Name: The Pre-Recorded Webinar: Scaling Webinars Without Burning Out Speakers or Teams
Uploaded: 2026-09-23T17:46:09.953Z
Duration: 34 min 19 s
Description: The Pre-Recorded Webinar: Scaling Webinars Without Burning Out Speakers or Teams

Transcript for "The Pre-Recorded Webinar: Scaling Webinars Without Burning Out Speakers or Teams": Hi, everyone. Welcome. I'm Alana, senior product marketing manager here at Goldcast. Thanks so much for joining us today. We are talking about prerecorded webinars, something I think a lot of webinar teams, a lot of marketing teams are at least curious about. We're going to talk about when this format makes sense, how teams actually build and run these sessions, and what you can do to make the prerecorded webinar still feel engaging and interactive. And And before we get started, just a couple of quick housekeeping items. This is the third session in our six part webinar revenue play playbook series. We'd love for this session to be just as interactive as our previous two. So feel free to use that chat throughout the session. And if you have questions for our speaker today, drop them into the q and a tab. As always, we have a couple of $75 gift cards to give away to folks who stay engaged throughout the session, And we have something special today. We got a couple of gift boxes filled with goodies, things like, a sand a scented candle, face masks, and a few other surprises. So keep those comments and questions coming. Our team will follow-up with you after the webinar. And we have just one quick poll question for today. Let me open that up. Alright. Head over to the polls tab and let us know what's the biggest reason you'd consider prerecorded webinars. Would it be speaker availability, team bandwidth, polished content, or overall scalability? Alright. You know, one thing I learned from, our customer speaker, Jesse, from FloQast in our last session where we chatted about putting on successful large virtual events was that we are actually able to keep the poll open throughout the entire session, something I didn't know before. So we're gonna do it this way today. The poll will stay open under the polls tab this entire time. Take a second to answer that and keep your answer in mind. As we go through the conversation today, we'll come back to some of the some of the reasons throughout the conversation. And if you'd like to check out that conversation with Jesse, feel free. It is available on demand and linked under the docs tab as well. Alright. Without further ado, I'm excited to welcome Alexandra Williams from Precisely to join us on stage. Hi, Alana. Can you hear me okay? I can hear you perfectly. Hi, Alexandra. How's it going? Good. Good. Thank you for having me today. Thank you for joining us. I'm super excited to have you here. Let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're bet where where you're based, your role, and anything else you'd like us to know. Yeah. So my name is Alexandra Williams. I'm based in Dallas, Texas, and I am the campaigns marketing director for Precisely. Precisely is a AI ready data company for big enterprises. We are trusted by about 12,000 organizations worldwide, including 92% of the Fortune 500. And I am leading our campaigns team, so I do a lot of webinars across many different countries, languages, and I have a lot experiences. I actually have a background, in different, like, languages, originally from Europe. So a little fun fact about me is when I first started in a marketing campaign, I had to handle, like, 10 different languages, had to translate marketing campaigns, and work with, many different countries together, which really taught me a lot on how to engage different audiences for different countries, how to engage them in different languages, and how to make sure, you know, everything is successful, for your specific campaign. That's super impressive. I also really love languages. What are some of the languages you speak? So I speak German. I'm originally from Germany. A little bit of French, just from school. Don't don't take me on it. Like, I'm not fluent anymore. I used to be, and, like, a little bit of Spanish. So Oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah. I I took French in college too. I think I returned everything to my instructor already just after years of not using it. But, back when I was in college, I was really into k pop. And because of that, I picked up Korean, and now one of my best friends is from Korea. Alright. I'd love to start with kinda like a bigger picture question before we get into the prerecorded format specifically. You mentioned that you run marketing campaigns at Precisely. So tell tell us what role webinars play in your overall marketing strategy. Yep. Webinars are really important for us, since we run integrated campaigns. I wanna make sure we activate different channels for the right buyers at the right time. So, like, my team is responsible for, like, paid email campaigns, webinar, ABM. We work with, like, web updates, sales, BDRs. And webinars is a really important tactic for us to really convert our messaging globally and make sure there's, like, a consistency, like, a consistent campaign theme, a consistent messaging. So I would say, like, a webinar is a centerpiece for our campaign, and then we build, different, like, assets around this webinar with, like, a supporting ebook or we use on demand session to create, like, a blog post and social media snippets out of it. So, like, a webinar is really, like, a centerpiece of integrated campaign for my team. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. And then one more thing is, like, with AI, you know, I feel like everyone is talking about AI right now. That really changed the way we how how we do webinars. It changed how we execute webinars and, how we kind of consider our strategy at the moment. Right now, AI really helps us to, like, segment our audiences better, personalized content at a scale, and it helps us to work fast. Right? Like, from creating content for webinar, it's much easier now to, like, post webinar follow-up sequences. So our team can do a lot more with, like, less. And that really just helped us to, like, rethink our webinar strategy and how we're running webinars as a global company, because I feel by us a lot more informed, they're a lot more selective right now with AI. So we kind of really thought about, like, how we make webinars like a central part of our strategy and, run like a quarterly cadence. Like, for example, we have, usually a big campaign theme every quarter. So we start with a flagship event, virtual event, or like a big webinar that's more like a thought leadership content, really, like, top of the funnel segmentation. And then we have many different products, many different product segments. So we have usually, like, deep dives, the following months as, like, a follow-up strategy, to, like, really talk more about the different use cases. So it's more like mid of the funnel, education, and then we kind of finish our quarter with, like, round tables, like, sales led round tables, where people really can come on stage, ask questions, or, you know, we give different demos, about, like, specific use cases, so which is really, you know, down the funnel, and it helps us to drive the pipeline. That's awesome. That's really helpful context. And I think you touched on some themes that a lot of marketers probably have been hearing about themselves or experiencing themselves as well. I think one thing is, webinars are becoming or have been, like, a centerpiece for demand generation. And another thing is we're as marketers, we're all kind of operating on lean, if not leaner, teams nowadays. Like, AI has definitely helped us, stay productive, but webinars are all wearing multiple hats. We're doing a lot of different things at the same time. It's so much more true. Let's get into the topic everyone came here for. What made you decide to explore the prerecorded routes in the first place? Yep. So there are a few different reasons. I think the most important one is that we run a lot of, like, global programs. We have different webinars in different time zones, and having prerecorded session really helps us to, like, coordinate with our speakers, not burn out, different speakers. We don't, you know, need them to wake up at 2AM in the morning to do a live webinar for EMEA or APEC. So it really helps us to, like, organize and scale. And then, of course, quality and consistency. As I mentioned earlier, you know, we have many different countries, different languages, and we just wanna make sure we have, like, one speaker with a consistent message, you know, our brand message, that is gonna be available in all the different countries. So there is a consistency, and everyone is aligned on what our brand message is and what our new product developments are, how to, like, demo those product developments, and things like that. And sometimes, you know, live webinars can be very stressful too for the speaker. Right? It depends a lot of times on speaker preference as well. I had, for example, a funny a funny case. I had a live webinar with a speaker who was doing a demo. And good the good thing is, he prerecorded the demo itself, like, just a video, because he had some issues with his connection. So the program wasn't working the day of the live webinar. And then, something happened where he lives. So, like, a siren went on. His dog started barking. So it was, like, really chaotic. And I think that was, like, the biggest reason why I'm like, okay. Let's do prerecorded. That makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of us probably have shared that kind of experience too, and you're also as we're seeing with the poll questions as well as speaker availability, scalability, polished content, or barking dogs, those are all great reasons for teams to consider the prerecorded format. And I remember I think you already mentioned demos. That's definitely one, like, top use case for prerecorded. And I do remember I think that was probably, like, a quarter ago. Goldcast were host we were hosting, like, one large, virtual event, and I was supposed to rec I was supposed to do some demo sessions during the virtual events. And I like, the stress levels are completely different when you're thinking about doing demo live versus a recorded. Luckily, we decided to go with recorded because especially for a large scale virtual events, you have so many moving pieces. When you have a recorded demo right there, you know, oh, this is gonna be, like, two minute fifteen seconds. Like, everything is gonna be it's gonna be much easier for everything to follow-up on that. So you already mentioned demos are one of the top use cases for this, but you also mentioned the the time zones. Any anything else you'd like to mention? Yeah. I mean, you just gave me an example big, like, flagship virtual events where you have a lot of different speakers, you have different sessions, a lot of content. That is something we usually want to prerecord because, especially if you have external speakers too, that makes it more difficult. Right? Not everyone, you know, is very familiar with, you know, whatever recording studio you use. So it just makes it easier to prerecord. And with different speakers and different presentations, you can keep things organized. You can have everything uploaded beforehand. And you know, if you need to edit, you can. Right? But we also want to make sure it's very natural. Right? Like, we don't wanna edit the video too much. We still want to make sure it looks like a live session. It's very natural. So, yeah, I would say, like, those big flagship events are, you know, the second