 Hello everyone and welcome to today's special event, well we're up to the second year running with the State of Webinar Marketing Report so it's very exciting we've just launched the report and today we're going to delve into all the things that we've actually learned over the past 12 months. I'm joined by Tim Johnston from ON24 today, how are you? Very well. Well hasn't this been an exciting 12 months? I'll tell you it's going to be the year of the webinar this year. It has and it's flown by and I think once we initially launched this report into how marketers plan deliver and execute their events, 12 months ago we weren't really prepared for what was going to happen 12 months down the track were we? No, no I think the businesses that have been thinking about a digital first approach to marketing are the ones that have had to pivot less than our others in the space. Yes, let's see how many times we can work the word pivot into today's event. So my name's Sarah from RedVac as you know so let's really get into the nuts and bolts of this webinar and what the research was about with the state of webinar marketing 2020. We're also going to draw on some of the conclusions from 2019 as well. So Tim as you know the last three months have been crazy for webinars I think most people are becoming webinars now but what we really discovered in this is that there has been a big shift when we launched this report back in February, was it? COVID-19 was just sort of starting like it wasn't really prevalent in what we're doing so I think we sort of caught the back end of it didn't we? Yeah definitely a combination of that sort of early stage sort of panic mode to this am I going to be running physical events this year or not? And then yeah so good combination of both. So I think this is a perfect time for you all to actually sit down relax and enjoy some of the research so you can actually run better webinars in the future. So first of all it was Australia and New Zealand based and we actually surveyed 128 organisations. So this was a mix of in-depth qualitative research and also quantitative so we could uncover as much information as possible about people running their webinars. I think the biggest thing that we discovered from this is that webinars are clearly becoming a growth medium. People are seeing them work and they're actually becoming a lot more successful for organisations that are running them properly. So the first section of the research we're going to go into is exactly that. So let's talk about webinars as a growth medium. So first of all I think it's very evident that webinars are working and I think that's a great testament to everyone out there who's actually launched into webinar series. I think people are starting to tie them together with their marketing plans and as you can see here 84% of people actually consider webinars to be a key part of their marketing efforts and that's up from 70% in 2019. So quite a big jump there isn't it Tim? Yeah and no doubt if we launched this during March we would probably see that number 100% because it's the the only channel that we have as marketers to play in this state of play right? Yeah exactly and so people are pivoting so there's my first time saying that but they're also planning to spend more on their webinar programs as well and I think the fact that marketers are actually starting to invest in this we've got a 34% increase since 2019 really shows that organisations are starting to take them seriously as a lead generation channel as well so congrats to out there to everyone because we all have a role to play in this and I think the biggest thing that we all want to hear just so we can keep doing what we're doing is the fact that webinars are very effective when it comes to them as part of your marketing program. 35% of people highly effective and another 35 mostly effective so that's also a bit of a switch from last year in 2019 you'll see on the green graph here where the majority of people called them sometimes effective and not very effective at all so it feels like we've made a shift since 2019 and to your point Tim I think next year when we do this we're going to make even a bigger shift so I think it's great that you've all invested your time to learn a lot more about this because I think they are the future of marketing teams. So with such a huge majority of people the majority of people spending 20% roughly on their budgets when it comes to webinars how can you make them work for you so today is about going into the research but it's also about giving you some tips and some tactical advice to make sure that you can walk away from this session and implement it straight away. So the first thing as marketers what we need to be doing is stop thinking about webinars as a silo program they need to complement your entire marketing strategy and you need to create consistency and you need to really think about at which stage they're going to play in the funnel and we'll talk about the funnel content later because we also got some great research from that so first thing I would say is really think about the content that you're producing when it comes to webinars and how that complements not only with your outcomes and what you want to achieve but your other webinar content and I'll just give an overview of what we mean about that so if you have one webinar it does take a long time to get a webinar up to speed which we'll also go through think about the other content that you're producing and how that can tie into that so do you have blogs do you have white papers do you have ebooks and can you adapt that to the online environment and then actually link back for people to download those books so similar to what we're doing today yeah we have a report for you guys to download but we're also discussing the report online so that then creates webinars. The other part is really making sure that you've got a calendar of your marketing activities and you'll slot in your webinars into those marketing activities. We can't really just create a whole six or 12 month content calendar and then no three weeks before say great let's do a webinar on this they really need to be well thought out and then need to be consistent don't you think Tim? Integration is key there yeah absolutely and then also look at the top funnel content as well that you're producing so the content doesn't always have to be specific to your organization to your customers or to your prospects we can actually a little bit be a little bit more creative and we'll go into that in a moment but traction is important consistency is key consider branding your webinar series and consider tying it into your overall marketing plan and getting all your key stakeholders involved so it's clear that marketers are using webinars and they are becoming a growth medium which is very very exciting but Tim can you go into the research a little bit and talk about who actually completed the research the frequency of how we're running webinars yeah provide some insight absolutely so first of all we did have a really nice cross section of industries and ranging from SMB right up through to enterprise so there's in the report you'll just see how broad we were in terms of our collection of data there but let's dive into you know webinars how we're using them number one and it's very clear and I don't think this is new news but they're quite a very diverse medium and they can they can play multiple roles within an organization across the marketing team but the prevailing sort of responses here came through from an education perspective and thought leadership so you know really hugging that