bandwidth issues in other locations. So thank you for that, Michael. And don't be alarmed, the webcams have been turned off so it's not your computer. So online events, just a brief overview because I don't want to bore anyone with what a webinar is or anything too simple, but a webinar essentially is what we're on now. Okay, so just on that, so yeah, the webinars like Adam said there, it's not really new. They have been around for a long time. The PowerPoint is the main focus. A webcast is something a little bit different now. So a webcast is really high definition and what it is, it allows your online viewers, think of TV on the internet if you like, where it's not really a PowerPoint, it's more about the video, it's more about a day show style format and a lot of people are now turning to those to mix up their online events and to give their people something a little bit different. It is important to note that webinars and webcasts can be interchangeable. So some of our customers may have a 12 month professional development program and they will offer maybe eight events by webinar and there may be the other four through a webcast for example. Maybe you have your annual conference and that's also a way that you can generate revenue through online events. So you might use a webcast to stream that live event online to your audience as well. So just a few different little differences there with webinars and webcasts, Michael, just to put everything into perspective as well and to understand that they can be used interchangeable. Nice. Okay. So let's get into the first way to make money from online events. Sponsorship. We hear a lot of clients who want to do this but I think many don't know how. Can you explain a bit of how the sponsorship works in an online environment? Yeah, absolutely. So as many of you may know, sponsorship is working with other organizations that are really similar or they have no aligned goal or vision or purpose to you to support a particular event. So in most cases it's usually for a cash reimbursement especially with online events or sometimes it's an in-kind fee paid for exposure and sometimes lead generation. So like offline sponsorship, obviously it's important to choose an organization that's aligned with what you're doing but I think the biggest thing with online sponsorship to remember is that your content does live on a lot longer than an offline event. So if you are hosting an event and you're looking to get it sponsored, it's important that you really, really convey the benefit of the content to live in before, during and after your online event as well. And with that, with an online event when you are hosting recordings online and you do have a sponsor that's actually paying you money to support this event, you can use their logos online and their websites and their campaigns and expose them for maybe 12 to 18 months is the average that online content actually lives on once it's hosted. So you can change up links, you can change up any call to actions that they have as well. And obviously this is also going to be a higher return investment for not only yourself but also for the sponsors as well. So that's just an idea of the benefits of online sponsorship. You get all the same benefits as you do with offline but it's more than just having a banner and it's more than just having a logo. It's about being able to direct people to different pages and different websites and different campaigns for maybe 12 to 18 months after your event has been held as well. I think it's kind of funny that so many people put the emphasis on the physical event and getting sponsorship for that one day and not realizing that if you sponsor the digital event it lives for the life of the content. Exactly and some people if they've got enough money they might actually sponsor both and they might actually get the best of both worlds. Nice. Okay I want to get into sponsorship now but first I want to get some of your audience's opinions. So Yenin can I get you to launch your poll please? Cool. So have you secured sponsorship for your organization in the past 12 months? So we're going to leave this poll up for a little bit just so we can engage some responses. I can see now a lot of people are saying yes but now it's starting to change. Do you love an interactive poll? You can see it all changing. Yeah and I'd love to get a little bit more insights into your experiences by using the text box if that's possible. So just type in there maybe it worked for you, maybe it didn't. Was it online sponsorship and maybe you just delved into and decided to wing it and maybe it did work for you. Be free to share that with us as well. I think it's important that we build a community with these types of things and get as much conversation flowing. And I can see around 52% have actually secured sponsorship for their organization in the past 12 months which is great. Nice. Okay so I guess we'll close the poll now. Perfect. And let's go on to the next slide. How it works? Sponsorship. So Sarah? Yeah. And I've just seen Karen say more seems to be in kind and not as a cash sponsorship which I think is interesting because to be honest most of the sponsorship we see with online events seems to be cash. A lot of our partners and just I'm not going to put anything out there that everyone must sort of aim for. But usually around the $500 to $1,000 mark we see people actually getting their online event sponsored for. Some of them I have seen go up to $3,000 or $4,000 but that's for high profile speakers as for international speakers who are coming in from the states as well and that is for content that is going to live on for a long time and with maybe 200 plus attendees as well. So just maybe keep that in mind as we go through and talk about more about sponsorship. I will have to say for one of my customers I've done it very well. They get their whole entire digital event sponsored