 Hello and welcome to today's webcast, how to increase revenue and attendance with your webinars and webcasts. My name is Michelle and I will be your facilitator for today. Today, we will be uncovering how to make money from your online events and increase exposure. I'd like to welcome our panelists for today, Michael Bunker and Sarah Gonzalez. How are you both? Very good. Thank you. Great. Good to be here. Welcome. It's been a while since we've done a webcast. It has been. So today we are talking about online events. Can we just set the scene for everybody online and start with what type of online events there actually are? Sure. So today we're going to be talking about three different types. So you have your webinars, your studio webcasts and your hybrid events. And to break through the three of them, your webinars are generally a presentation delivered over a browser-based web conferencing tool where you're no longer collaborating but you're delivering your message in a one-way communication. Studio webcasts slightly different is where you have a dedicated brand in microsite that's built for your job and video is really key. This is also no physical attendees. It's purely digital, exactly what we're doing here today. And your last one is your hybrid events. And that's where you have a physical event with physical attendees. And we have an event happening at the same time digitally for it. All three of these are available on-demand. So once you do the live event, you can also have it hosted post-event. So the webinar platform, as we can see on the screen right now, is your general one where you have a webcam on the right-hand side, your slide presentation in the middle. And you can have your attendees list and chat on the left-hand side. Now with these, you can configure them in a bunch of different ways and you can use different mediums for it as well. You can have just the PowerPoint presentation. You can do slide, sorry, desktop sharing, application sharing, but then you can interject things like polling, questions, surveys, all these things to get good insights from your online attendees. Studio webcasts, so again that is just the digital version only. This is live to on-demand where you have, in this example, we've got Sarah, marketing manager, interviewing on a green screen. So you can have a little bit more production flair with your webcast. It's definitely a higher end product as well where you have HD video and video is really key. You do have the same features where you can have slideshow, polling, surveys, but it's definitely that higher end product. And the last one we have, sorry not the last one, but the next one is panel webcasts. These are great educational forms. This one doesn't have any slideshows because this one's purely about the video. This is one where you're trying to get a good group discussion. This one was World Suicide Prevention Day. It was a very successful event for them. And yeah, and the last one is we have our hybrid events. So hybrid events very similar to a studio webcast, except for you're going to be on site. You have your video of the presentations happening in the room, your slide presentation. Everything is being mirrored to be exactly the same that it was for the physical audience as it is for the digital audience as well. So speaking of the applications, they seem to be fairly endless. Is it possible to make money from all of them? Definitely. I think it's also important to note that these platforms are all interchangeable as well. So for a lot of people, there's so many applications happening within their organization, from your educational department to your marketing department to your comms team to even your finance team. And they all have a need to communicate somehow. However, with all of these platforms, it's not just a matter of an organization saying, oh, I can just use one of these for education or I can use one of these for corporate comms. So the main applications we're talking are education information, and we tend to see probably about 80% of people using the online platforms for this. And this is a perfect way to make money because it's basically people paying to attend your online event and to become educated, whether it's for professional development purposes or whether it's just because people want to pay for an event and they think it's a value and they see it as a higher value, which we also see all the time. So that's where you can make the money from the educational sessions. Corporate comms, I think for a lot of organizations out there, their return on investment is different. So I'm in marketing. So my return on investment a lot of the times is branding and exposure for something, not necessarily just the hard cash coming through the door as well. So another thing which we'll go into as we're going through the benefits of the platforms and everything is everyone's return on investment and what they're hoping to gain is a little bit different. Your conferences and your events and your keynote speakers, you've got these people coming and they're from overseas and they're amazing and you just don't want that person to speak once, pay a fortune for them to come out and then not have their content live on. So you can actually make money from that on an ongoing basis and that's when Michael specifically will talk about extending the life of your content. And then lead generation, which is a big one and it hasn't really taken off here in Australia. We've been doing it for a long time and in the US it's huge. So you think about these educational sessions that you're getting out there and a great way to expose your brand, invite people to an online event. And within that it's about generating leads, nurturing people through the buying cycle. So eventually you'll see some money come from it, but it's a little bit longer in terms of when you compare it to an educational session, pay $50, get an hour of education. Lead generation takes a long time for that money to actually come through. Right, so it's about choosing your event and then working out your structure. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, well you need to know your end goal before you can even start in this space. Sponsorship's another way to create revenue, but before we go into sponsorship, you need to know your application, and which is going to be the right one for what you're trying to achieve. And I think anyone out there who's listening today, if you can just type into the chat box to us and just say, you know, if you've got a situation and you don't know what application to use or you don't know much about it or maybe you've got the application or vice versa and you just really, really lost, just type it in there and it'll be great to talk to everyone today and give them some real life examples. Yeah, let us help. Yeah. That's what we're here for. We might not look like it, but we are. I think with that one, and especially with the application, you might not just need one, and we're finding more customers actually use a hybrid of about two or three of them and their education or a sponsorship will span across a couple of different ones. We'll go into that a little later on. Well, just speaking on sponsorship, this is something that a lot of people ask during the registration process. So how exactly does it work in the online environment? It works in a couple of different ways. So with a sponsorship, depending, we'll use a hybrid event example right now. So on the screen, we can see that this was actually one that we sponsored for one of our partners. So we've got our logo right below the video player saying that this webcast is proudly sponsored by, right back conferencing. And then on the right-hand side, where the slides are, it's another tab which is the sponsored exhibitors. And this is a dynamic space where we've put actually every single sponsor for that event in there. And it's all clickable, it's linkable, and this lives with a whole hosting duration of this webcast. So that's got a minimum of 12 months there for it. So huge brand exposure, huge return on investment by having people buy into that. It's no longer being at a physical event and just having, say, your pull-up banner and a delegate bag brochure. This is now just continuous exposure. And if you keep promoting the event and pushing people back there, it's just more a benefit for your sponsor. The next example we have on the screen, and I really like this, they've done this quite well is that before every session, they actually says this session is sponsored by, and it has a pre-rolled video. So it's a great way of getting them included. It's also using a bit of dead air time. It lives for the life of the content. So yeah, I think it's a quite cool one to have. And then this one I got up here, it's very similar to the first example, but instead of this being around the sponsors, this is all about how you can use custom buttons and tabs so that you can generate more marketing for yourself and your sponsor. So this one here for Diabetes Update Day, they did it really well where they had a learning tab and it actually promoted all their upcoming events down the bottom of the page. It became a lead-generating thing. So they actually have become a member and it's linking straight back to their website. You have an opportunity with an online event to market and communicate to them while the presentation's happening and it's a missed opportunity that a lot of people do. I've talked about three examples for webcasts. The similar things can be done for webinar platforms as well. You can brand those. So above the participant list, you can have sponsors branding there. You can promote links during it. There's a number of ways of being able to benefit both for it. And I think a lot of the times we see being in the industry for so long is people come to us and they don't have a lot of idea on what to do. So I think it's important if you are looking to do this type of thing, to go out there, find your provider and then get, when they ask you, okay, what do you want? It's like, I don't know what I want. Give me every single thing I can have and let me sort of pick and choose from it because you don't know what you don't know. And if you go out there saying, oh, I want a logo here or I want a link here, that's all you're really going to get. But if you can see examples of people who have done it in the past and if you can get a whole wish list almost, just put there in front of you, then you're going to be able to tailor it for every different sponsor as well, not necessarily just for yourself as a company. Great, so those examples are great, but in terms of tips, if we want to, or if we're looking to sponsor our online events, where can we start? I just gave you a tip. Oh. No, it's all right, there's more. I think the biggest thing, and this is for sponsorship in general, but more so for the online world because it is relatively new to a lot of people. So never ever assume, and we all know, the old saying makes an ass out of you and me. So use examples and images. So if I'm going out there to someone who I want to sponsor my online event, saying, would you like to be an online event sponsor for my webcast? Half the people out there are just going to, what, like, question mark, what's a webcast? So it needs to be clearly explained in terms of what it is, and most people know if you're going out to gain sponsors, you want to actually go out there and speak to them before you just send them a proposal. But clearly explain what it is, but these are the sorts of things that need to be shown to people. I find, and I think we're the same, everyone we first started, we're like, well, what's the webinar on a webcast? Show me. Oh, now I get it. And also work with your provider. Like, your provider will be more than happy to actually mock up a page with the sponsor's logos, clearly articulate what the sponsor's going to be, and even say to them, look, if you're going out with a sponsorship perspective, let us put our information in there with clear examples. And if you have three key sponsors that you get every year, get the provider to mock them up for you. By you winning that sponsorship is going to win the deal, so your provider's going to want to do that for you at the end of the day. And I definitely think it's about more than just a logo now. So going out to people and say, you can have your logo here, it gets a bit tiring after a while. And like you were just saying then, if you can go out there and you can say to people, okay, here's what your logo will look like, but look at BD, BCD and everything else you get after that. You know, it's about your branding, it's about having clickable links. So if I'm sponsoring an event, and I've got a big stand behind me, I could have a QR code there, but the power of being able to sponsor an online event and be able to click through any single thing that I want or go on demand afterwards. So my links then live on and my brand lives on for maybe 12 months, not on the track. So there's so many more benefits for people that they just don't realize. Or you can be really quiet and actually sell two forms of sponsorship, one for the live event and then sell it for the on demand as well. And it's two forms of revenue stream. And yeah, it's two customers doing that. And the Gold Silver Bronze thing, I attended an event last week, and this