sort of top end of the funnel you know putting your experts on show getting your experts to help educate the market there so that was nice to see no new news there but what was really nice to see in this year's report was that there is certainly an increase in the number of webinars that we're running as marketers right so if you look here the the blue column of this pie chart is you know one to five and this is typically what we're sort of advising against this one and done show maybe there to fill out be a stopgap for a physical event you know in this in this age I think many marketers will be tempted to run a lot of these sort of style events where you just plug in holes or putting a band-aid on your marketing plan but really comforting to see that the the majority of the audience that responded to this survey was that essentially we're running between one and four a month right and that just shows the diversity they may not all be lead generation focus campaigns but they could be training they could be product updates they could be you know post purchase best practice for you for your customers right so this this idea of running between one to four gives me a sense that people are adopting this you know this content think about their webinar programs as a longer term initiative which is which is awesome to see the 51 to 100 category the 14 percent there is a little bit scary these are probably exhausted well they're probably the the Microsofts of the world these big organizations that literally have you know webinar resources at the fingertips they have teams of you know 10 20 people just they get these programs on the ground to run at that velocity but you know I would say that you know this month alone I think on 24 just locally I'm running 31 so we're up there we're up there and that's a that's a team of two yeah so so diving into some tips here around you know this idea of thinking longer term about your webinar programs the first tip I'll share is really building on an identity behind your your series so whether that's a best practice series we've been running our best practice series for the last eight years and there's certainly an identity around it our host is almost a celebrity in some ways but it's this idea of really building a community behind your content and your brand that that is resonating well they should have some connective tissue between them there's some continuity between your episodes I like to call webinars episodes now because they are really like a television show right so that that connectivity between episodes is really important here and you don't want to keep drawing your audience back to a registration page over and over again you've got to find ways to seamlessly transition people make it easy for them to access the content so so one way a lot of our our clients and customers will do this is literally by linking the webinars from one to another and providing this idea of a centralized location like a like a Netflix hubs for the for the brand where people can binge on their content and that's working really well another tactical tip here which is one of one of my favorites I love seeing these intro videos where marketers we love our shiny intros and overproduced videos but more and more we're seeing this idea of just starting the experience off on the right foot and yeah it's a great way to add right I think so we used to think of it as branding and it was a great way for marketers to put their brand funding center but I think over the past few months what we've seen is a lot of our customers in a time of uncertainty and crisis and isolation get in their CEOs in front of the camera and do in that intro video and not making it about how to use the features and how to ask questions but hi everyone we know you're struggling we're putting on this content for you and you're connecting the whole organization all your prospects to that organization then and I think there's almost like it's oh thank god there's a human behind there talking to me moment and it's just it's a bigger way for you to engage people but it's about that consistency like you said at the beginning of every single webinar or episode that you're producing to have that person front and center as a familiar face I love it it's a really nice personal touch and and something that can't be replicated by your competitors as well you come across human authentic right so that's that's always a nice touch so when so when we we also dived into you know who we targeting as marketers and and why are we doing this so the results are interesting and of course behind each section here there's so much data right so we try to prioritize and consolidate this right into into bite sized pieces so again we do encourage you to download the report and get the detail but the the stats that we saw here was essentially okay as marketers what are we doing with webinars are we are we marketing abroad are we marketing locally and it was nice to see that you know 58% are using the power of webinars to reach beyond the borders you know this was a very focused survey in the Australian New Zealand market but a lot of a lot of them came back saying that yes we're using it to tap into international markets which is great and then you know still seeing a high percentage of 42% being locally based audiences so this doesn't really surprise me because I cover the Asia Pacific region and you think about the sheer manless of of Australia and just you know traveling to do these you know three four city roadshows at a time it takes effort and time right as hard work so you can see marketers starting to realize the value of just really scaling that their event materials right and then and then in terms of who are we engaging so you know this was this was also interesting because I've always perceived webinars to be that sort of you know net new prospects and bringing in new audiences to to educate the the number one response was actually customers yeah okay so probably not that surprising but I did think that prospects would come out on top there so a lot of a lot of marketers designing programs to educate share best practices in inform but when you combine that with the the next chart on the on the right hand side here of the objective of the webinar program the number one reason we've run webinars is for lead generation do you think there's this sort of cross-selling approach as well so this whole account based marketing thing everyone's sort of looking on okay we've got huge customer base here how do we get in how do we promote other products and services to them how do we create these raving fans that everyone's been talking about for years and maybe people are using webinars for this type of I think is a really good point focus on the 20% they're bringing in the 80% right so this idea of you know working with your customers to engage them more find those opportunities to to delight and engage them and offer ways to grow those accounts but you know at the same time I think you know the the lead generation aspect still still rings true here and and just engaging engaging your customers more for retention customer satisfaction is also a strong reason here the interesting thing that I'll watch for next year is that that 2% at the top of that chart is you know this ability to save on the physical event costs right now I think marketers don't realise this now but throughout the year throughout 2020 we'll realise just how effective and efficient from cost perspective that that webinars can be so I I put my money on that one being the the biggest alright so so looking at some tips in terms of how to reach these audiences