by one person so they don't spend any money on it every year for their conference. You're getting a free online event. They're getting a free online event every year but that sponsor gets so much out of it because they've done a really great strategy around it. So if you can prove the volume you can technically get your event for free. Yeah, exactly. So how it works. Yes. So like I said it's a little bit different than a live event where you do just have a banner app at your conference. You've actually got landing pages where you collect registrations as you would have done to register for this event and then you've got all your email invitations as well which go out. So your invitation, your confirmation, your reminder and having that all redirected to somewhere. So obviously using logos is important but because it's online it's so much easier to include links that go to other online pages that your sponsors can actually have on there as well. And having that ability to capture data in that live environment from people, not just about how you can tailor your event but also what your sponsors want. So these people are registering for your online event. They're in the moment as they really want to attend. Maybe ask your sponsors if they want to ask one or two questions about your audience to help them out to make this event more valuable to them as well. And also email invitations are important. You may have seen to us, we don't use them as a sponsor but it can be seen as the same thing, our charity spotlight. So we do a charity spotlight every quarter where we highlight three charities. We have that on our landing pages. We have it on our submit pages. We have it on our email invitations and then once you actually come into the platform you can actually see that in there as well. So it's consistent throughout the entire thing and those links go back to these charities' websites, enter their Facebook pages and like I said, much more than just having a banner at a live event. Nice. Okay, so we're going to go into some examples now, right? Yeah, and I just want to show you how this can be done because AdMild, the Association for Data Driven Marketing and Advertising, they're a partner and these guys do it really well and they actually have a lot of international speakers. So I'm just going to get my little tool here to show you. Obviously they have logos so you can see down here there's a logo of who was sponsored by their Infocentric but what they also do, they also use the actual landing page to replicate their website on the background. So sometimes I think if you have logos all over the page it looks a bit salesy when you are doing sponsorship but the fact that they have made it look very similar to their webpage I think it just makes it look a little bit more credible. That's an extension of their brand. Yeah, exactly and these links for Infocentric, they actually go back to the campaign that Infocentric are running now. So it's not going back to their website, it's actually going back to something that's relevant for AdMild's audience here. So whether it's a special offer, whether it's a dedicated page that says here are five things, why you should buy from us, or five reasons, why we're going to provide you with some great content and make everything great. But another thing which is important is privacy when it comes to online events and sponsors. So on the right hand side you've got the register bottom down here and then there you've got yes I accept the terms and conditions but underneath the terms and conditions are there. Privacy laws have changed and a lot of the times sponsors will come into these sort of agreements and say well if I'm going to pay you X amount of dollars to sponsor your online event I want to make sure that I can capture this data afterwards. So how can I do that? So AdMild have something here which states by registering for this event you give permission for ABC company to contact you afterwards or something similar to that as well. So that's just an example of how landing pages work when you're capturing that information. Nice. OK so the submit button there that's what takes you to the redirect page. Yes. So. Yeah this is it. So I think this is really under utilized in live face to face sponsorship opportunities but really much more so in the online environment. So when someone clicks on submit you then have them in the palm of your hands when they click to go somewhere else. So why not utilize these pages to actually showcase your sponsors here as well. So this is an example of the charity spotlight which is different but this is another page that you're redirecting all those registrants to and I think it's important to really think about registrants as well as attendees because I think most people are caught on to the fact now that attendance rates are dropping within online events and we probably see around a 40% attendance rate on most online events which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's important to capture as much from your registrants and to expose your sponsors to your registrants even more so than what it is for your live attendees as well. So using that submit button to then redirect people to other pages and just another way to make money here even if you aren't gaining sponsorship if you're just running online event use that redirect page to maybe showcase other events that you have coming up. So you're running a three month webinar series and you want people to register for one and then view another one or maybe you've got an annual conference coming up so when people click on submit they can then actually be redirected to your annual conference page and you can then entice them to join it that way as well so just really thinking about these pages is I think really important. Well you've got them there already so you might want to use them. Yeah exactly. So you've mentioned the platform. How