actually came up as, it is a little bit old school now. And for an online event, it's probably not the best way to approach it. Would you say? No, I wouldn't ever, with the Gold Silver and Bronze, they're the very traditional physical event sponsors. But you kind of, it's the value of actually selling sponsorships purely for the webcast, that's just the one sponsor. It's not, you're not combining it. Or alternatively, like full day conferences that we have, some people sponsor individual sessions. So then it's a lot easier to chop it up saying, okay, you get this keynote and you get this keynote, but their individual branded pages are not shared. You're not having to look at other people's stuff. It's all nice, clean, simple. Yeah, okay, a lot nicer. Just taking it back a little bit, maybe Sarah, this might be a question for you. When it comes to launching your events, do you have any tips? Well, I think, like we said earlier, and we keep going back to it. And if there's one thing that you take away today, it's to realize and understand that you need to know your goal and start with the end in mind beforehand. So with this especially, this sort of this sponsorship and how you're going to make money from this really needs to be defined. So another few tips on here just before we go into launching is using stats. So going out there in your prospectus and saying, this is an online event. Did you know that we have a goal to reach this many people? Or I'm going out there and I'm going to target ABC company to actually sponsor my event. Maybe they're already doing webinars and webcasts. Maybe they know a little bit more about it than what I think. So maybe I should really try and target them more. So I think that sort of stuff really needs to be defined and that's all in the planning ahead stage. And I think you'd agree, Michael, that a lot of people go into this and they have a program, they know what they want to do, but they don't really, they just think, oh, I'm just going to send them and I'm just going to market it like I normally would. And yeah, it's totally different, unfortunately. So depending on the application and the program that you're trying to do, so hybrid events, yeah, you want to try to get people there as soon as possible. It's bums on seats, you want to advertise that a few months up because travel's involved everything. For the webcast, you're giving people the convenience of watching this either at home or work. So you don't need to advertise at the same time. You need to market them separately and especially with segmenting your database as well. So if you're having your conference in WA, don't advertise the webcast in WA until the week before, but advertise the other states two weeks prior saying, hey, you can't travel to make it, we're now doing a webcast. So now click here and buy the session. So you're creating a new revenue opportunity, you're saving the money and I know a lot of questions are going to come through about, do you price it differently? I want those people who advocates don't price it exactly the same, just remove the social engagements and food and everything, but you're giving them the exact same content, access to the exact same speakers. So I wouldn't cost it any differently because you're saving them money. That's a good point. But yeah, especially with planning ahead, think about them differently. E-learning programs and everything, you do need a nurture and that wholly comes back to what you said before about trying to get people to, and promoting your events, keeping them up to date what you're going to be doing because people to commit to that can take a little bit longer and it can take a little while longer to actually build your online community. But once you do, it's continuous people will keep joining. But yeah, though, you do need to talk to us more about how you're wishing to plan it because there are a lot of questions. So yeah, planning ahead is obviously a big one. And then defining your marketing plan and we'll go into a marketing plan shortly, but I think the biggest thing is realizing that you're dealing with an online audience. So you want to try and do as much of your marketing online as possible and it is going to be a little bit different and it is going to be standalone to your actual campaign that you run on a regular basis. The delivery of your event as well. So obviously a lot more goes into it when you're dealing with online events. You've got technology that comes into play. You've got things that are going to happen that you can't control, that are going to come into play. And it's more about how you deal with that or having that backup plan there. So I know a lot of organizations tend to go for managed services because then it sort of removes the burden from them. Even if it's for the first two or three events they hold. And then they actually, oh, I've got this now. I can do it on my own. So it's more about that piece of mind. But delivery, we're talking audio, we're talking about presenters that might not even be in the same country. You know, having the right equipment. If someone has their headset turned up differently, that is going to impact the entire online audience. And you only get one chance to make a first impression. And I always say, if I'm in a room, and I don't do this by the way, but if I'm in a room, it's a lot easier for me to close out of a webinar than to get up and walk out in front of, you know, the presenter on stage. You feel a little bit bad, you feel a bit awkward. So really consider your online audience when you are launching this event and their experiences. And I would recommend, before we started doing them, I used to go and register for every single webinar possible, just to see how people run it, just to see how the registration process works. And if there's one that you don't like, it's like, well, I'm not doing that. I'm going to make sure that I don't send out that many emails or I don't do this. Whereas if there's one that really, really appeals to you, you can sort of take that sort of stuff. And it's quite a simple event to run once you get everything into place. It's just figuring out what you want and how you want to run it. Yeah, what does it say? Like mimicking is the best form of flattery or whatever. Something like that. But yeah, but it's true. You want to learn how like, there's a number of other presenters out there that I watch constantly just to find out their hints and tips of what they do. And yeah, register for as many as possible. We live in an on-demand society. We'll get into this later on about how many people that actually expect. But yeah, register and pick and choose the ones you want to watch, especially