and I mentioned it before but you know and and I come across this challenge a lot myself as well but these blended audiences whether you're you know targeting international audiences or local the the number one consideration here is is really you know just be be attentive to that time zone and when you want to run that for your ideal core audience right so if I was to run an Asia Pacific audience based webinar and want to attract multiple geos I have to consider the different time zones so you know from New Zealand all the way to India as fans many many hours and we're not going to we're not going to satisfy all so the way I approach that is to identify the core audience groups and so I'd use functionality like simulated life to run at a more convenient time for for the audience of course to your point earlier on demand is is key here when you're spending multiple time zones making your content available on demand is is a no-brainer and it's almost a hygiene factor these days people want the content when they when they can access it and when they've got time so without doing that you're leaving a lot on the table right yeah another another aspect here to focus on is you know when when you're looking for webinar programs we did mention a lot of the top of the funnel sort of initiatives and and the role that webinars can play right through the funnel but you know we always advise clients to start looking at some of those you know mundane and repetitive business processes that do exist in most businesses and find ways to drive efficiencies to to eradicate those and help your your human resources be more effective with that time so so a great example I saw recently and LinkedIn spoke at one of our conferences last year and they shared their success around their onboarding program they used webinars to on-board customers they found that they identified that their customer success managers were spending an awful lot of time just doing the same thing over and over again and training and it's very repetitive content they identified an opportunity to produce a a glossy a high production value event that they run repetitively every day now as they onboard new customers that's the first touch and that saved them a lot of time energy and resources to do that now those resources can spend more time developing strategic initiatives with the customer and and providing more value yeah so then so then the the last section here section four is is really around you know how effective are they as as lead generation tools and and you know was it was the perspective around the costs of running a webinar program a a you know overwhelming majority here at 80 percent agreed that webinars do help lower the costs of of lead generation which is which is fantastic it's it's a very scalable and engagement driven mechanism that allows us to reach very far and wide as we just saw we looked at the you know where where marketers are running these webinar programs as well in terms of the stage of the funnel and I was I was very pleased to see that so many of us 55 percent are actually running webinars or designing these programs to you know nurture people right through that funnel and and beyond as well it's not just about that sales cycle but you know as you just heard in the LinkedIn example how do you identify those customer facing initiatives as well and speed up some business processes so really good to see I I put my money on the the top of the funnel in this in this case thinking that most would be thinking about you know their thought leadership programs and these programs that have a really wide net on them right but very comforting to see I think it's an entry point as well for a lot of marketers this top of funnel content and definitely over the past three months we've seen a lot of our customers have had a huge increase in their attendance and their registrations at webinars because it is that top of funnel content so back in January people were talking to their members around the bushfires for example and then COVID-19 and then managing through crisis yes so those sorts of top ics have become huge because people are craving content right now and I think you're right we have to be careful that we don't just focus too high on the top of the funnel because then people just get stuck yeah it's like they're just a little cyclone just turning so we really need to I think some great advice for marketers this year is to focus on nurturing people through that not just with webinars but through all your content 100 percent so so when we talk about you know lead generation and pipeline generation and to the point of pipeline acceleration how do we do this in a way that is actually to your point moving people through and not only thinking about the the different webinar programs that you can design whether that's a demo program at the bottom of the funnel or maybe it's a customer interview series in the mid funnel where you're educating around how your solution solves the problems that they have or even that sort of thought leadership you've got to design the programs those blocks right but looking at the single webinar itself just a once-off event you can find opportunities to surround those prospects and your customers with other pieces of content so you'll probably pick up on some some secret source here today in the console but we'll provide lots of different content that allows you to binge while you're watching this episode right and you're surrounding them with with content experiences that are related to the webinar and that's a great way to just really accelerate the education process you know if you think about the forest research that was published a few years back and how many touch points you need to move somebody from from lead to revenue think about how many touch points you can get in a single webinar right and the signals that that can generate I also like thinking about you know probably some of the least used or the use cases around webinars being around the sort of mid funnel right and I always love to see these these webinars are focused on the customer there's nothing more powerful than the customer's voice right and I think it many times you've been our customer for for some of our spotlight series right and it's a great way to hear it from others on how they're working with your technology your solution to solve that problem but the other format that is rising in popularity I'm sure you see this a lot as well is this conversational format where you're literally getting a couple of speakers together and you're putting it and you're posing it as an expert panel and these formats are highly engaging because they're mostly audience driven right all the questions are coming from the audience this is an scripted or a structured presentation with slides yeah this is about just answering the people's questions yeah and it's it's a very popular format that's that's that's growing over the last 12 months and then and then looking at you know in terms of pipeline acceleration you might have a different approach in terms of you know how you're following up with some of the leads behind your webinar program would you necessarily send this yourselves team out in full force behind your top of the funnel series no yeah you've got to adapt based on the signals you receive and what the program is intended to do so for us as an example we have a demo program which has been designed as a bottom of the funnel webinar program and the the reason the objective behind that is to relieve the pressure that it takes for the sales people to go out and demonstrate the product each of those sessions could