How to Win with Webinars: 5 B2B Marketing Pros Share Revenue-Driving Plays

Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet, in the X5 community, but it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming, which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier, versus what just can be another thing to manage. Or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website Optimizely. Humans, that's us, of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now, right? Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for the stuff that each or week, so you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job on into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing. Again, I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. Optimizely.com/exit5. That's Optimizely.com/exit5. Go and check out their agents. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the agentic web built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search. No developer needed. Your website isn't just your homepage anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer. Before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams used to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at webflow.com/4/exit5. That's webflow.com/FOR/exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerrard show. Hey, well live. We're live. This is a big day, man. There's a lot happening. Daesh, you're good to see you. Where are you calling in from today, my friend? Good to see you. Dave, I'm precisely three hours away from where the coolest marketing conference is going to take place. I'm in Ottawa. Okay, little exit five drive plug here. Are you coming to drive? Hell yeah. Of course. Are you? I will. Lord willing, I think there's 22, maybe 22 or 29 left abs as of this morning. I'm a marketer. I'm a serial rounder, upper or rounder, downer. So there might as well be like zero tickets left at this point. But I'm excited to be here. We put a ton of work. These sessions have been awesome. And we've put a ton of work into making this one even more awesome, if you will. Like, you know, Daesh, you were on the prep call yesterday, last night. We just had this session. Just quick reaction to what we're going to go through today before I get into the spiel here. It's going to be so fun. And I've sat through a lot of terrible webinars. So what I love is that this is all about how to make your webinar actually great. And the speaker lineup is awesome. And everyone's prep has been amazing. So yeah, I'm glad. Okay. All right. So as Daesh just said today, our focus is on webinars. Real quick. If you've never been to one of these sessions before, this is called Exified Live. We do them twice a month. I'm here at Hula in Burlington, Vermont. I have to get out of the house today and do this. And we do them twice a month because look, I believe you can get a lot of knowledge from AI, but there's a different level of knowledge that you can get from the people that are actually doing the same job as you are your peers in B2B marketing. Our job with these sessions is to give you real tactical specific examples of what real humans are doing in marketing. And today, the topic is all about webinars. We've got five B2B marketers joining us. They are going to share their single best performing webinar play. What they did, how they did it, and what it drove. This is real tactics and real numbers because despite what you might read on LinkedIn, we run the probably largest community of B2B marketers and webinars are not dead. In fact, for almost every single person here today, you're doing some type of webinar program at your company. And so your goal is to take notes, learn something, bring it back, put it in the chat right now. Why are you here? What do you want to get out of this session? Hopefully, it gets smarter about running interesting webinars. The format for today as a reminder, each speaker gets about five minutes. They're going to go through their play. And then we have two minutes of Q&A with the speaker. So get your questions into the chat. Our team will organize them. Hopefully, we'll have some time to do that. And then at the end, obviously, we got to make this little competition. We're going to vote on which play you're most likely to put into action that we're going to ask the winner why they think it resonated. So super fun format. These have been really engaging and super fun. So before we get into today's show really quickly, I want to give a shout out to our friends at Zoom for sponsoring this session. Check it out. Look at this fresh makeover here. Zoom webinars and events. They're the virtual event platform built to engage connect and scale. You know, I love webinars. I'm not afraid to say it in this building. I feel safe saying that. By the way, outside of here, I don't like to let people know. But my last two companies I've been running webinars and now here at exit five webinars are huge part of our content machine. Despite what you've heard about webinars being dead in B2B, they're not. It's one of our best performing channels period. By the way, I think I'm the one that makes up that narrative and then I get to defend it. So it kind of works. That's why we've partnered with Zoom to take our love for webinars to a whole new level starting today. Every exit five live session through the rest of the year, going to be right here on Zoom webinars and events. And as you'll see today, they have an entire platform for running marketing events that includes registration pages to match your brand, the tools you need to promote your events and live engagement tools. So people actually stay tuned in, get custom branding, production tools and built an analytics with no technical skills required. Look, we have a high bar for our content at exit five and webinars are a huge part of that. So I'm excited to be doing it all on Zoom webinars and events now and moving forward. And look, on the topic of webinars, man, I think you're going to get some value out of today. We got five people here, awesome crew of marketers. So we're going to do quick intros. We got Logan, Mary, Caroline, Christina and Josh. I think we're good. I think that's it. Housekeeping out of the way. We're ready to get into the meat of this show. Dash, am I good? I missed anything. Should we bring up our guy Logan to kick this off? Let's do quick intros. Let's introduce all the speakers and then we'll bring up Logan. Okay, perfect. So Logan, do you want to quickly introduce yourself 20 seconds? Yeah. Hey guys, Logan Liles founder of Demand Shift. We actually run webinars as a service for our clients. I'm going to be showing you guys the two step sign-up flow that five X star conversions and a point that you're probably not thinking you can drive conversions