can the platform be used for sponsors? Okay so the platform is obviously important because it's for people who join and it's much more than just a PowerPoint presentation with a logo on it. One of the important things to remember is that your PowerPoint presentations can have links embedded in them in most platforms. So that means this little icon here the logo for InfoCentric that can actually redirect if you want it to to something else. You also have a thing called a documents folder which is located on the bottom right hand corner of your screen down there and so what you can do you can put additional information in there about your sponsors as well so just like a live event or a live conference you may have those little satchel bags where it has sponsors information you can do exactly the same within here if you wanted to as well. The branding and the color of your platform so a lot of platforms allow you to brand so top left hand corner we have a redback logo there with some managed events or managed webinar solutions you can actually change that and you can actually change the whole color of your platform so we could make this blue if we wanted to just so it's a little bit more subtle but it's actually reinforcing maybe your sponsors brand as well. Using the video player which I think I saw someone do last year and I think you saw it to Michael and I thought it was excellent. What they did at the beginning of the webinar and just say the webinar started at 11 o'clock they launched a video which is actually streamed from YouTube within the platform and it was a 30 second video from their sponsor and it was actually a really funny video that really showcased their brand it wasn't salesy it was nothing like that it was almost like a note from our sponsor but thank you for joining here's who sponsored the event and I think people are used to that sort of stuff now anyway and it's short and snappy. Yeah it's the same as if you go to YouTube nowadays and you have an ad rule over for the first 15 seconds but having a non-salesy sponsorship ad at the beginning was quite a powerful tool and a lot of people did end up clicking on that. Yeah so yeah exactly and it sort of just breaks the ice I think as well before an online event I think you know if online events are something relatively new to you you know people might be a little bit scared to join and they don't know what to expect but playing a video at the beginning sort of relaxes people put some at ease and yeah I think it's a nice way to start things in room surveys as well so get an information about your sponsors so at the end of the event asking people feedback on the actual event but then also saying do you want to be contacted or do you want to opt in for our sponsors and that obviously is powerful especially due to the privacy laws that have come into play most recently. Yeah because this is an example of the platform correct the one we're in right now. Yes. Yes perfect cool. Okay this is all well and good but how does sponsors get on board? Okay yeah so I think everyone depending on the industry and depending what sort of sponsors you're going after it's going to be different but I think this is quite generic and I think we see this quite a lot from the sponsor and the like as as marketing here at Redback we obviously get people come to us a lot of the times and if we don't see a lot of these things on here to us it's like okay what's in it for me where's the value so this is coming from both sides of the coin. Obviously having a clear proposal and prospectus to give people and outlining exactly what is going to be given to them and because you have online events and because you can take snapshots on your computer and put a picture in there you can show them examples of what it's going to look like for them and your online event provider will be able to give you examples because they've done it all in the past so you can say okay on the landing page we can brand it like this and you can put your logo here in these dimensions and with this and with that so really important to get that when you talk about the invitations, the registrations and also the recordings. Providing estimated hits and return investments so I think this is great and another thing that's really underutilized so on your registration pages your landing pages where people register you should be able to convert to measure the conversion sorry on that so you can then say to your sponsor you know we had 500 people come to this page and 250 actually registered for the event got redirected to your submit page and then actually were able to see you afterwards or you could actually say oh we had 500 people come to this page and 20 people clicked directly on your link to go to your offer or something like that as well so once you had that information built up you can actually estimate that and say okay the last time we did this this is the this is what we got in return. This kind of ties into a Mitchell's question so Mitchell typed into the chat box how do you qualify the figure associated with the value of the access to digital channels social media websites so with this providing estimates and hits to ROI you can follow the whole trail of where your people are coming from for your event and especially with these landing pages and redirecting pages you can see if they've clicked through to special offers or anything so then you can put a percentage of click throughs through it that can equal a value if they ended up buying and Sarah will be going into this a little bit later on with a whole relationship of the sale. Yeah and I think I'm another thing is to be creative and think about not just having a logo on there I think that's one of the worst things that you can do to go to someone say okay I want you to sponsor my event and pay this much money I'm going to put your logo on our webinar and it's a bit like okay well so what who cares but