for the free. And then, you know, nurture in your community and we'll go into that when we talk about marketing. But attendance, and I think attendance is why a lot of people join today. We can see attendant rates are dropping in terms of trends and what we're seeing. And to be honest, I can't see them going higher for any reason at all. And I think it's about, you know, you send out your first invitation for an event and then you have people register and you'll have at least 10% of them write you an email back saying, oh, is this recorded? Can I, you know, can I watch it afterwards? But yeah, attendance is a huge thing. And if you can try and find a way to get more people online, then obviously try. But don't be too disheartened if you aren't giving those people online because they're going to want to watch after the fact anyway. And they might be more engaged then. You know, if you're telling me when to watch something, I'm going to sit there and I'm going to probably be doing 20 other things because that's how we work now and we try a multitask. And if you're telling me, okay, here's a link, you can watch it at a convenient time for you. Maybe they're going to be more engaged and maybe they'll then, you know, respond to your call to action or something else. Yeah, we have actually just had a comment come through from Fabian. So thank you, Fabian, for sending that through. Hi Fabian. Hi Fabian. And the comment that's come through is just that they're currently using webinars to educate their professionals and business owners. And they're using social media to promote their series and topics to increase registration but they've discovered that the actual attendees for each event has dropped drastically. So can we maybe talk about attendance? Yeah. Yeah, I think just people need to realize you're not going to get full attendance on a live webcast. It's just not the way the market is. Especially if it's free. Especially if it's free, exactly. If you're delivering free educational content, your average is going to see 30 to 45% of people actually attend a live event. And that's just the way the industry is going. As Sarah just mentioned before, we live in an on-demand society. I register for so many webinars a month and I only will probably see a handful of them just because I don't have enough time to watch all those free webinars. But in saying that, I'm registering because I want to go back and watch the on-demand. And that's the different stat that we need to be looking at in the society. It's that when you have a live event, you're actually wanting to measure how engaged they were, how long they stayed online, how did they participate in everything? Like was that an engaged webinar for your live? And your on-demand, you want to look at how many people you get in the on-demand. How long was their average viewing time? Were they staying on? Where were their drop-off points? All of those key analytics. And again, that goes back to sponsorships. Being able to provide them that feedback of how the on-demands being ingested as well is valuable. And I think Fabian, for you, a few different things that we've tried in the past and that has actually worked. Before, when people register, from the time they're registered to the time your event happens, there's still a bit of a lag time there. So what can you do to engage those people without bombarding them and being like a stalker within that period? But what can you do sometimes in the confirmation email that you send to people that says, ask a question beforehand and you'll get priority on the actual day or something like that. Send them out a document or entire sent to join because they're going to get a free e-book or something like that. But in saying that, like Michael said, I think there used to be a time and even going just only five years ago where webinars were, okay, do I have my webinar I want to speak to you? Now they're actually part of your overall marketing plan for a lot of people. So we have to get more intelligent in the way we do things. We have to get more sophisticated and realize we're capturing all this data but it's just sitting there at the end. So you put your webinar out, some people attend, some don't. You're getting all those stats for people who actually watch live. But then afterwards, two months later, you've got all these other people going to your site. How are you engaging them constantly? Are you advertising your upcoming webinars on the site where you've got other webinars hosted? There's just so much. I reckon we could do a whole session just on on-demand content and how to maximize that. But yeah, as we go into the marketing, you might pick up some more tips, Fabian, but yeah, just don't be too disheartened, I think. Great answer, thank you. We've also had another comment come through from Ruth. It might be best place to answer this after the marketing stage, but she has just asked, how do we get them to the registration page and how to increase registration? Perfect, yeah. Is that something we can touch on? Yes, we'll touch on that later. We'll touch on that next. Perfect. But yeah, just before that as well, you've launched your event and this is a perfect example of what people do. We get so excited with the marketing and the delivery and the attendance and then we're like, oh yeah, the presenter will present. It's like, well no, your presenter should be probably 60% of what you're doing, working with the presenter. Having that presenter and organizer alignment and I've been on webinars before and I've facilitated webinars where there's actually cyberbullying happening because the presenter is talking about something completely different that was promised in the marketing material and there's no alignment there between the company and the presenter and the presenter then gets on and they've never presented a webinar before and they don't know how to talk to a camera. I always find it hard talking about presenter stuff when I am presenting because there's a big chance I could be doing it wrong. But yeah, the presenter, they're going to make or break your event at the end of the day. You could have the most amazing content and you can have 500 people online, give people 10 seconds and if your presenter does not make them go well, then they're off. What was the start of the Red Back Report about enthusiasm over content? Yeah, so we're going to launch the Red Back Report again but basically it's going out on an annual basis and saying to people, what's a great webinar experience for you? What makes you want to attend and what makes you want to stay online? And in terms of presenters and the stuff, it wasn't about how knowledgeable they were. It