in your webinar flow. Awesome. Mary, little intro for you. Hi, I'm Mary, revenue marketing at Calla Remind. And I'm going to show you how we as two people do a webinar series that compounds over time. Period. Caroline. Hi, I'm Caroline in right. I'm the head of marketing at Phase Shift, just joined the company a week ago. So excited about that. But I'll be talking about something I ran at my old company. The post webinar follow-up play that drove $1 million in pipeline in one week. That's a lot of pipeline. Christina. Hi, I'm Christina. I'm Director of Marketing at Treasury 4. I'm going to be talking about a virtual webinar series that I'm running on the spine of building it as a conference format. Okay, Josh, round us out. Hey, I'm Josh. I had a search for marketing at AirOps running our webinars program. I'm here in New York City. I'll be talking about influencer and automation plays behind our best performing webinars. Excited to be here. Excited to have you. Okay, now let's bring up our friend Logan with the cinematic backdrop. I love it. All right. My name is Logan. I'm the founder of DemandShift. And before I started running webinars as a service for our clients, one thing you need to know is that for two years, I was an in-house SaaS marketer. Like a lot of you guys who are probably here live today. And I ran webinars for two years for teamwork.com. And the embarrassing thing was I was hitting what I now called the conversion cliff. We were seeing high webinar registrations. We were even seeing people attend multiple sessions. Our attendance rate was pretty good. But the conversion to pipeline was woefully small. I won't actually put a number to it. But let's just say I wasn't happy with it. I actually set out and surveyed 250 plus B2B marketing teams that are running webinars. And I found that I wasn't alone in this conversion cliff. I found that most B2B webinar campaigns convert at less than 2% to book sales call or demo or trial or whatever that next step was. So I started to think about, well, where are the conversion moments, right? They're typically after the webinar and our follow-up emails. I know one of the other speakers is going to talk about where you can tweak that. And there's something to that. There's during the live show. And that's another spot. But I started thinking where are other opportunities? Because even with the live show on average, only about 35% of your registrants who said they were interested in the topic actually show up live. But then I realized, what do 100% of your webinar registrants see? They see your thank you message. They see the thank you page, right? That is a 100% conversion. And we're marketers. We love 100% of anything, right? And so what I did was I replaced that what I called dead end thank you page with a survey that was designed to leverage the fact that that someone just showed interest. This is one of their highest intent moments because they're interested in the topic. They wanna be educated on it and they were willing enough to give you their name and email and whatever other things are on your form. And so it's this two-step process from sign up to survey that allowed me to actually increase conversions, like I said, by 5X, and actually book demos, calls, and trials before the webinar even started with about a five to eight question survey that's meant to qualify folks, put an offer in front of them if they're qualified and give them the opportunity to convert. A little bit of detail, we don't have time to build the whole thing in front of you guys, but a few things to think about how this might work for you. You go from sign up, you redirect to the survey, we've tested a lot of language. This, that's on screen, if you wanna screenshot it, complete your free webinar registration by answering a few questions here. Works the best in my experience. A few other things, you wanna start with easy questions, you wanna ask for only what's useful. So for instance, if it's something you aren't gonna use to segment or take someone down a certain path, don't ask it. If it's something you could get through enrichment, like a LinkedIn profile URL, don't ask someone to type that in, you're gonna increase your conversions that way. Create some branch logic, whether you use type form or high level or any other sort of survey tool. Surveys are a great way to personalize that experience, so take advantage of that. And then most important, in with an outcome based CTA. Now I actually had a client who we implemented this for and they didn't believe me when I told them that over 90% of people across webinar campaigns typically complete the second step of this flow in the survey. So I just brought some screenshots to show you guys the 91 and 94% here. This is worked in services as well as SaaS. So here's an example of an agency offering a LinkedIn ads audit. Again, they only saw this final CTA question. If they were qualified, then if they say yes, they have the opportunity to book a call right there. We actually have clients where they're booking more calls before the webinar than they are live or after. But now we have three conversion points and other speakers are gonna help you guys convert more live and after. But I guarantee converting before is probably not something that you're thinking about right now. This is another example in SaaS was cool about this one as you see the branching logic. We actually have two different versions of the CTA based on who the prospect is and the questions that they answered earlier in the survey so we could customize that last question. And then you notice the calendar doesn't just say like book a demo, right? That's outcome based as well. So those are some of the things you can do to use this flow and make sure that you're converting at a high rate. What's cool is you can also use this survey data even for people who don't say yes, you've got more segmentation data to do more personalized follow up. You can hand your sales team not just a list of emails but actually all the survey responses that people gave with their registration. And if a webinar about webinars wasn't meta enough, I'm actually gonna do a deep dive on this two step sign up flow on a future webinar. If you wanna scan the QR code, you can register for that. And oh, by the way, you can see it live in action. So that's as meta as we can get today. - Amazing. - There you work. - Okay, I'm just gonna reset our timer here and we're gonna do two minutes of Q&A. That sound was the highlight of our prep call last night, learning that, so that's why we smile there. Okay, Dasha, why don't you take some questions for Logan that we got? - Yeah, one question that came up in the chat is what software are you using for running the survey? And I guess my follow up question to that is