you know it is and I think more and more people are getting so they're getting bombarded with this sort of stuff now when you need to find a way to stand out and last year we had a client of ours and he actually had two sponsors online and they both gave away something it was around the Christmas period one of them gave away a 500 voucher to the next workshop or something like that and it doesn't need to be salesy in the way that you do it I think it just needs to be it just needs to be relevant and it really needs to provide value to someone and then in terms of mistakes as well I think a big thing is when you are going out there to gain sponsorship a lot of people send out sponsorship proposals and they have it done and it's great and they don't follow up with people and I know that because people don't follow up with me a lot of the time and like I said it's not all about the logo I think you really need to be creative and strategic and do some research online and see what other people are doing what's different about your offering and how will you measure that I think going to someone with a proposal and showing them how you're going to measure this and how it's going to be a value I think that's really important when it comes to gaining sponsorship nice okay so going into webinars and let's go into lead generation these webinars seem to be very popular in the States what are they all about okay so another way of making money with online events is lead generation so if anyone has any more questions about sponsorship let me know but these three ways of making events all sort of tie in together I think you'll find and lead generation isn't just about corporates and marketing and sales teams a lot of it can be actually tailored to not for profits and membership whether it's membership engagement or also gaining extra members and getting them on board so essentially lead generation it's they work and they're so common in the States and I don't really think they've taken off here but it's really about exposing your product or service through an online event gaining that information providing educational and inspiring content and then nurturing those leads as they come through and then passing them on to your sales team or your membership teams to follow up this is obviously going to increase your online presence but it's also going to generate leads for you hence why they're called lead generation events so how does this lead generation process work yes well so like I said you can let registrations through landing pages which would just similar to what we saw in the past you have presenters online that provide completely educational content so it's very important that these events aren't selling whatsoever so you might have someone on content marketing for an example is a great way to do this so you might be the gardening association and you actually hold an event with this stellar gardener he's an international speaker and he's developed all this research on how to grow these flowers which are really really rare because obviously he's amazing and he hops online and he wants to generate leads from this and he wants people to buy his research that's his end goal but he gets online and he gives little snippets into the research that he's conducted and he talks about how good it is and he gives people something of value and maybe he gives people half of the research afterwards but his end goal is to either get people to buy his entire research or to get people to maybe sign up to his newsletter or something like that that would be an example of a lead generation event from the from the corporate side of things but another good example is who you worked with last year Michael from the membership side of things the leading organization so yeah I worked with a very large legal organization who was specializing in physical events and they were then trying to break into the online event and do hybrid events and for them to get their memberships even use the technology or even to try it for the first time they gave away one free cpd point and the fact that the cpd points cost these people quite a lot of money they ended up getting a thousand people online which automatically introduced their new product line to a thousand people which automatically became a new revenue stream for them and because it was with a speaker who is of um widely claimed and everyone liked him and he knew it was going to be engaging they got so many more people on there but it wasn't about selling the platform or what they were trying to do is by giving them away the point to introduce them to something so now they wouldn't be apprehensive of trying and spending the money the next time and it worked really well yeah and I think like I said it's about giving a little to get a lot more in return with lead and events but they have to be educational um you have to be able to analyze this data and nurture the behavior that comes through so for example big data is just bombarding us all right now and I'm a little bit over here to be honest but what actually happens is with online events you can report on everything and the biggest thing you can report on is who attended how long they attended for what their behavior was did they answer polls did they ask questions then what are you going to do with that information so as a marketer who is looking to generate leads from online events that's incredibly important because you can then use that to nurture them afterwards and then eventually get them into the buying cycle but I think the biggest thing with this is understanding that it does involve the support of your sales team as well and making sure that as an organization you are aligned in getting this to happen and another thing as well just to put things into perspective with this before we go into the buying cycle is you know people in general when it comes to online events they're going to buy