wasn't about how well they spoke. It was more about their enthusiasm and their passion when they're online as well. So if they're sitting there, blah, blah, blah, behind a webinar platform with a PowerPoint slide, you can see what that's like for an online attendee. And I think, like I said, if you're running these events, you need to get online and experience what it's like for an online attendee. And I hope that you attend a bad one because a lot of the times you'll get on there and you'll be like, okay, I don't want that. When I get my presenter, they're going to be amazing and I'm going to make sure they're trained and make sure they're coached and make sure they're not a bit of a dud. Absolutely. So I hope we're meeting some expectations today. Okay, well touching on marketing then, I think that a lot of people fall into the trap of assuming that marketing your online event could be the same as any marketing plan. Is it? No. Okay, so obviously there's a lot of elements that are the same but Michael, you were going to talk about the Rural Women's Association. That sort of falls into attendance and marketing. It kind of falls into attendance and marketing and yeah, the poor, she did an amazing job her second year at and the first year she ran into, so rural women do a purely digital event where they connect numerous rural women around Australia via digital event only and she used the wrong platform the first year. She went out to market, she found an overseas platform, it didn't offer support, she ended up being quite costly for it and she didn't actually figure out what application was going to best work for because at the end of the day she needed a hybrid solution across a lot of them. And so the following year, once she did some more research and worked with a good provider that was able to say look, you need teleconferencing and webcast and this is how we're going to connect your speakers and all these things to put a full plan together. She had the platform and everything locked down. She was able to reach over 500 attendants via the live and on demand which was a huge success for her but then the marketing side of things as well that she worked with herself and myself quite closely about how do I engage people? How do I get the word out there? She had a beautiful website, no traffic going to it and it really again started with, well, if your aim is to get here, where do we have to start? And so we had like, she was only a couple of weeks up in the event and we had to start from scratch, square one again, whole new email marketing campaign using different language, removing a lot of images from it because people's emails weren't rendering them so it was plain text work perfectly for her. So there's a lot of things that you need to try and fail at to find out what's going to happen and especially with the email marketing side of things, A-B testing's not done a lot and so A-B testing is the same content but used either two different titles or two different body messages to see which one's going to go out the best and do it to half your database. So send out the same thing at the same time but with a couple of different changes to see which one gets the highest open rates. And I think one of them ones was a customer that I know who was in the wedding industry and because so many weddings, emails and everything that come out are so heavy with images, as soon as people open them, they were deleting them. So we changed the email marketing campaign to just be text only and they ended up getting a 60% open rate after that because people weren't realizing that it was a marketing thing straight off. It was a personal way of them doing it. So people were a lot more engaged with it. They scrolled to the bottom like, oh, it's actually for a webinar. I'm interested in this topic. Click through to the registration page. So even with Fabian, whether you're trying to get people there and everyone else, like A-B testing is quite valuable and I recommend everyone to do it. Just back on that rural women's, what was the end result? End result was, yeah, she had over 500 attendees for it and she's still getting more. So because of the contents living for 12 months with an option to extend afterwards, she's still getting people back there. She gets analytics of which ones were the best sessions. She had over something like 45 different presenters in that week. So it was a week long digital event up to eight sessions a day. And so she has full visibility to go back to sponsors and potential investors for the next one saying, look, these speakers were amazing. This is the people that I've hit and she can reach everyone via that method. Very successful. Very successful, yes. Great content. There was a good content. Yeah, no, there was good content. It was quite diverse. There's even an online yoga session as well. There was all video-based content pre-recorded and then live Q&A where we were then dialing in using teleconferencing to connect people and Michael Harris, who's our technician on today, will remember the event very well because he was locked in a room for a week to do it. Yeah, choosing your application and marketing, they come hand in hand. So if we had to pick some top tips out for Ruth then on how to increase registrations and leading people to that registration process? Well, I think there's two parts to this, Ruth, and everyone else out there. And I think you need to think, the people you're targeting, are they new people? So is it fully generation or is it members or customers and people who you already have an active community built? Because I know with us when we started our webinar program, we didn't have a community and you had to build it. So eventually over time, you need to find ways to nurture that community. So first of all, let's just assume that Ruth's dealing with members or customers out there. So consider your overall strategy. So if you're going out there and you wanna use social media, for example, to advertise your webinars, but you don't have a current social media page or you don't use social media in any of your other marketing plan, why would you all of a sudden use it? Do you know what I mean? And it's about building those people up on these sort of areas. So whether it's your database, whether it's your social media platforms, LinkedIn, I've just discovered and I love it. I think it's an amazing tool. LinkedIn advertising, sorry. But one of the things I think you can't just go out there and start advertising your webinars to people. You need to sort of warm them up if you like. It's like, you know, you just proposed into me on a first date like you tried what, three years ago? And I said no. You need to actually