like, does it matter? - There's lots of ways you can do it. So I've done it two different ways and I'm working on a third. So the first way was using un-bounce for the landing page type form for the survey. And then both of those integrate really well with HubSpot. I've also consolidated it and done it all in high level to do the landing page, the form, the survey, and the automations in the back end. Option three is where we're all looking. Hey, you could probably vibe code this. - What happens if someone wants to skip the survey? Do they still get to watch the webinar? - Yeah, and that's important. That's why I divide this into a two-step signup as opposed to just making this one long progressive form. So the way that we do it is we have the signup form. The moment that they're there, they get registered for the webinar. And it's actually a redirect to a second page with the survey and I'm passing over their email via UTM parameters. There's a couple ways you could do it. But that way it feels like a continuation, but you're not losing that 10% that don't complete the survey. - What are you using the survey responses for? Christie's asking, do you use it to identify better content direction for the webinar or something else? - All of the above. So one, to qualify folks to put the offer in front of them. Two, to segment my follow-up because I've got first party data on these folks now that they've recommended. And that's a great point. You have 300 registrants, 90% of them answer these questions. You can actually bring that in as a stat during the live webinar and to shape your long-term content strategy. So yes, yes, yes, and yes. - Let's see if we can get another yes from you. Do you use SMS for nurturing? - Not yet, but that's on the roadmap. - Good job, Logan. Good job, Dasha, with the follow-ups. We're running well out of schedule right now, which producer Merissa is in my ears telling me that's huge because I like to ramble and we'll get some time back later. So let's kick it over to Mary. Mary's director and marketing at CaliberMind. Mary, welcome to the show. - Awesome, cool, are we timed? We're live. Okay, so our webinar series, Hitchhiker's Guide to Marketing Analytics, is really, it's kind of opposed to what Logan's doing, which is awesome. But it's really at the center of our content strategy as opposed to this is a lead play. So you'll see, like I talk about ungating things like that. But for starters, what it is is three seasons of live episodes with outside thought leaders, as well as some internal stakeholders as well. And one registration covers the whole series. So people register back in August of last year when we started, they could attend today no additional forms or anything like that. And the crux of it is, there's really just two of us in marketing for CaliberMind. And we don't have the luxury of treating each one of these like a sprint. We need something that compounds over time. And that's why we chose a series because people register and they're registered for the whole thing. So we don't start from zero for each individual event. Some highlights off the top. We've had 900 registrants across the series. Like Dave said, I rounded up a little bit. I think it was like eight, 92 or something like that. Some clean numbers for us here. - Don't tell them my secrets, keep going. You worry about your presentation. - All right, 500 attendees live in on demand. What you'll notice there is that that's over 50%. So I'm really happy with that as a marketer who's heard like the stats on show rates and all that. Then over a thousand hours watched live in on demand. This is not counting on gated content. This is just purely the content in our webinar platform. So again, two hours on average watched each is huge for those registrants. 80 opportunities influence in less than a year. And 25% of all of our revenue is touched by this series. So that's a real, like it's got a broad influence within our programs. And then lastly, we won an award for it, which is always super fun and nice. But more importantly, how we did it. The biggest thing here is automation really powers all of this. So all these things are only possible because of the things that I've automated that run in the background, promotion wise. We promoted this series early on through third party communities and publications. And that was a huge unlock. I've seen people talk about paid social being really expensive at times for driving registration activity. This was I think way more cost effective for us. If you can find a community with high affinity for what you're looking for, that's a great thing to start with. Our own email, a couple of sends, organic social thought leader posts are also very, very valuable. You'll probably see a lot of us posted about this event. And I think that helps to drive a ton of visibility for your events. And then lastly, spotlight ads. That's just something I threw in there because I had the time. Then the live event, another thing that was a differentiator for us was it's hosted on our own website. So when people are on the webinar, if they get distracted, which people do tend to do, they engage with other content of ours 'cause they're on our own website. They're surrounded by our content. And they can learn more about us there as opposed to being on a third party platform where they kind of as soon as the events over, they're done with our engagement of us. And then lastly, post event. This is really the crux of the content piece of our strategy where with just two of us, we run so many different things across the board and marketing. And this creates so much content for our marketing because it's 30, 40 hours of content that we can pick from. So I use AI to generate clips from it. And then I choose from them. So I'll generate as many as our webinar platform will give me and I'll pick through those. I have the transcriptions that can be used for social, for blogs, all that stuff. And then this is just our workflow that we use. The big unlocks here are that registration emails and reminder emails and calendar invites and post event thank yous all automated. I don't have to think about them at all as well as the campaign activities. That's another thing where I really needed something to manage us for me so that I can focus on the content and using that content and creating more content as opposed to the sort of operational moving things around. - Yeah, I think I actually gave myself a little more time than I needed, which is, it couldn't, it's bad. I tried to talk faster than I wanted to. - You did great, quick while you're ahead. Leave people wanting more versus being like at the Slatey office today. You did great, oh, you did a great job. - Nice job. - Probably 'cause that sound is gonna play any second and