take up to an hour but with a webinar that's scalable and repeatable we can run that on repeat daily as a half an hour block and that takes a lot of pressure of the sales team and the point here is that the follow-up methodology in the process they go through for those type of people that are more educated in the process will be very different to the people that you know see if we ran a webinar program that's based at the top of the funnel yeah so align with your sales team on how to follow up and and that will make sure that you're outwards it shows that you're communicating with your internal teams excellent so yeah okay the next section right we're looking at you know the the value of on-demand and pre-recording and this was a really interesting section for me because you know like you we come up with our own benchmark report and one of the insights that that's we saw this year from our on 24 benchmark report was that the appetite for on-demand content is climbing right and it goes back to this whole Netflix style of events and we've actually found that so the last year when we did this we actually saw 35 percent average attendance rate on events we've seen I don't know if you have but over the past few months that's been increasing yeah but you've still got over half of those people actually choosing to watch your content on demand as well so having this on-demand strategy as opposed to saying okay my webinar's done and Dustin let's host it online is incredibly important so as you can see here 75 percent of people are doing the majority of their webinars live so most of us want that live engagement they want to actually have something and they want this q&a and they want to similar to like you said with panel discussions and stuff like that as well there has actually been a 16 percent increase in Simulive though and I think there's a few reasons for this I think the ability to reach out and get presenters when you want them as opposed to giving them a certain time and date is definitely going to be an advantage for you but also your time for as presenters as well and if the majority of your audience isn't going to watch live then you sort of need to work around that because webinars are hard and as we'll go into it we'll talk about the resource challenges which is something completely different but one of the things we also found was a huge amount of people are hosting their webinars on demand which wasn't necessarily the case last year so I think now we're understanding that because we're looking at our data we're looking at what's actually happening with our attendance and there's this switch that we're flicking and saying well do you know what let's do a bit of a hybrid approach as well um one thing I will um say is we have the perfect opportunity right now to start mixing things up a bit and doing things a little bit differently when especially when it comes to live and on demand so I'll give you two examples so we probably around virtual conferences are huge now right but if you had a live virtual conference that ran for two days would you sit would you sit behind a computer for two days straight watching live content no no I know well you have trouble with on an hour four with me I know that you're going to distract us in so there definitely needs to be think like an attendee and start to think about how you can work with the different collaboration tools you have and the different um even features in the platform to make it happen so we had someone come to us okay this was start of COVID-19 when everything started going to be crazy we're all in reaction mode two-day annual conference what do we do get presenters into the studio to record three pieces of pre-recorded content that people can actually watch but then we also had live so 9 a.m. in the morning attendees logged on for four hours of live sessions that went back to back first one was a pre-recorded video of the CEO hi everyone welcome to today we've had to pivot second time I've said that we've had to pivot to this style of event we're now going to introduce some speakers that will be talking as soon as that event ended they then shifted everyone to a website that was built and tailored for this digital conference and people could watch that for an entire week and continue to earn professional development points so not only then is your content which was two days going to live on for an entire week possibly even more than you want it to you're then saying to your attendees do you know what we understand you're busy and things are crazy at the moment so we're going to give you a week to digest this content so definitely think about using a blended approach and I think we'll see a lot more of this as we do the report next year yeah great advice yeah the other part is around where your webinars live and I think this has always been something that we try and try to advise our customer base because you want to keep generating that traction after your event is over so as you can see over half of the people here are saying we just put it on the website we put it on YouTube we put it on the website and people want to watch it that's great for awareness but if the majority of us are running webinars for lead generation which is what we saw earlier we need to think about how we're constantly tracking these attendees and how we're actually monitoring who's joining live and who's joining on demand as well so one of the things we recommend is using a branded video on demand platform which a lot of people are by the sounds of things which is great but then after that three months you probably gained a lot of that traction by then so then maybe hosting your video on YouTube or Vimeo so you can actually get that SEO from it and people can actually come across your video and then embed it on your website but that sort of month sometimes sometimes it's only a month two to three months but then a lot of the content you probably have to revisit as well because a lot of it's probably not ever green so really start to think about where you're hosting it how long for and just don't forget about it as well so a few other options on there but definitely think about your on demand strategy because sometimes it needs to be completed separate from your webinar lead gen strategy so just some pro tips for webinars and on demand so first of all having this always on content strategy is a must and finding ways to integrate some of these on demand webinars into your websites and your other programs is also essential and one of the things when you alluded to ask the experts I love that idea because I think panel discussions are so much more engaging we actually had Australian marketing institute a few weeks back so they had training they had to deliver to people internationally so what they did is they got a range of experts to come into the studio and create 30 minute videos which were pieced to camera with slides they were recorded and then following that at different times of the day especially that was convenient for the people overseas we hopped online we had everyone join via a video conference we streamed that 30 minute presentation and then we opened up everyone's video conference line and then the presenter sat there for Q&A so it started to it was a lot easier on presenters it was a whole heap easier on the organization but it also gave it was a perfect example of how you can use different platforms to mix a blend of prerecorded and on demand I agree so clever I think I think you know many many businesses think that you know a webinar is simply just a replacement for a physical event right and and you know when you're