most important use case. Sometimes when we do, specific deep dives where it's a little bit more technical and there's a little bit more content we need to present. We like to prerecord it just it's a little bit smoother, and in case something does happen. But, yep, these these are the main use cases. Yeah. I, a 100% with you, I also don't think, prerecorded content needs to be or become, like, a huge production project just so it feels, like, overly produced because we still want that, like, natural, like, conversation feel rather than something that's just, like, overly polished. So we talked about when you think it makes sense to use prerecorded formats, and are there certain types of sessions where you'd still strongly prefer live sessions? Yeah. We have, like, customer round tables where we have a lot of engagement. And with customers, you know, we we trust them. We are comfortable with them. So they raise their hand. We take some on stage to, like, really have a discussion, where it's very important to get their opinion. We want them to speak up. We want them to be on the stage. That's when we usually prefer to do, like, live sessions or sometimes we do a combination. We do, like, a prerecorded, like, main content and we do, like, a live q and a. I think it really depends on the speaker level of comfort. Some speakers, they actually prefer to do live. We have a few of those. They don't want to do any prerecorded webinars. They like to be more engaged in the chat. But prerecorded doesn't mean that there's no engagement. Right? Prerecorded just means that it's a little bit more coordinated. Absolutely. And I really like that distinction you just made because I definitely don't think the takeaway from our session today is that everything should suddenly be prerecorded. We like, to me, the formats really don't matter as much. Like, the goal is to to understand our program, to see what we're trying to accomplish, and then choosing the right format to support that goal. But like you mentioned, we also wanna meet our speakers where they're especially nowadays, everyone is just, like, so busy. We gotta be flexible and then make sure that we can have our speaker join the session. That's more important than which format. Right? Especially now in the summertime, everyone is on vacation. So it was really difficult to coordinate webinars in the summertime. So that that is a big part of, like, when we make the decision, like, prerecorded versus live. Definitely. That's another good practical reason. Now let's go into, the more practical side. Could you walk us through your workflow? Yes. Let me share my screen. Alright. When we create a new webinar, we usually, we have different templates. So let me give you an example here. So I'm just gonna create a test event real quick. So when I create the event, you can see, let me just show you the registration page. So you can see our general template we have. We have different blocks we'll use to build the template, but we do want to make sure there's consistency, right, like our branding, colors, and everything, put in presenters. But the most important is our registration form. There's a lot of, like, legal language. That's why we have those different templates. So a campaign manager doesn't have to go in every time and, like, recreate a whole new template or recreate all the different settings. And the good part about it is, let me go back. The good part about is if you look at all the settings, everything is already, like, pre kind of select. It's it's really easy to add, a video in here, if you record it directly in Goldcast or, like, add a poll question you can use. So, again, we have different service set up we use when the webinar ends as part of our template. So it's all, like, already set up, and it creates it takes less than five minutes to create a new webinar. Especially if we have a webinar in different languages, we use a multi registration form. There is an option to make it part of a multi registration event series. So that's like how we would use different time zones. So usually we do three different webinars. We use one in EMEA time zone, one for America time zone, and one for APEC time zone. It is one registration page, and the person can then select which time zone they wanna attend. Thank you for sharing with us your workflow, and we can see it's very it's very simple to set it up. One thing I would like to call out here is just there are a few different ways teams can approach this. Right? Like, you mentioned that you can use Goldcast as your end to end workflow. You can use the recording studio, the content lab to do some light editing, and then use the webinar, product to actually host your your prerecorded, content, so teams don't have to kinda, like, move between different tools for uploading and downloading. But there's also the flexibility to just upload a video that was recorded somewhere else. Right? So, like, I remember one of our customers, Lattice, they they kinda have a similar strategy to what you just mentioned before. They do, like, a huge, quarterly or annual event in person, actually, but then they use the RTMP feature within Goldcast to stream live. And then they have the recording to repurpose whenever they wanna reuse it. And, really, there's just, like, not one right way to do this. Right? It really depends on how your team already works. Yeah. Absolutely. And you mentioned, you know, the content we purpose. That's a big part of why we record, because a lot of times, you know, we can use part of the recording for the promotions to build some excitement for the actual webinar. So it does have, you know, some advantages, for, like, promotions. And we can also, like, plan a really quick follow-up because we already have the recording. It's already edited. It can go out really quickly, to our audience, and we can