I'll just feel for it. - No, I can't, I can't stop now, which is disappointing for everyone because I chose a different sound. I want to say there's more sounds you bet they know that yeah, all right They want more Mary good news Mary's gonna be in the chat a lot of opportunities I'm just gonna jump I'm not looking in our slack right now dash if you want to check that out But I just say yeah, I really like this is more of a statement and a less of a question But Mary like I like what you said at the end there talking about how you see these webinars as an opportunity to get a bunch of Content and I like that because I think so often we think very one dimensionally with these like we must get 17 people on here, and we must get six mqls and we must convert one into pipe blind Is that a narrative that you share in the team like do you intentionally use these as a Trojan horse to get content beyond just being a vehicle for selling? I think like it can kind of start with you know, honestly when you think about the content itself You want something that you would watch right especially if you're marketing to other marketers You know what you don't like Marketing so it's easy to think more critically about the content so when you produce something that you would happily watch You get a bunch of content that you are proud of and you can put out there on LinkedIn and YouTube shorts and all that So I think that that's really it also like anyone here has probably had a bad webinar before So you've had a webinar where people didn't show up everyone's had one and you feel like a failure So I think even from that you see that you have all this content that you shared well you should do something with it because otherwise It's just a failure and that's really sad They're right of passage Dash and go ahead Mary people are wondering both on like your tech stock So what are you using to embed the webinar on your own site so people can stay around for your own content? And then what are you using to chop things up and reuse reduce recycle your content? Yeah, so if most of it is sequel so sequel is our webinar platform I'm not familiar with all the other ones. There might be some like functionality, but that's what we use perfect Okay, there are a lot more questions in the chat if you want to answer them there or you can answer them in the community Yeah, go in the chat go in the chat get the chat that there's a million questions the chat is popping and this is what I love I love about this chat I'm not joking like I love seeing people in there. Hey, what was that tool like people are helping each other out answering questions Be active in the chat. It's it's makes it very very nice very useful. Hey, it's me Dave this episode is sponsored by zoom webinars Zoom webinars lets you host polished engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline We recently switched to zoom webinars for exit five live. I don't know if you've seen this It's been everywhere. I think our conversation about webinars everyone's talking about webinars right now Let's do great webinars. That's what we're talking about right? I've been super happy since we moved over to zoom Just really the high quality. It just something feels different our webinars feel professional and polished our media team Shout out to Marissa and Rhea they've been putting a ton of work in behind the scenes to get this thing right and it really helps us run These exit five live sessions and put on a performance This is not a webinar. It actually feels like our performance and the results have been there our attendees and our team has been really happy The platform gives you everything you need to run a real event from branded registration built-in promotional tools Live engagement features and post event follow-up that helps you convert attendees into pipeline That's the difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event if you're a bdb marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or You're thinking about building one you should go and check out zoom webinars, right? You know zoom but go and check out the webinar product and come to one of our upcoming exit five live sessions every other Friday it's two Fridays a month you can see it in action check them out check our sessions out I think it really gives a good example of what you can do go and check them out zoom dot com slash exit five that's zoom dot com slash exit five Hey, it's Dave this episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing They're a full funneled-demand gen agency look I personally hired them twice I think I was the very first customer before I was even a thought leader just when I was a VP of marketing a real marketer back in the day Right cgm was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired I think that's because they understand the job the founder John came from this background Knows what it's like knows the life of a marketing leader and they help high-growth Cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming Opinions about which product to use they offer the combination of a EO modern paid advertising strategy and a dedicated Go-to-market engineering team everything cgm does gets tracked measured and improved over time That means more pipeline for you and this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing like I said John He really gets this space. I think that matters by the way for b2b tech companies cgm has a special offer for people who listen to this Podcast you can get two free sessions focus on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI How much you should be investing in demand capture versus creation and how to invest up funnel effectively Hey, this is a really smart offer. So go check it out compound growth marketing dot com slash exit five Go check this out get some free help. That's compound growth marketing dot com slash exit five. Bye-bye Let's go Caroline. Hi everybody. Hi, good to see you again. Thanks for calling guys So I want to set the scene a kid was a series a startup that sells cash assistance Platform to government nonprofits and humanitarian organizations So any org that needs to deliver cash aid quickly like for disaster relief the sales cycles were long six to 18 months And we typically saw five to six figure deals and at the time we were a marketing team of three So our first two webinars generated mqls, but no pipeline not great, right? So for our third one we changed almost everything at once I know that's not an ideal experiment design But when you're chasing a pipeline number you have to pull every lever and see what combination works So we switched our usual customer case study format for a fireside chat on a hot topic in the aid industry This was anticipated changes to FEMA guidance with live Q&A The