build up that. It's a damaging accusation. You need to actually build it up. And you can't just go out there and say, okay, register for my webinar. It's like, well, what are you giving me first? How are you nurturing me and giving me something in return? So think about that. Like I said, keep it online and use dedicated invitations. So what we usually do, and this works quite well for us, we send a dedicated email so we don't bury it in our newsletters or anything like that. It's dedicated. It's about the event. The subject line might not be the same as the actual topic as well. So the topic for today, you know how to increase revenue, blah, blah. Maybe the subject line will be something like, how much money are you making on your online events? That's a bit salesy, but you get the point. So, you know, using those different ways to persuade people to open then. Sorry. Oh no, it's true. But it's again, choosing like members, customers, who your audience is, it's definitely gonna entail who what's the best communication for it. Direct email campaigns are definitely the best if you have the database for it. But then again, if you're trying to look for a specific demographic, which is I'm looking for women and men in the ages of between 25 and 35, Facebook marketing, Facebook's amazing for that now because it has all those analytics behind it and you can start to get those people to register with you. So then you can build your database to do the direct email campaigns. Exactly. So you've got that targeted advertising and remarketing. So like Michael just said, you've got the Facebook advertising when you can actually drill down on specifics. LinkedIn also does that as well. But then at the same time, if you're going to do this, you need to have a really good LinkedIn company page or a really good Facebook company page that people are going to see how credible you are afterwards. You want to have a lot of followers on there. But then you can do as much advertising as you like, but if people get to your registration page and it's not easy and it's not something that they want to register for anymore, they're going to jump off. So I think getting your registration page and having it convert properly is probably number one first and foremost. So finding a system where you redirect people to register for something, if you're going back and you're doing some reporting and you can see that you've only got a 2% conversion rate on everyone who's actually coming to that page, maybe you need to change that up a bit. Maybe you don't need to find out people's dietary requirements for an online event. But it sounds funny, but some people just go into it and they're like, oh, I need to know all these different things and it's like, well, no, with the online environment, all you really need is their first or just their email address really. And then you can start to profile them over some time. So if they do come to register for another event a month down the track, instead of asking them for their email address, ask them for their company name. So if you are doing it for educational purposes and you do need a lot of that information, ask it as drop-down boxes as opposed to, you know, check boxes or free text or something where you're going to get a lot of confused information coming through. Other than that, I think email signatures are really underused. They're underused, definitely. That is perfect advertising space, really, for anyone. Having your events pages up to date as well. But I think the biggest thing for a program if you are launching a program is to start nurturing your community and blend them. So if I have a webinar program and I define it as, you know, it's going to be 12 months, we've got 12 webinars happening and they're a mix of webinars and webcasts because I want to do some different engagement throughout. I send out my invite the first week in February. Then someone, their event is actually held a week later. I've still got three weeks in between my next webinar invitation. And am I just, do I just want to be known as someone who delivers webinars or do I want to be seen as a thought leader? Do I want to be seen as an organization that's going to nurture a community and build them up? And then by the time they're online, they all actually start to know each other. They're all part of it. And they've actually been, I've been in front of mind. So an example of this is, you know, my webinar series is on HR best practices. So I do a webinar on HR. Maybe, you know, two weeks later, I'll send a white paper on something like, you know, top leadership tips. Or if I know they're women, top leadership tips for women or something like that. Then the event, the webinar, is also something on leadership. So in that white paper, I mean, why don't you register for our webinar? It's on this date, blah, blah. Then after that, it could be, you know, some, you know, top 10 tips to deal with bullying and harassment within the workplace. So there's a theme coming through, but it's different types of content. And webinars are perfect for your content marketing plan. But I think people need to realize that some people are visual. Some people like to watch. Some people like to read. Some people want short content. Some people want blogs. So it's really about just finding that balance. But hopefully those tips will get you through. I think there's a valuable point in there as well, where, especially when you're trying to get people to register and you want to keep it as small as possible, if you do a webinar and then after that, you follow up with a white paper, that's a great opportunity to get people, not just to send a link, but send a link for them to download it. And actually opt in. So then you have a different registration form for them to download. And you're building on your database, you're getting more information out of them. You're asking them, what type of business environment are you in? And it's a different form each time. So it starts linking back to your CRM and your database is just becoming richer. Exactly. And I think hopefully you can all start to sense a theme here where we're talking about a whole content program, not just a webinar here and there, or you might be advertising your content and your blogs and your social media stuff all separately. Bring it all together. Have it work for you. And then all the, everything's done there. It's ready to go. So it's pretty clear that we need to think fairly far ahead and have a good plan when it comes to increasing attendance. Just in terms of revenue, Sarah, you mentioned at the beginning that there are different ways to make money. How can we do it? So many different ways. So like I