you know 25 percent of them are going to buy within the zero to six months period long term 50 percent of them are going to buy within the six to 24 months period and 25 percent of them won't open buy they're just going to come online to get your educational content and some insights so this is where nurturing really comes into it which we're going to go into but just some extra tips for Legion always offer them for free I don't think I've ever seen or seen any research where lead generation events have been actually paid for events because in the end they are revenue generating opportunities but just in a different way send dedicated emails to these events don't be ashamed to don't hide them in newsletters or hide them on your events page make a big deal of them and really show the value educate and don't sell I think we've just covered that off and scoring as well so scoring is a way that also comes into the nurturing process so I might say I'm holding a webinar and if you register for my webinar you're going to get 10 points if you join my webinar you're going to get another 20 points so you get up to 30 points and then if you actually complete the survey and watch the recording I'll give you another 10 points so that actually accumulates over time but I'm not going to then put you into a nurturing cycle or contact you straight away until you get to maybe 200 points because I want to make sure that you're really exposed to what I'm doing and you're really interested in it and that I'm just not going to annoy you every time I call you so that's the scoring option there there are platforms to do it but you can actually do it manually as well if you are just starting out and offer content offer people something for free and consider their behavior so don't just say okay this person attended so they must be really interested if they attended they could have been looking at emails for 20% of the time you don't know that whereas if they're participating in polls and they're chatting with people and they're getting really involved obviously they're a little bit more engaged in what you're doing get the feedback from people online and also think about privacy as well which is where these feedback options and these surveys allow other people to opt in to what you're doing and then measure the conversions like we said with those landing pages and always follow up with people with these lead generation events within 48 hours don't leave it too long otherwise they will actually go cold so just a few tips there in terms of lead generation events if you are considering running them nice okay well we talked about the buying cycle before but talk to us about this relationship journey okay so the buyer's journey and I don't want anyone to get scared off by this this is just an example of how nurturing campaign would work and how we do it here and this is just a visual representation of how you can see when someone registers for something so many behaviors they can take and how you can actually base what you do on those behaviors so that's just so you guys can see it visually in case it is something but I want to just talk to it slowly and how it would work for a webinar so someone registers for a webinar they might attend the webinar okay maybe they don't attend the webinar so you can see you've got two options here if they attend the webinar you might send them a recording and a piece of content over a two week period and if they don't attend you might also send them the recording but you might send them a survey link as well and maybe some additional content and maybe you do that in say a four week period depending on your audience because they haven't attended maybe it's not of urgency to them but you still want to be able to keep in touch with them then you might say if they did open that email that you sent them with the recorded and they attended you might send them another email and that might be a membership offer saying you know 25% of membership this time around and then if they open that email then you might actually pass it on to your membership officer team or something like that and say hey I notice you watch this online event are you interested in the content we have to offer or do you want to be put on our database so we can you know send you more inspiring content and you're always going to be in front of mine with them then you've also got the other option where they're not necessarily opening your emails and maybe they need to be touched in a different way maybe it's not all about the online experience for them so maybe you want to offer them complimentary access to a live event and maybe you want to get them on board then so they might start online in this buying cycle but in the end you know they might get halfway through and you might say okay well this person isn't really responding to this maybe they're more of a touchy-feely person they want to meet us face to face or something like that I think the biggest thing here Michael is seeing it like a relationship and I think you don't go into something and on the first date propose to someone without knowing what you're getting yourself into you're almost like nurturing and you're wooing people whether you are in a corporate environment whether you are in a not-for-profit environment and I think every audience needs to be nurtured no matter what sort of industry you're in nice and this ties back to your whole sales needs to be aligned with marketing as well because you don't want them contacting them well truly before they've reached the score or without the right point of the cycle exactly so that's just a little bit about lead generation okay so this does this work where's the proof okay so I just want to give you a little bit of an overview as to how it has worked for us here at Redback so in 2014 we ran 20 webinars and we had over 1600 registrations and our landing pages attracted a 42.5% conversion