big draw was our featured speaker former FEMA administrator Dianne Criswell She happened to be an eight-kit board member check your board members They're really cool usually and they like to help you her opinion navigating the shifting female landscape was the main attraction And the opportunity to ask her questions directly was a carrot for showing up live So the topic was already on our ICP's mind before the invite even went out And we knew that some people would join out a curiosity to see what a former FEMA administrator might say about the newly appointed DHS chief But we geared the content towards our target audience of county and local leaders Our channel mix philosophy was the more the merrier And the TLDR was this free or owned channels like organic social emails and our home page banner performed the best They drove the highest number of quality registrants Paid search woefully underperformed both in number of registrants and quality most of them were not in our ICP LinkedIn paid drove higher volume and quality registrants at a lower price than Google It was almost 13 times less expensive and we also did a press alert sponsored newsletter passed out palm cards at conferences And invited folks through our SDR's but the impact of those channels was marginal at best Finally, what clinched it was the follow up Crucially, we fixed a weak point in previous webinars the handoff for marketing to sale We secured sales alignment in advance with our CRO that all leads would be picked up the same or next day by AE's no later And immediately after the webinar marketing processed the attendee data and handed sales a prioritized list of hot leads So attendees who engaged in the Q&A or the chat top the list followed by attendees and target accounts And then all attendees in our ICP the team raced against the clock to enrich and tendee records with buyer persona Segment and enter any prior context we could find so we can draft personalized messaging for sales to adapt And I know I scooped my own thunder by putting it all on the slide But the numbers were the strongest that we'd ever seen a few hundred people registered around 50% showed up live with 45% of those in our direct ICP They had an average watch time of 50 minutes for a 60 minute session and most importantly we drove almost a million dollars in pipeline in the first week after the webinar It took the marketing team an entire afternoon into early evening cross-referencing hub spot, LinkedIn, Googling, and writing personalized messaging by hand for one webinar But it was definitely worth it and shout out to my teammates Dimitri and Eugene for their speed and ascension to detail So after I left aid kit I was inspired by this experience and I built three AI agents that work in concert to do what we did by hand Automatically so they codify the best practices that we used and they also add a few nice to halves that we didn't have bandwidth to do Like deep linking the most relevant session clips into emails for each persona and each segment But when you strip away the agentic infrastructure the core workflow is simply three steps The first one is enrich so cross-reference attendees against your CRM and the internet at large To bring in all the context you can to give AES as much to work with as possible so they can craft the best approach Number two match so tag key session moments by segment and persona Identify which parts speak to them and why do the digging so that you can direct them to the highest value content for their needs and their circumstances And finally personalize reference what people actually asked or saw during the session and tie that back to who they are and what they do Questions pull responses and comments from the chat or goal. So use those nuggets to respond And for the record you don't have to be technical to design this as an agentic workflow I came to Claude with clear ideas of the inputs steps and outputs and it helped me build the system Even if at times it was just me playing the intermediary meat puppet between Claude chat and Claude code Pasting things back and forth so they could have a conversation with each other But in the end, I'd say substance really matters more than the tooling A spreadsheet populated manually can get the job done But it will take a lot longer with a high opportunity cost for your team So in summary, kindly personalize follow-up for webinar attendees is key Do the hard work to make it easy for sales and build agents and make it easy for yourself Pencils down Pencils down good job Caroline dash to take us Caroline I'm curious to learn In general like as you're preparing this how are you thinking about matching up the content to your audience Like you had amazing results you built a ton of pipeline. How did you make make sure you didn't fall into the webinar trap of just like pitching your solutions. - Yeah, we really started with a deep understanding of who was coming to the webinar. The nice thing is often you can see exactly who's registered and we sorted them into the different segments. So thinking about, okay, this segment is in charge of operationalizing their disaster relief program. So these are the parts of the webinar and the things that we think the end is gonna be talking about that will map closely to them. And you know, these are the folks who are responsible for funding. So we think that they'll care about this. And obviously we had to play it a bit by ear because you know, our site chat is pretty unstructured but we had a rough outline. - Did any of your people that attended like have cloud, like were able to use the people participating to drive attendees? - Ooh, we had a bunch of people from FEMA and a lot of local and county agency leaders. We tend to not pull out people from the chat because often we want people to feel really safe and they can say whatever they want. So we focused mainly on Dianne but she was a big draw because she was really well known in the industry and people wanted to hear what she had to say. - And then you said you would never do the Google ads play again, how come? - I think to be honest, you know, it was a bit of a special case because most people are not Googling cash assistance platform for a disaster relief near me, right? So it just like that channel has never really worked for us but I would say, you know, I would try partner plays again for industry associates and that kind of thing. I might probably give it a bit longer but really our own audience is where the ones who cared, you know, unsurprisingly. - Sweet. What have you found building these agents? It sounds like you built them or in the process of building them. What are you using? Is it just like cloud? Is it a mix of things walk us through that? - Yeah, I think that the biggest thing I would say is you