taking your events virtual you've got to include that networking capability in that sort of two-way interaction within their experience right so that's a that's a really great example of how companies are doing that but yeah it's it's it's important to identify that from the outset do you want this to be an interactive networking sort of event and make sure you bolt on that capability well interaction and engagement isn't just the features on the platform anymore and a few years back it was and I saw this great blog by Mark Jones from filtered media which I was talking to you about before and his idea of the evolution of the webinar so starting off from the talking head on a webcam you know go-to meetings sort of style where people would log in they kept throwing the back around the webcams or freezing then we evolved to the streaming side of things yep which still hasn't taken off as much as it probably should have but now we're in this this time of where we're talking about tv shows and episodes yes and getting people engaged and bringing that human element into it yes it doesn't need to be polished anymore where you've got someone sitting there with their corporate banner behind them doing four different takes exactly because people want that human element to come through it yes it's more authentic I think authenticity I don't know if you're enjoying this session the all the all the zoom calls and teams calls we just get a look inside the life of the the person behind the bio yes and it's it's something that you can't replace that you know I think marketers do have a habit of you know over producing things and these sort of scrappy mentality of just throwing together get some great content pieces and and provide an interactive session is is the way forward don't insult your audience trying to keep it authentic um so let's talk about resources now because it's all well and good to have the platforms available to you but webinars can be hard and it's not so much I think it's just more that we understand what's involved because we don't want to sugarcoat anything and say running these webinar programs which are hugely successful in your case up to 40 a month they're not necessarily hard but you need to create a playbook and see what works for your organization we're working with an organization we work with they've been running webinars for 10 years evolved massively they've got a whole team of five people who now run their webinars so let's just go through and get your thoughts that came through the report so first of all we want to ask the question are webinars easy to produce and as you can see the majority of people are indifferent probably because it's one of those things it's like I've never really thought about it to be honest but 26 percent of people say they'd not actually that easy to produce and I think we all feel the pinch and the stress and the nerves especially with a live event when you're doing the five four three two one countdown when it takes off there's always that oh god what's going to go wrong because there's technology right and that's what it is but technology is only one component of what we're talking about here so we're talking about the marketing assets getting people to register getting your different stakeholders involved training your presenters which is huge and two out of three people manage this in-house so half the people indicate they don't have the resources to actually make this work and it usually takes around two to four people to manage a webinar program to get that up and running so we did some research internally as well as a managed webinar provider it's important that we know exactly how long webinars take 11 and a half hours from concept to completion there you go so that's the new webinar so obviously there's a lot more involved in terms of debriefs and preproduction calls and making sure everything's set but just understand to do this properly work needs to go involved work needs to be involved and you do need to dedicate time to that yeah and you need to use internal resources and I think you probably you'll find efficiencies along the way right to your point the first time you run a webinar is always going to be a slower more thorough process but you develop a playbook to get it off the ground quicker yeah exactly so think about the format that you're using as well and we've spoken about this a little bit now so understand in that it's not always about video being king and we know that a lot of people like the video component of it as well but it does remove a lot of the complexity if you don't have video and one thing we've realized especially since everything's hit us over the past few months is that Australia's internet isn't that great not sure if anyone's noticed um they don't really think we'll set up for this but a lot of people are the presenter briefing side of things especially with remote webinars now is such a big component so not only are you briefing them on how to use the platform but testing their internet at 10 a.m. in the morning on a Wednesday compared to 6 p.m. at night on that Wednesday yeah maybe completely different so you need to be prepared to maybe not have video the entire time and maybe have a headshot of the presenter up there because if there's one thing I can guarantee and I'm sure we've all been there the audio quality of your event is paramount yeah I can live with someone's headshot being up and it's almost it's quite engaging because sometimes you think of it as a bit of a podcast with some interaction but I cannot live with crappy internet so don't sacrifice it it's a good point we come across this challenge across Asia as well where you know bandwidth can be limited and you know sometimes you have to think about that format very carefully based on where your core audience will be yeah Australia we haven't found too many issues but certainly as we spend deeper into Asia we do come across some of those challenges yeah and not having to worry about this we'll leave a lot of it so if you're managing this all in-house these are some tips to make sure it goes off without a hitch the other thing is around the slideless webinar as well or another format which people just love doing and I can't stand doing it is screen sharing on a webinar so I just find screen sharing is much more for a collaborative style event and screen sharing also takes up bandwidth as well so that's going to impact your video and possibly your camera so really think about the format try and consider a panel discussion without slides because sometimes you don't need the slides especially if you've got ask a question yeah I agree it's moving to this notion of conversations are greater yes than presentations yeah and you don't necessarily need slides to to guide the conversation or guide the story the narrative right yeah exactly and I also think if you've got anything that you need to screen share maybe the webinar which is sort of a one-way distribution channel isn't the best solution for you maybe you should be looking into more like web conferencing or something like that but once again it depends on everyone and then think about using people to help outsource the event so whether it's managed providers whether it's getting people into a studio to remove the technology burden or definitely having presenters and moderators I think any especially with these virtual conferences I don't know how people run them no facilitator or moderator yeah and if you've got a panel if there was more one more of us we definitely need a presenter or moderator here just to keep timings keep things on track keep us a track a nice top and