rate now if you have a landing page where people register so that means people come to your landing page out of everyone who comes versus registers we had 42.5 it took a while to get there though because industry average according to HubSpot is 5 to 15% as well so really important for you to work on those landing pages making sure they're accessible by mobile devices and that sort of thing and then like I said using your submit pages for other things as well and just on that the lead generations we ran from the period of end of financial year 2013 to 2014 actually generated 18% of marketing revenue for us so quite a big chunk of revenue that was generated from marketing came from online lead generation so that's quite a good stat to go by and engagement rate we measured as well so you know how I just spoke about the scoring just then we said you know we want our average engagement rate for everyone who's attended these online events to be 100 and so that way we can then see how engaged they are based on their behavior and the average engagement rate of everyone who was coming onto our webinars and participating and downloading content ended up being 152 so really important to start thinking of it as a whole if that makes sense and thinking about new ways that you can attract different members new ways that you can even engage current people who are involved in your community as well and I think lead generation is a perfect way to do that like I said not only to generate new revenue into your organization but to also from the retention side of things and to keep people engaged I think it's great Of course there's always so many different opinions when it comes to charging for events what's your opinion on this and what are we starting to see trend-wise Okay so if we go into paid versus free events now so like I just said when you're running lead generation events it's really important to have them for free but we are seeing more and more people charge for their online events people are actually quite scared to I find unless it's compulsory professional development but here's what we saw last year here at Redback from our customers so in terms of attendance rates if you're offering a free event we saw attendance rates drop by 30 to 40 percent so that means that for every 100 people you have that register for your webinar you're probably only going to get around 40 to 50 of them online that was one of the trends that we saw but not necessarily a bad thing because you can still actually reach out to those people attending afterwards but however if you charge for an event the attendance rate was around the 80 to 90 percent mark so you've got a higher chance of people attending your event in the live environment if you pay for if you charge for that we saw the ratio however free versus paid 65 to 35 which is quite a significant change because in 2015 in 2013 sorry we only had probably 10 to 15 percent of our customers charging for events so we had more of them start to think okay what are some ways that we can actually make some additional revenue here and can it actually work but I think the biggest thing that came out of it was a 30 percent increase in the blended model so what that meant is people offering a blended solution of paid and free events so for professional development or even just membership engagement people started offering events some of them were free some of them were paid but then some of them also started to change their model and say okay I'm going to give free webinars and free webcasts to our members but I'm going to charge for non-members because that might be a way to actually get new members on board so a few different options there with free versus paid but very important to consider the organization that you're in considering the people that you want to target as well and I think this is just some paid events as I was saying then obviously there's extra revenue opportunities when it comes into that you get an increase of attendance with people online people tend to be a little bit more engaged when they're online as well in a live environment if they're paid for it because they know okay I've invested this much in it I want to actually get something from it and sometimes they can be considered a little bit more credible as well and I think I don't know about everyone else out there but I get invitations to a lot of webinars because I sign up to a lot of things and a lot of the times they're free and you know they're just I'm getting bombarded by them a lot of the time so it's really the presenter and the subject matter that stands out but if it's a paid event I tend to pay a little bit more attention because I think it's of more value and I think oh wait a minute this might be really important and you know it all of a sudden seems a little bit more credible however with paid events you might get a lower registration rate as well which might not necessarily be good for your sponsors if you have got sponsors involved but then you've also got the administration things to worry about so if you are going to charge for events do you have an e-commerce platform can you make it as easy as possible and can this obviously working with your webinar provider I think it's also good to say there because a lot of people get really scared off by with the free events that decrease in live attendance but you generally the people that you get are the right people but the people you want on it anyway and the exact same thing with people going I've got decreased registrations for paid events like well no you've got people paying who actually want to see the content yeah I think more and more people I think you know webinars has came in full force with everyone I think now webcasts are coming in full force and people got so excited and they wanted to run it and then they saw excellent results but then as you know things started to drop down and get back to