just have to really know what you want to do. - I find that when I think about what I want the agents to do, it's best practice and I want them to do it every time. So I just get glad to do it for me. - Sweet. All right, I think we're ready for our next presenter. - All right, thank you, Caroline. Yeah, next up we got Christina. She's back, director of marketing at Treasury 4, strong member of the Denver cohort of X5P2B marketers. If I remember correctly, Christina, take it away. Good to see you. You're back. This is your moment. - Oh my God, okay. - Teach us your webinar game. - I'll try. It's my first time presenting also, bear with me. - We got you. - Okay, so little context to set the stage. Treasury 4 is a Series A fintech. We are founder led. Our founders are recovering practitioners from Microsoft Salesforce I Tron Tableau. So we have a really strong market present and network from them being head of Treasury at these enterprise companies. And one of the challenges that I had to face, I'm still facing, this is a live series even as we're talking. You can see it in the wild on Arlington, My LinkedIn website is how do I get our AI message out to the market as quickly as possible and establish our credibility as the vendor of choice when it comes to AI and Treasury. We're a small team. I have an early stage generalist on my team who helps me out with a lot of the admin logistics. But for me, the series is my baby from concept to production. And I had to find a way to build something that I could maintain and control because one of the really hard things about a series or ongoing is speaker pipeline, I will say. But going into this, I really stood up to think about the type of content that we want to present and how I want to present that. And what I came up with is a program that's fit for an in-person conference. And I've designed all of our content to support that structure. And what that looks like underneath is taking those components of what you would have live. You'll have keynotes, you'll product announcements, technical deep dives, industry voices, client voices, panel sessions, and you'll weave the syntax building out a series. And so my hot take is nobody wants to sit in a virtual conference for one day anymore, right? I think that there's a lot of businesses building out one day, two day formats and they do this gauntlet, this big blitz. But I'm actually dispersing this across a cadence that makes more sense for our attendees. So going into it, just the components of building it like a conference, and now we promote it like a conference. And this is an easy way for me to digest like how I need to manage the workload of all of those emails, all of that promotion, building out of our audience. And I think what was really fun is even just on a teaser page with no agenda, like you would at an in-person conference, we already had over 75 people register with no content to promote. And just building that like brand play through that, we did test a couple channels, LinkedIn paid specifically, I want to call out, it didn't work for us. Email and organic, top performers, they're fantastic. And so these are the channels that we're pressing into. As a result, we have a little over 370 attendees enrolled in the series, and that's in the series alone and not just per session. It has more than doubled our pipeline influence quarter of a quarter. And we just launched this this year, so it's still going to continue to grow. And so what I'm really excited to see is just the continued growth in this program. In general, we love repurposing. And so we turn every program into clips, newsletter formats, thought leadership posts, newsletter on demand center. And so this is an evolving program that we've been growing to build out the content engine. I started with, we have no content, we don't really have a story. And I'm using the workload of this series to produce all of that end result. I am pretty short, but on time, but that's what I got. - Awesome. - We, with a minute to spare. - Yeah. - You crushed it. - I got one. Can I take one? Can I take a question here? Is that okay? - Of course. - Since we're just talking about this, how do you, Christie asked in the chat, just curious how the sausage is made for the messaging, for the email and digital to promote this? How do you take this one idea of the series and then what's the strategy? Obviously email was your top performing channel. Can you give us a quick overview? And like, what are you using for messaging there? What's the hook? What's the pitch to get somebody to go to these things? - Right now, the mandate is every CFO wants your treasury team to be using AI. And they don't know where to start or how to get there or how to use it. And so like even our keynote was there to help teach them. And so we're being really accessible in the content and providing really a guided structure for them to be able to go in and use this tool. And that's either with our product or without it based on some of the content that we have. - Dash, what do you got? - I was gonna ask Christina, you said something didn't work. I missed what that thing was. What was the thing that you said? Email really works, but X doesn't. That was paid social. So in my mind, I'm like, it's so big. I'm gonna blow it up. It's gonna be everywhere. I'm gonna put paid behind it. I'm gonna get some budget. And that just wasn't a performing channel for us. And so I actually repurpose that budget into more of our live experiential. We'd do this little prize portal live for all of the corporate practitioners that show up. - Oh, that's cool. What's a cool prize that some marketers can steal? - Yeah. So $300 airline gift card, Airbnb gift cards, cash grabs, like not just a water bottle, like we do. Like some really good prizes. - Some luck stuff over there. - Cool. - Some luck stuff. All right, Dave, how are you feeling about bringing up our final speaker? - I love it. We're buying back a bunch of time, which is good news for you and me to have our banter that everyone has grown to love so much after this. So let's bring up a lot of chat already. A lot of chat about AirOps in the Zoom chat over here today. But let's bring up Josh. Josh runs content and SEO at AirOps. Big webinar program they got. I'm excited to hear about this Josh. Take it away. - Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks everybody. I am Josh in New York City. I had a search marketing here at AirOps and a big part of what I spend time on is our webinar. So today, I'm going to walk through a motion that we do quite often. And that is how do we bring influencers into our webinar system, but then also use that with automation. So for example, we partnered here with Kyle Poyar. If you're in the marketing space, you may be familiar with