tail to the session yeah absolutely so we've sort of segwayed into this but just quickly I'll go into engagement interactivity because I did say I do believe that engagement interactivity is very different than having a few features activated presenters and we've said this for years your benchmark reports indicated my benchmark reports everything could be brilliant on your event but if you do not have enthusiastic and engaging presenters people will drop off yeah content has actually increased um it's fun seeing a lot more people actually saying content is also very important and there's nothing worse than joining a webinar and it not being what you signed up for yeah you have that one shot yeah look I think I said this last year even but the principles range through it's it's really this there's three legs to the tripod here you've got your presenters you got your content yeah and number one you've most most markers actually neglect the experience right so this this branded console this environment that you can welcome people in as part of your branded experience but also thinking about uh how you're you know weaving interactivity throughout the whole thing yes uh you you'll get to this stat in a minute but you know so many people think that uh running a successful interactive webinar is simply just by bolting 10 minutes of qa on the end yeah holes it's not mean nothing that's you have to find those moments of interactivity throughout the whole experience and I think to your point keep so we've got 62 percent of people say they build webinars with interactivity admired and we've also got 53 percent of people saying that they have usually around four people on a webinar which has definitely increased since last year yeah is that 62 percent making sure that they get those presenters involved in that briefing session to build that interactivity and to make sure it's relevant so like you said your presenters your attendees and your customers you need to look at these three people and talk about the experience um one customer who's doing a series of webinars a week and it's to real and remote organizations they've started to build this up slowly and I love it okay and this community that they've built in is just so with them along this journey and it's actually really nice to see so they started with the how far they've come has been amazing they started with q and a then the next webinar they open the chat so people can start chatting amongst each other and then they launched polling last week and everyone was like oh wow this is great we're polling next week what they're doing they're getting people to submit video questions and they're playing it through the platform so it's like Tony Jones on q and a wasn't Tony Jones anymore is it um but building people up because as an attendee there's a lot to do on a webinar you're listening you're watching you're learning you've probably got kids in the background and so polling chat private chat open chat there's a lot to do in there so think about maybe gradually working people up when it comes to a new series there's a lot you can do and you don't need to overcook it but you got to find those those features or that functionality as part of the experience that that gets people hooked and engage with you yeah and relevance is definitely key so think about your favorite talk show think about what you want to recreate and then maybe not use slides and maybe think about engagement on another level engagement doesn't necessarily have to be features and functionality multiple presenters as we saw a lot of people are actually starting to use these and these drive more interactive conversations with people we're launching another tv show which is aimed at the investor relations community in a few weeks time and there's two companies that are branded on it and we're going to be the facilitator on the panel and we're going to alternate yeah so think about how you can utilize that and you've probably got talent sitting in your office right now yeah that you haven't even thought about yeah and weave that interactivity throughout the experience think about when you want to use polls and if you do want to use polls make sure you insert that on a something so tactical but insert on a slide poll with the question so you're prompted because once your presenters are in there there's so much going through their head it's easy to sort of just skip through that and then go to the end and go oh wait we didn't launch that poll and now it's no longer relevant yeah that's a really good point I mean I think presenters have so much on the plate just to deliver the content and provide a conversation right I think the the key takeaway here is think about the audience member and the presenter owns more more responsibility on this execution than ever they have to provide that that's those moments of interactivity along the way all the time they're not involved or they're just sort of okay what's your topic let's talk about it there's a whole briefing session that needs to go on so there's our tips for interactivity and engagement so so many options and we don't want to overwhelm you we just want to provide you with the facts to make sure you can make better decisions um but how do we get people to turn up so we've spoken around attendance rates before and getting people engaged what did we find out this year around promotion and conversion and integration yeah look we regularly survey our audiences on 24 with every webinar and and we might have you know thousands of attendees on on these webinars but the number one challenge that most people have with their webinar program is actually building audience uh you know how do I get more registrations so this section really looks at uh you know of course there's multiple aspects to this section but the one that I thought would be most interesting for the audience today is you know the where of our actual registrations coming from and what's what's proven to be the most effective promotional channel and this wasn't particularly surprising to see that that email invitation comes out on top I think that's kind of no-brainer it's the the channel of choice for most webinar producers um seeing that 33 percent I have seen that number higher in in other studies we've done even up to 60 to 80 percent been a core driver so it's important that we get this right and I'll finish with some tips on this slide but the other thing I want to call out here is that it's so great to see so many in fact 18 percent leveraging their sales team their sales comrades to get involved this certainly wasn't the story last year and and one of the recommendations but you know seeing that marketers are now working more collaborative with the sales counterparts to help spread the word of the content and and help solve the problems of customers that customers and prospects they're engaged with is great to see I think the website you know again kind of no-brainer and we're starting to see marketers think more strategically around you know how they find content they're doing keyword analysis and looking at you know the seo performance as to you know what topics they could potentially craft and then they're leveraging those keywords and titles and throughout the descriptions to really drawing that organic traffic to the webinar program so I think that's a tried and tested strategy there emails no-brainer but great to see that we're you know calling to arms all of our comrades across sales but also customer-facing teams so when it comes to tips a lot of these are focused around the email channel because given that they do drive the the sheer volume of