reality people start to get a little bit disheartened but it's like you're still attracting those people who want to be there and do you really I think it's you know quality over quantity at the end of the day as with anything but if you are considering charging for your events obviously you want to make as much money as possible which is where you know you could have a paid event that has sponsors to it which means you're making every every so much more money and then you could be nurturing those people afterwards which could lead to lead generation so it's like what I said at the beginning all of this can sort of all been you know combined into one big really amazing online event marketing strategy if you really wanted to and if you want to put a little bit of effort into it but then we've got free events as well so obviously here it's the opposite is what we just spoke about so you do have those higher registration rates and you can attract a wider audience and like I said it is perfect for lead generation activities however your attendance rates may start to drop a little bit and it is becoming a saturated market so you know then it goes back to considering do you want to maybe offer a webcast as well as a webinar to make it a little bit more exciting for people and to change things up a bit and I think you know if you do have a webinar program or an online event program consider in the different ways that you can engage people and keep it at different every time even doing like shorter segments we've got customers and partners now doing 15 minute webinars because they just want to do a quick interview and they think you know I don't want to sit online for an actual entire hour and I don't need to because I can just get as much information out of 15 minutes so a few different options there and I think a lot for people to think about for 2015 I've already liked that model the 15 minute interview ones I think it's going to start to trend yeah it's going to change the world Michael it's going to change the world okay so what are your tips for paid events how can we make money well obviously people are paying for something they want value and they're going to be a lot more inclined to give you negative feedback because they're paid for it and they're not happy so you want to make sure that you've got highly skilled presenters with excellent technical knowledge a lot of people who charge for events make sure that you know I think if you're hopping online I think we saw this last year a lot of our customers within the financial industries and the legal industries and stuff like that they tend to charge for their events a lot more than some other organizations so thinking about your industry and what people are willing to charge and even you know are you marketing to an individual and not for profit or a corporate and who is going to be more willing to pay for an event you know if you're marketing to uni students maybe they're not going to be willing to pay for your event because they don't have as much income has say someone who's just completed you know their CPA or something like that your presenter as well and there's a thing called CREED so CREED actually stands for credentials reputation expertise experience and dynamism dynamism sorry so think about presenter training as well when it comes to this and if you've got a presenter who's international and you can stream in from maybe the US or something like that that's going to be a little bit more appealing to some people depending on your industry and making sure that they are trained up when they're ready to get online and understanding that you know presenting online can be a little bit different compulsory as well a lot of people offer paid or charge for events when it is compulsory CPD because more people are likely to pay because they have to and then when it comes to how much do you charge as well I think I think it depends on the content the audience and the industry so we've had people charge from say 20 to 25 dollars for an online event and then we've had some people pay up to 350 dollars for a 90 minute event and it really is how big is the piece of string but I think you need to think about your audience and that time is money as well so how much time are they investing when are you going to offer this to them to watch how much are you going to charge them and what value are you going to give them afterwards as well and I think the perfect way to do this because you know your audience better than anyone else so ask them send them you know an email at the beginning before you launch your series and say hey guys we're thinking of running this webinar series and don't blatantly ask how much would you pay because obviously everyone's going to you know choose the less one but find ways that you can sort of get everyone involved and get their import into these sort of programs and then tailor your program around that as well consider a program like I just said and make it interactive and consider post events so with a lot of these a lot of people just assume they're going to attend a live webinar and pay for it and it's done make sure you let them know that they're going to have access to this content maybe six to twelve months after it's done if it's relevant as well and that's a huge advantage for people because people are busy and people forget and people want to be able to access things when they want it on their own time so I think it's really important that you guys consider well I don't think anyone does enough to be honest really make it a big point of the on-demand content and I think as webinars and webcasts become more prominent and I think as people become more time-poor it's just going to be more important that we focus on on-demand content and consider it just as important as the live element of an event and just a tie-back and sponsorship to this one thing again remembering that that on-demand