him. If you're in the VC space, you may be familiar with him. He runs a very successful newsletter called Wrote Unhinged. I was going to say Sub-Stack, but I think he's actually on behalf now. So what we did though is we took his research. I'm going to start here with this middle one. So we did three things that I think are important here to call out is that he had some first party research that we were able to share. So he wrote about the state of the marketing stack on his newsletter. And one of the things that I really look more with webinar guests are kind of an interesting point of view. I don't want to just want to bring somebody on and just be like, "Hey, where did you go to school? What are you into?" That sort of thing, not just like a conversational type thing, but really to add their point of view. So once I, and I can like mine, newsletters, ask conference talks, LinkedIn posts for that sort of thing. So once I saw this about first party research, I wanted to jump in there. And then another thing that makes Kyle really interesting and what I think is a good webinar guest is course that he has a great audience. So he's a trusted voice for over 100,000 marketers. His ICP really matches a lot of our buyers. So that is another feather in the cap for what I'm looking for a successful webinar formula. And then thirdly, multi-channel promotion. So maybe a little bit different than what Christina just shared. We actually have seen a lot of success around social ads and specifically on Meta and LinkedIn. Meta, the cost per lead was a little bit lower than LinkedIn. But we also have a pretty good organic mix with an email list. We use our HubSpot list, but then I also use a, it's called Luma, like a booking system, kind of like an event-right type thing that also has some like automations there. So it's a bit of a scrappy system to get people involved, but it also expands what we're able to do with some of those reminders. So we have three things going on. here, first party research, right speaker with our ICP who is well known in the area, and then we have a multi-channel promotion. So what happens with that? We had about 900 people register about 250 live, which then beats the normal, I think, attendance rate for most webinars. Here's just the screenshot it actually did happen. We of course then put it on YouTube and do a recap there. So a couple of things I think about here is like not everyone may have a pick of audiences our friend Dave here or Kyle Poyer, but I would really encourage you to look into your industry to find those folks who may be at conferences, who may be wanting to build their own kind of influence there, bring those folks in. And then what's really important here is you can combine their reach with your own reach to really get it going there. Before I run out of time, I want to jump over to what some of that repurposing might look like in AirOps itself. So we are a growth platform for AI search. And one of the things we do is we take these transcripts. We take this subject matter expertise and we're able to fuel a lot of our content with it. Oh, look at there. There's Dave Gerard of all folks. He was on our webinar as well. But there's Kyle Poyer. So what I do is I take that, I take our LP copy, I take our webinar transcript, and then we're able to create takeaways, we're able to create an email, we're able to create a Luma email recap, a newsletter copy, and then post webinar, social post as well. And then we can also take a lot of this and fuel our own like on site content as well as putting it on YouTube and those descriptions too. What else do I got here? So yeah, those are the elements that we have found here, make, or what I've found here, makes a pretty successful webinar, happy to help solve that cold start problem is when you really do try to partner with folks like this. Yeah, Josh. This is great. I love seeing the whole flow like that because I think a lot of people, you can extend the life of a webinar, the more effort you put in. I think we've learned it with our sessions, it's very much like measure twice, cut once, like all the emails you send out to the call, the transcripts, the recordings, all that. I think a lot of times when a webinar isn't working for someone, it's like, well, how much effort did you put into it? Like, is this worth the effort? You treated this like a, like a true show. My first question is going to be, did you say there was a 95% attendance rate or something like that? No, I did not say 95%. I think we got around 28%, like 28% or 30%. That was your flex. So it was a 28. Attendance rate. All right. My bad. Everything. All right. People have had better ones at us. Okay. No. Because I was like, this guy knows something. I'm going to have to go, all right, Josh, do you have a serious question? That was an anti-bro move. A bro move is like, oh, like, love your 15% attendance rate and they go, no, no, you missed it. It's 28. And you did the reverse of that. I'm here. I wrote that I literally, I'm not even kidding you. I wrote down 95% like I was thought I was listening. I was like, make sure to ask him about the 95%. It was the reverb. It was the reverb of the mic, Josh. All right. Josh, some serious questions, serious face. Did you pay Kyle Poyer or was he just like excited because of the Aeroops brand? Like, was it mutually beneficial or did you pay him to do this? Yeah. Good question. I'm not sure we paid him specifically for the webinar, but we have paid to run ads in his newsletter. And in some of his, I don't know if we sponsor and if he has linked in post, but I think that is something to think about as people do partner with influencers as making webinars part of that, that package. But I would say for the most part, we have paid a few speakers, but I'll bring back Dave's 95% number, 95% of the speakers that we have on, we, we have it formally paid a little bit behind the scenes there. Are you open to sharing your screen again for a sec and sharing like what the underlying prompts are like share your one prompt that's repurposing some of the content if you can? Yeah. So in Aeroops, we have what we call playbooks, but also workflows. We just transitioned over from one kind of set to the other. But what you can do here is you can trigger certain things like so you put in like a transcript and then we have a whole workflow system here where it takes out certain elements of the post that we can then reuse. And so we always have a human reduced up as you see here to help, help make it happen. But yeah, we built all this out in Aeroops using a variety of LLMs and then it's able to repurpose that someone's calling us out for product placement. I will say you can 100% do this with other tools as well, but I think it was a call out. I thought it was like a