kind of plan content around this main piece of webinar content. I love that you already mentioned it. It was gonna be one of my questions for you as well. Our Demand Gen team runs a Goldcast Events Insider series. And for our sessions, most of our sessions are live, but they do a prerecorded speaker prep session in recording studio. And afterward, they have the recording, and our social team can easily make a teaser. And they did report back to us whenever we do a, video teaser, the posts the posts tend to perform better than the the ones with just a still image. So that's another added benefit. I think yeah. I think, you know, this is something that I didn't know before I started preparing for our session, but I realized that with the there are different broadcast approaches within Goldcast Events for prerecorded. Like, you just chose the prerecorded format for your session. But, you can also choose the live format if you don't want the whole session to be just like a recording. You still want to have the added, live interactivity at the end. Like, speakers can jump on stage. You can choose live format. I'm I'm curious if, for your team, which approach is your go to or it it kinda depends on what kind of webinar you're running that day. It depends what kind of webinar we're running. You know, if we want to do, like, a prerecorded session but have a live q and a, so we would use the live functionality, use a different template for that. But if we decide, for example, sometimes we have webinars that perform really great for us, So we would rerun a different, content piece as a prerecorded webinar. So that's when we now, like, we just kind of make the title and abstract a little different, use a different audience for our promotions and we, like, rerun the content again, that's when we just go straight for, like, prerecorded. I think one of the questions I hear all the time from marketers when we talk about prerecorded specifically is how do you actually keep people engaged if the content is not delivered live. Let's dig into that. Yeah. See the chats are really important. So we usually try to have, like, a conversation starter in the chat. So it doesn't feel like it is you know, no one is there. No one is available to answer your questions. And, you know, I mentioned, even if we have a webinar in a different time zone, we still have, like, people, like, locally available. They are monitoring the chat, engaging with people in the chat. So they're there to answer all those questions. And then we do use the run of show, feature quite a lot. It just even if it's prerecorded, it just helps us in the end with, like, live q and a and make sure we have, like, some seated questions and we don't forget about any of the questions. We wanna make sure, our speaker gets asked. And sometimes it just helps us like a conversation starter because a lot of times you ask, like, hey. Are there any questions in the end? And then no one wants to raise their hand, so we kind of have some seed questions. It just really helps to, like, start a conversation and people feel then more comfortable if someone else speaks up first. And, of course, you know, keeps the segments tied. Like, we don't want to run, like, super long webinars. It shouldn't just be a presentation. We wanna make sure, you know, people have time to ask questions. We try to keep our webinars about, like, thirty minutes to an hour maximum. That makes total sense. And I I I think intentionally building in those moments for interaction is so important. And at Goldcast, we definitely do that. Like, at the beginning of each webinar, we beginning of each webinar, we definitely ask questions like, where are you joining us from? Or some other questions just to get the chat started. Because you once you get them started, it's so much easier for them to keep chatting with each other and sending questions into us as well. And this actually reminds me, we I think it was on WebinarFest, a virtual event we did last month. So we on one on one of the sessions, we actually asked people what they remember most about the webinar they attended last time, and surprisingly, 5% of them actually said they remembered nothing. I think it's always a great reminder for marketers. It's like, oh, we gotta try harder still. But the good thing is over, I think, a third of them mentioned the experience. That's what they remembered. So, specifically, they called out the design, the engagement features, the whole experience, how they felt when they joined the webinar. So we I think as marketers, we already know good content. That's table stakes. Right? But the experience really is the big differentiator here. So it's necessary to build in those, interactivity moments with people even if you're doing a prerecorded session. And I think you actually mentioned earlier too, there's, like, a lot of other flexibilities with this approach too. Like, can you guys run large virtual events too? And then when you have prerecorded, everything is just more organized. It's more coordinated. And I think one of our customers, I think it's AspenCore, they actually shared with me that they do, like, live and prerecorded sessions concurrently sometimes for their large virtual events. So, like, it helps with team bandwidth. They don't need, like, every single marketer there to, like, manage a session. If you have a a prerecorded, you just need someone to pop in kind of periodically to, engage in the chat, ask questions, and making sure that people are having a great experience. Absolutely. Let's talk about results. What impact have you seen from this workflow? Yeah. I mean, the biggest impact really is time savings and quality. So I only I have a team of five, and just this year, we have run 82 webinars, just my team, in different time zones, in different languages. And we have over, like, 3,500 