content can be sponsored and it can even be a different sponsor from the live event you can change your sponsorship in your when getting sponsored it for it you can have one person sponsor the live event and then you can sell the sponsorship for their on-demand as a complete separate package you may double the amount of money you can get money out of everyone so I think these are really the five things that I wanted to these are your top tips yeah yeah to take away and I think it's important when you attend these events to walk away just you know even knowing one or two things that have been like a light bulb moment to you so and I think this comes back to every single presentation we do on online events is to know what your goals are from the beginning and what you want to achieve you know coming into this many of you may not have thought that there was more than one way to make money from the online event many of you may have just thought it was just sponsorship and that was your only option whereas now you see three different options so it's really important to know what you want to achieve is it going to be increased member engagement is it going to be more revenue directly hitting the bottom line or is it going to be you know more members coming on board and people signing up to your community maybe that's how you're going to measure your return on investment maybe it's not all about actual hard money maybe it's about you know what's going to come into your organization six to twelve months down the track who your audience is because every audience is different and I think it's important that you gain as much feedback from your audience beforehand and then keep that feedback loop going as you continue your managed event program and utilize all your touch points as well so it's not just about your email communication it's about your submit pages it's about your on-demand hosting pages afterwards and making sure you have a clear strategy before, during and after your event and then also making sure you communicate that to people and measure to improve you know measuring your conversion rates and knowing I think you don't know what you don't know so if you're not measuring you know and you don't know what's working because you have no way to measure it you need to find a way and utilizing the data that you have and measuring behavior and engagement I think is going to become much more common as online events become much more common especially within Australia and then nurture and build a community so even if you aren't doing something like this and you're not ready to make money from online events I think you still need to nurture your community and find a way to build upon that community with your online events you know even people say to us oh I don't want the chat box open in my webinar because I want it to be private which is fair enough but then we've got some people they say to you know what we have the same people hopping to every single webinar once a month and they all get they all start to know each other and it builds an online community and they want to talk to each other and it makes it feel more human and it removes that technology barrier so think about stuff like that when it comes to your community as well I think that's all really important it's not just all obviously making money is great but it's about a little bit more than that and with a measure to improve and the building a community and everything as we said before you can do this stuff manually but there are products out there so just think about that when you're trying to discover where to move on for it so okay just going to open up both tabs now just so you guys can see us again and we're going to pull up our exit survey on the left right-hand side just so you can ask us give us feedback while we go into the end so the slide we have up right now is just over to you so we've made this an interactive slide so you can click on each one of these you can download find out about becoming a presenter you can support our charities so that's one of the ways of interacting with the slides so just have a click on that and also if you can please provide us any feedback in the right-hand side so if there's any questions now please feel free to type them through to me and Sarah we're happy to answer any ones that you have on sponsorship lead generation fire away but any found that's from you Sarah yeah like I said there's some more content available in the download more content section there there's actually a white paper which actually gives you some information on hosting your hybrid events and some online hosting platforms even some free online hosting platforms that you guys can actually get your hands on if you wanted to as well and then also more tips on marketing your events and getting the most for them but please fill out the survey your feedback is obviously really important to us and you know this is the beginning of our webinar series so thank you for joining if you are a presenter and you've got something to share we're more than happy to speak to you guys about becoming a presenter so feel free to click on that link become a presenter and let us know or perhaps you know someone who would be great as well like I said we're always willing to share as much knowledge as possible and I can't see any more questions coming through now but if anyone does have any questions post event please let me know we'll be sending out a recording within 48 hours which we'll have our direct details on there a copy of the slides as well as some other supporting documentation but other than that I'd like to thank you all for joining I'd like to thank Michael for being a wonderful host and I'd like to thank Yine for taking care of all the technology and I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day thank you for joining our business course webinar series thanks everyone have a great day