wise wise. It was a good play. No, it's smart. It's smart. I would be doing the same thing. But I'm just saying, if you're a marketer and you don't have Aeroops, you can either get Aeroops or you could do this sort of workflow in another tool. The prompt is super cool. I should slowly become in the homey today. I can feel some good energy coming this way. This is very good. I'll take it off the product. So I'm not accused of that. But yeah, here we go. All right. I was so interested in asking questions. I forgot to run the question timer, but surely we are out of the two minutes. Thank you for answering our questions. We have time. I'm going to just say one more thing that I think was hidden in Josh's thing. I think because of AI and everyone's ability to generate landing pages and do a bunch of perg in my language, we can all do a bunch of shitty marketing now. Thank goodness. Because we can all have these AI tools. Hooray. I actually think what you need to do to stand out is to do more. I said in the chat, first party research, do some real research. Have something that's worth going to the webinar about. Write a report. We're going to unveil this on this thing. I thought that was an underrated piece of what makes this really interesting is the first party original research. That's the lead magnet of the future. A lot more effort in your marketing. Let's bring them all back. I'm supposed to ask, while you all vote right now, so the audience is going to vote. So what play will you be putting into action? I like to let my panelists come off mute for a second. Did any of you learn from each other today? Were any of you backstage taking notes, anything that was interesting that you might take back and bring to your company from somebody you learned? Well, I was really excited that I'm not the only one that Google search ads did not work for. But down metal and LinkedIn messaging ads because of their things that I'd like to try. I saw something in the chat. I wish I could shout out who it was. If it was you, let us know, raise your hand in the chat, but someone saying, trying LinkedIn message ads, performing well, I mean, it makes sense, right? It's a personal invite. It's not just like, Hey, here's this lead magnet or like, take this action. It's an invite to something that's upcoming. It's time-bound. And I think that's why webinars work for people being willing to give you their email. It's like, you got to send me the invite, you got to send me the link. So I thought that was interesting call out from the community today. We get to, oh, we got it. No, no, Dan, but I can't see the stats of this. Can you all? All right. Can you do the tally for me? Here we go. Logan, which play will be running. Looks like the winner. The winner of today's X to five live session. The first first in the program, first in your hearts today, Logan, congratulations. You know, you are the, you are the, do I get a slide here? We bringing the prize back up. You're going to be the proud. How do you hold? You will be the proud new owner of drum roll. Please. If you're at your desk, please do a little drum roll. I'm trying. I hope you can all hear that. It's going to be real. The noise suppression is not. Zoom's noise suppression is so good. We can't hear each other's drum rolls. Oh, it's a bummer. I am sharing my screen. If producer Marissa just pretend to have a little earpiece in producer Marissa, thank so much. Yay. All right. So you're going to be the proud owner of your personal engraving here, a winner of the replica trophy of the, it's kind of like the Stanley Cobb. We give you a replica of it with your name on it. You get a feature in my world's famous newsletter, our world's famous newsletter here at exit five reaches millions, millions of, bond millions of marketers every month and a bunch of exit five swag, Logan, good job. Just real quick. I want to give a round of applause to everybody who came up and showed up today because we are here to hear from the real humans in marketing. I don't have a beef with AI. I just feel like we need more of this. We need more looking at each other in the eye, hanging out together, sharing notes, collaborating together. And this was an awesome session. Don't leave yet. We got a couple more announcements before we get out of here. I'm going to pass the mic over to Maria real quick and we're going to wrap this thing up. Oh, we got to rate the session. See, yeah, this is my issue. I don't know. Are we rating this right now? Am I just seeing this? But if you could please, feedback is a gift. We do measure. We rate all these things. One through five, five was awesome, one was not worth my time. Throw us a rating in here. We measure all these. We look at all the topics. Kind of in like that spreadsheet that Josh had. So if you can't really quickly give us some feedback on this session, please. Thank you. Thank you. And as you're doing this, as you're building, first of all, please, after the session, go into the community because all of our speakers will be there and they're there to answer your questions. If we didn't get to your question, you'll get the exclusive opportunity as our members to ask your questions again to hang out with the speakers. So please go visit the community and you'll get to answer your questions. And then a few more things before you go. We are very excited to announce that on Tuesday, we're launching our experts network, which means that if you like what you see and you want to be a part of our future webinar or newsletter or get featured on our social and our podcast, you can sign up to become our speaker. We'll open up all applications on Tuesdays to keep an eye out for an email from us for social announcements and we'll get you in the poll for our future speakers. So that's very exciting. Another exciting thing is our next live session is coming on August 21st. Mark that day in your calendar and once again, wait for the announcement in your email. It's going to be all about writing for humans in the age of AI, very topic, very timely topic for everyone, I'm sure. And final announcement, drive, our conference, our event in Vermont is just in 32 days and I believe it might be sold out already, but I'm sure there are few more tickets for you there. And that's about it guys. Yeah, I got to count down 31 days, 14 hours, 9 minutes and 50 seconds as of right now until September 8th. Thank you, everybody. Dasha, great. job hosting today holding it down. Maria, thank you for coming on and get wrapping us out of here. And one more time for our panelists. And I also want to give a shout out to producer Marissa behind this scenes who made this whole thing happen with Maria awesome effort. We'll see you all later. You're going to live. 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