said before, we did speak about the way that we actually communicate to people and the application is going to depend on what sort of money you wanna make. So if I'm doing educational events, then I'm going to maybe just charge for them as a one-off and that's how I can make money. Sponsorship, once again, I think if we wrap up with that, just telling people that it's a great way to get people on board and it's a great way to also increase the dollar value of something that's not just going to live for one event. It's going to live for an extended period of time. Who's the last person that we actually did a sponsorship event with? The meeting's managers with one, the other ones have been, why do I have a mental break right now? I've been on annual leave for the last week, so apologies for that. No, there's about half a dozen but I've got a couple of sponsorship perspectives out there right now which we're actually building dedicated pages for for them to show to their potential sponsors and what they outline on them is the whole ability of the click to call. So the call to action buttons, they are linked back to the sponsor's website, asking the sponsor to get in contact with them so they can build their own registration email. But then we also look at putting things like Google Analytics on the page so you can see if they're actually clicking on the sponsor's links now and then that way you can say, look, you've actually had in this 12 months hosting, 80% of attendance have clicked on your link. I think what we'll do for everyone out there with the recording that we send out within 48 hours, we'll include a link to the example sponsorship perspectives in there just so everyone can get an understanding because it is quite daunting and you might have one for your other events but going out for the online environment will be a good idea to actually see how things work. But yeah, like we said earlier, we're talking about paid educational events so professional development, getting people on for that, charging for your hybrid events. Oh, definitely, definitely charging the same amount. And even for the on-demand, you can still charge for that but I don't recommend ever charging the people that attended live to also go on the on-demand. And I mean physical attendance, like physical attendees should get that included in their ticket so they go back in a later day and watch the on-demand. Yeah, perfect. And then lead generation as well. So like I said, it's a much longer buying cycle but I think what you'll find if you are doing this product launches are also a great way to, a great application to use when it comes to online events. So consider how you can take your product to market but then you know when you get those leads that actually come in through the registration process, what are you going to do with them? Are you going to work with sales? Are you going to put them on a nurture enlist? How are you actually going to deal with those leads that come through? Great. Now you've both mentioned on-demand quite a fair bit. Is it true that you can make money off this as well? Yes, yes, yes, yes. All the time, you just make your money off of it. How have you got that yet, Michelle? I'm sorry. No, look, on-demand content has the ability just because it's, again, you're sponsoring it as we talked about before. That's making them money. They're paying for your actual digital event. That sponsorship has taken the burden of you having to spend a couple thousand dollars on a webcast that's paid for by them and they get the benefits out of it. The hosting side of things, you've got two different options there and I won't get too detailed into it but you've got your UGC which is your user-generated hosting environment. So that's your YouTubes, Vimeo, all of that where you can upload your content for free and then you have SaaS which is software as a service where that's a dedicated branded hosting environment where you have a lot more control over that. So if you're hosting a series of content you can then put custom links around it saying click here to register for my next event or click here to download. We're on your YouTubes and stuff. You've got a little tiny description text underneath. You can put links in there but if you had just all links it's not actually talking about the event and what's gonna go for that. And then the segmentation. With digital content, like we're doing right now we could split this into every one of our slides and make many videos out of it and we can use that for promotional material. We can use that for on-demand content to promote upcoming events and grab little snippets out of it. We're working with a lot of conferences right now and especially as we talked about before like those keynote speakers they've traveled all the way from the States, Europe, anywhere and you're selling that hour long piece but then you can take two minutes of his speech out and you can use it as a promo video to advertise the following year. So Ippa did that really well where they had their conference. They did it as a webcast. It was the very first time they've ever done it so they only had minimal attendees which was still over 100 that were paid for people to watch. It was a fully paid for event as well. They used that content for a whole 12 months while I was hosting to keep pushing people back there to promote the event for the following year. They then sold out physical event and they had over 700 people online. So it was a massive increase in revenue it was a huge drive for them and it shows you the power that you have with a digital event. As long as you have a strategy with the on-demand and a lot of people, so much emphasis goes into the live event. Okay, I'm doing this live event. I've planned, planned, planned, executed. Okay, I'm on to my next project. That was only half the battle. The next step is the on-demand. How are you going to utilize it to actually promote future events? How are you going to use it to build case studies? A lot of people back in the day would have to wait for a case study to come out and then they do a webinar on that. Now people are doing webinars on a topic to make a case study because it's changing the order of how we're delivering content and creating it. Definitely. And here's an example of a hosting page. So with this, obviously, most people would know what YouTube and your video channels look like. The great thing about those is they are free. So as soon as you get the link from any of your webinars or webcasts, you simply upload that into your YouTube channel and then you just embed that link within your actual website or your events page. So if you've got, if you manage your own WordPress site