registrations for us perhaps one of the the biggest tips and advice that I can offer is that we see so many marketers just and it's probably no-brainer when you look at the resources that we have most of half the audience saying we don't have the resources so spending cycles on developing content and promoting your webinar in different ways often falls down the the priority order so we see a lot of marketers will just produce one email and send that out three or four times right that's it's lazy marketing and we're probably all being slapped on risk for doing that from time to time but essentially we need to find ways at different angles to promote these so that we learn what resonates best with the audience whether that's the speaker's expertise the solutions that you bring to the table the unique perspective that your webinar's going to offer find ways to promote your webinar differently I'd also say that mixing up your email format has been a key to success for for driving registrations for us and what I mean by that is you know typically we think about our email promotion and it's usually a glossy overproduced html email that looks nice and from a marketing standpoint we we give the stamp of approval it looks great and it's going to do the job but often they're ineffective sometimes you know competing in the inbox can be challenging so we've we've had a lot of success with the simple understated plain text email the plain text email that comes across very personalized there's no glossy marketing elements to it yes it's written by a marketer but often we make it presented or produced by the actual speaker themselves so it's a personal note from the speaker to the audience to invite them to attend and we use lots of words like we and I'll show you this and this is what you'll take from from my presentation we also see the addition of having just one singular slide being promoted as part of that so it's like this is what I'm going to share you want more I'm going to tease you into to get the full value so if today I was to promote this email we might share one of these key stats to show oh this is the type of content they'll get from attending we spoke about this a little bit but the power if we can only drop three or four emails in a given promotional cycle and we always recommend between you know three to four weeks out you start promoting event you're limited we can't spam the world and and start sending emails every single day but this this idea of turning everyone in your organization into a marketer providing them with copy or bullet points that they can take and leverage either share on social or share in their own you know sales dialogues that they have is is a fantastic way to tap into the mass right one one recent example we took over all of our sales reps signatures and it was almost like a personal violation it was like I set up shop in their house and I camped out in their house it was a they felt very violated from doing that but in fact it every every time they send out an email it promoted our webinar series and allowed us to capitalize on that email traffic as well and then perhaps the last and maybe the most valuable tip here is is this idea of cross webinar pollination okay so this idea of leveraging the existing engagement in the webinar that you have today and promoting the next one it requires a little bit of organization but if you start thinking longer term and serializing your webinar content it's it's easily achievable right so you know if I was to ask you all to join the next webinar that we have available in the resource section this is what I mean we constantly see between 10 and 15 percent of our webinar audience migrating to the next session so before we even push a singular slide we'll ask the moderator or the presenter to propose the next section and it's proven to be an effective tactic so webinars are great they're great at driving engagement but the the reason that we drive we rerun webinars is because we're interested in the data what does the data tell us about our audiences and how can we use that data to profile so we asked what do markers do with with webinar data does it just sit there in the system sometimes you see but uh this was a this was a nice increase year and year where we started to see more marketers realizing the value of integrating their their webinar platforms with the tools that they use every day the CRMs the marketing automation platforms right and when you start thinking about this logically you think okay we're using this for lead generation there's a number one use case well it makes it makes sense to use get this actionable data and put it in the hands where our sales team is I love the fact that that's at 53 percent almost 54 because last year it wasn't that high and I remember us having a discussion around this and just saying what are you guys doing why are you doing this if not to share with your sales team so I think it's great that people are starting to manage start with the end in mind which I think we spoke about before so making sure that you know this data is going somewhere but then how is that converting yeah think about how the recipients of that data will use it yeah so it makes sense if you if you have a customer relationship platform and over time you're building a profile of your lead your customer think about how much intel and how much richer those customer profiles can be if you integrate your webinar activity right through to to those platforms and the same applies for marketing some marketers are getting extremely uh uh sophisticated in their approach of using engagement data to capitalize on the behaviors that happen during that one hour or 30 minute session and using those signals to drive specific action and we'll have a look at that in a second so what do you do with your engagement data well it's sharing leads with sales I think that's a no brainer and dove styles nicely into what we've just been explaining many are using it to uh also assess their program performance and and evaluate the content effectiveness I think that's also a good good use of the data to work out whether you continue along the same vein as you're producing content or you pivot directions altogether that's one for me there you go so uh looking looking at uh you know how do we optimize uh you know the data flows and the use of data uh we always advise that you know when you're designing these experiences yes you want to have multiple content pieces as part of that journey right but also think strategically about how you're designing these these uh these webinars as well uh think about you know what sort of signals you can get by including different types of content so an example could be maybe you have some case study materials in there maybe you have a link to your upcoming demo or maybe it's a some pricing information membership information whatever it might be every click and interaction as part of that webinar can be taken as a signal yeah and the more marketers start to think strategically about their execution of a single event but also a series the more they realize the value that a webinar can bring in terms of those subtle signals that you can you can you can use as part of your follow-up we touched on this as well but uh the the real value is uh not behind just collecting a name behind your webinar program right it's not just about uh success I've got I've got Sarah as part of my database now that's that's not what we're interested in and what we should be focusing we should be focused on the the behavioral and the engagement data that we can get from having experience with you so all the questions