within your organization or maybe you have a tech team that you work with it, they'll know how to embed a YouTube link. And you can actually then create a library of things there to see as well. Great for membership as well because a lot of people are like, well, what am I going to get out of this? So you can show people. Once again, it's about showing people. Here are the webinars we run. Here's how they were valued to you. Why don't you go on and take a look at some. The one online is a SAS example that Michael was just speaking about then. So it's actually having a branded page and that's actually created by an external provider and within that you've got the data capture. So I can then, I can say, okay, this is a page for everyone who attended live. I'm going to upload their email addresses so they can just go in and watch. But for everyone who wants to attend now, moving forward, I'm going to put a payment gateway on top of that. And I'm going to charge those people if their email address isn't already in there. If that makes sense. So it's about using different platforms in different ways. Obviously the SAS platforms, you do actually have to pay for them but these days they're not hugely expensive. I think technology is just moving so quickly and there's so many startup companies out there doing them. You've got full branding, you've got the data collection. And if anyone else is interested in the on-demand stuff, a little bit more, if you head down to the resources tab, you'll actually find the CPR guide. So that's when we talk about Create, Promote and Recycle and that's all about on-demand content. And it goes into those hosting example pages a little bit further than what we've talked about. I think that's it beyond us today. But yeah, hopefully that gives people a good insight into how they can make money after their event. And I think the way that the industry is going and I can't wait for this year's Redback Report to come out to actually see what people are saying. I think that's exactly where we need to start thinking a lot more. And once again, starting with the end in mind, how can we make money once the event is over and not just for that session beforehand or whatever. Okay. Well, just being a little bit conscious of time because I know we're very appreciative that everybody's put aside 45 minutes for us today. But I think this brings us to our Q&A session. So just as a reminder, if anybody has any questions or any scenarios you'd like us to help you with, please do send them through. And I know, Sarah, you mentioned just before that there are some resources in the resource tab. We've got the CPR guide in there. Are there any others in there? Yeah, so we've also got a link to join our community in there. So within that, all that we send you is links, invitations to these types of webinars that we run on a fortnightly basis. And then our blog Friday, which is just combined tips that we talk about throughout the entire year, but it's in a really easy to read format. And it's just bullet points here and there and it's full of education. And the blog actually comes from everyone within Redback as well. So it's not just me, yourself or bunker talking. It's actually a whole range of people. And the presenter guide, I really recommend that you all take a look at the presenter guide. This was only launched last week. And like we said earlier, your presenter is so important to your online event and the success of your online event. So this is a guide that you can actually forward to your presenters once they say yes, or once you're thinking of actually having them. And as long as you give it to them beforehand, they've got tips on theirs when it comes to creating their PowerPoint, things they can and can't do so they don't get freaked out the day before. How to present, what we recommend, how to have everything set up internally, how to create PowerPoint presentations that are really, really good and really, really attractive online. So a few different things there. So feel free to take a look down there. Great. Well, thank you both for today's presentation. Thank you. It's been a very engaging session and hopefully everybody's been able to take away a few top tips from us. There's a survey there as well. There is a survey. Be kind. But I think we mentioned before that this presentation will be sent out within 48 hours. So if anybody, hopefully you haven't, but if you have missed anything, you are able to watch it again. I'd like to thank both of you. Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you. You've been the hostess with the most. Thank you. Have you got any final tips or anything you'd like to say before we close off for today? Definitely with the, I think there's two just for the sponsorship side of things. So definitely work with your providers if it's something that you're looking to get into. For webinars, the main thing you'll get for sponsorship is the on-demand. It's about making sure the recording of it has all that sponsorship information and their logos, everything. So when it's hosted, they get the hosting duration of it. So they get that exposure for that. So that's a real key one with webinars. With the webcast side of things, because it's the brand and microsite, work with your provider who's gonna be doing it for you, get them to build you dummy pages so you can show it to your potential sponsors because they've got a lot more buying power having seen the actual samples, see what the click-through rates are gonna be like and then present that back. Cause yeah, if you win the sponsorship, your provider wins the deal. So they're gonna work with you. And I think mine is, I just have this wish, I have this wish that everyone will just eventually see webinars as a full, as part of their entire content marketing strategy and not just something that's ducked over to the side and that they do see it as an end-to-end process. And like Michael said earlier, it's not just about holding your webinar, moving on to the next thing. It's about managing it as an entire process. And I think down the track, if not already, you have people within your organization who are just running your webinars for you on a regular basis and that will be the actual job role. So I think the more you can actually see them like that and the more you can start embedding that within your organization now, the better off you're going to be in the long one. Great. Well, thank you guys once again. Thank you. And thank you to everybody who has joined us online. And just remember, please do, if you do need any more assistance or advice on how to host your webinars and webcasts, we are always here to help. Thanks everyone. Thank you.