that you ask the the way that you respond to polls another format that you can think strategically about the polls right the type of questions you ask to to understand and develop richer profiles uh the surveys the the uh additional content that you make available during these webinars is is key to building out the profile and understanding where that prospect or that person sits as part of the sales journey so you know lots of things that you can do with it and I'm glad to see that you know the first step is integrating getting the data where you need it so you can increase your marketing sophistication around what you do with that but you know a key takeaway here is that you know we've got this data we know who attends and who doesn't we should be using a lot of that data to inform our lead scoring as well and many of us have you know robust lead scoring programs it's now 2020 and we've we've all sort of finessed this uh to a place that we're content with how we're scoring our leads but once one one piece I consistently see that Marcus neglect is this idea of scoring webinar leads the same way um Marcus have a ton of data as we just discussed and why can't we start to look at engagement data to inform high level of scoring or a lower level of scoring just because everyone's attended this webinar we shouldn't score them the same way yep and then wrapping wrapping this and having a look at uh you know how markers are deeming webinars to be success or a failure uh this this was a very interesting uh part of the report which uh unfortunately wasn't the results that I was hoping for never is when it comes to um measuring success I feel people attendees are still just the number one measure of success yeah and it's it's easy and it's vanity but it needs to be measured but we need to we need to go deeper yeah so you know looking at uh you know how marketers are deeming a webinar to be successful uh a lot of putting emphasis on those attendees and and registrations are closely followed by that and really this is disappointing to me because you know I view this as the equivalent of a of a click uh or a form capture you know there's not a lot of value in that and you know if I was to take uh registration or attendee numbers through to uh the the leadership table I think I'd be a lot of blank looks uh really the the advice here is to start looking at um you know what is your what is your end objective and if it is lead generation demand generation you know how do you start to measure that is it is it campaign influence the pipeline is it is it revenue attribution behind that is it is it a cost savings initiative or is it simply how many people you've educated and certified how do you actually measure that so um you know it's not to say that people aren't thinking this way but it's the the overwhelming majority is sort of focus on those lower lower value metrics to determine success and I'm not saying we shouldn't look at these they are still indicators and uh you know ways that we get a feel whether something is working but they shouldn't be the measure of success in my mind at the end of the day I don't care if I get 100 people or 500 people to the webinar for the right people and they're helping move the business forward that's the result that you want right yeah so and the the tips behind measuring success is you know don't don't fall short and start thinking about the attendee goals and registration you should have those goals but they should be a secondary focus start with the end in mind to to Sarah's point you know where what do you want to be celebrating success down the line and how do you prove the value of the webinar program if you can tie that to a revenue number pipeline generation or cost savings initiative it's going to be far more receptive when you're presenting the performance of your program internally and also align with your business to to determine what that success is sometimes marketing can be disconnected from the business right and and often that's probably why we celebrate these small wins these likes and tweets and clicks and open rates that you know nobody really should care about they just indicate this right so work out what the business cares about align to those and and you know develop a structure and a framework to measure your webinar success against that so with that yes I think look that was a 30 page report condensed and summarized and uh exhausting you know I think I think a nice way to end this particularly in you know you know the the state of of environment the the COVID world that we found ourselves in now just to share some some parting advice as to you know how marketers can do this better like you said this my advice now would be a lot different to what it would be six months ago but definitely it's very very easy to get tempted to be reactive in this sort of environment and to just go out because everyone's doing it and people are saturated with content but if you deliver it properly and if you sit down and you actually work on your strategy trust me it is bit of time that you're doing at the beginning will save you so much more in the long run and will definitely inflate your return on investment so you need to my biggest advice would be make sure that you plan for this success and always start with the end in mind but also make sure you're not just trying to do everything all at once don't necessarily use all the features don't necessarily try and just get all presenters into one room and try and do 10 people at once really sit down and plan your content create some consistency and do what works for you because we can't all be the same and we're going to have so much saturation if we try even we're seeing bottlenecks now of people running webinars between 11 and 2 so I like to run my webinars in the afternoon because people are more chilled and with people working from home our habits are changing so start to think about the external environment because you don't just want to be bundled in with everyone else's events yeah that's good that's good advice and I think what I'd add to that is you know particularly during this state of play where you know people are working from home and you know do have a lot of time on the hands we're also seeing a huge volumes of of registrational invitations you know inbox every day right you're probably the same yeah I get you know at least 10 to 20 every morning before I wake up from from different parts of the world now more than ever we have to find a way to stand out yes and I think the ones that are being innovative pushing the boundaries and not overcooking things like you stated but finding ways to be different and offer an experience that you know the audience can connect with and they'll appreciate that because they'll come back over and over again even post this crisis I think you know one of the one of the things that you know COVID has taught us is that you know businesses now need to be digital first thinking right you know the the businesses that haven't had to change and throughout the whole marketing plan for the year are still marching on because they've had a digital first strategy and webinars are key to success in in many cases so think about you know whether you're new to this journey or if it's your your matured webinar marketer think about putting in your digital program first so they have to scramble when when the next COVID wave hits us right so so that that brings us to an end thanks and yeah I'd like to thank everyone for attending we want to encourage everyone to download the report it's available as part of this experience today and until next time thanks everyone bye