registrations combined for all those webinars. Right? So a lot of people to manage. A lot of, you know, from a dimension perspective, a lot of, like, follow-up and leads and, you know, content we're gonna manage. So it just really helps with bandwidth a lot. And then it is a consistent pipeline driver for us. Our team is demand gen, so everything we do is about pipeline. Right? So just this year so far, we have driven about 2,000,000 in ALE, alone just with our webinars. And we have about, like, 58 opportunities attached at the moment to those webinars. So it's really, really exciting for us to see, like, those results. But also, you know, not just, you know, talk about those numbers. Also, it really helps us to, like, prioritize quality over volume. So it sounds like, oh, 3,500 is, like, a lot of people we're managing, but we're really looking at, like, content for the right people at the right moment. So, we use webinars a lot for not just too. So it's not just, like, high quantity. It's really about, like, how to nurture your lead, how to follow-up. That's why we have, like, those deep dives and demo sessions. So that is what's really helping us to convert, pipeline from webinars. That is super impressive. I I personally think a lot of the hesitation around prerecorded format comes down to the, like, assumptions about what the audience will think. Like, whether that will impact your registration, whether it will impact your pipeline, but it sounds like it's been working great for your team. And, I, actually, I remember I think it's Lattice. They did a survey actually asking their attendees if they care whether the session was live or prerecorded, and the result was, no. They don't. As long as your your content is valuable, we're getting something out of this session, and we have a good experience. This is all we care about. So marketers, that's one survey that someone else already did for us, so we can go ahead and experiment with this format. So we already talked about kinda like your overall strategy, your workflow, and some very impressive results as well. For anyone listening who is considering trying out this approach, what lessons have you learned that you would share with them? Yeah. I mean, there are a few things, actually. Like, one example is, like, really make sure you lock down your speakers before you even record. And that's why sometimes it's really good because when you record, you know, everything is safe. Like, you can start your promotions. You know, you have have your recording, you know, the webinar is going to happen. With live sessions, I had quite a few times that speakers get sick, they cancel last minute, they cannot find a replacement, and we have really great registration. So it hurts to cancel those webinars, right, but we don't really have a choice. So that is like a really big lesson I learned, to just always lock down your speakers, record as soon as you can. Even if I know my webinar is going to happen in, like, October or November, I love to be caught as early as possible. So if we have a recording before we even start the promotion, that is even better. So we don't have to worry about, like, canceling or changing last minute all the promotions because it's a different speaker. It's very stressful for the team. So it just really helps to kind of have a more coordinated approach. And then, also, you know, a big lesson I learned is a webinar doesn't end with the streaming. It's really, really important to not just see it as, like, a one time tactic to as I mentioned, it's, like, the center point of our campaign. So we really use the on demand recording a lot. You know, we create, the blog posts about it. We use it for social teas. We create ebooks based on the transcript of a webinar. So there's, like, a lot of content that comes out of it and helps us to kind of keep driving the demand and have a consistent, dimension campaign strategy. I love that. I think you actually touched on some of the sessions that we have in this series that are coming up. Webinar is definitely not the end. Make sure to repurpose your content. Alexandra, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really helpful. Before we let everyone go, there's actually one more thing we haven't told you. So our conversation today with Alexandra was actually prerecorded. This is my first prerecorded session at Goldcast. So if you've been sitting here thinking, okay. But does this actually work? Well, you've already experienced one. Did you still learn something new and did you find the session valuable? Let us know in the chat. And now that we've given away the secret, Alexandra and I are actually gonna be here to join you live to answer your questions. Hello, everyone. Hello? Thank you for hanging out with us. You probably noticed I look a little weird today, and good job for some of you who already noticed the segment was prerecorded. Alexandra and I, we actually had an alternative ending recorded already, so we could have ended the session with just a recording. But we decided to do something fun here. Since we talked all about tips and strategies and what you should do for prerecorded webinars, we thought we may also show you a few of the don'ts if you want the session to feel consistent. Right? So, for example, don't show up in a completely different outfit from the day you recorded, and same goes for your hair. I had my hair down during recording, and definitely don't wear your old Halloween headpiece. And then if you're using a virtual background like where we are right now, you want to keep that consistent as well. Details really matter. I know we're at time, so let's quickly get to a couple of the questions. I saw quite a few questions. This session will also be available on demand. So if you need to drop, no worries. We can definitely you can always come back and then watch the recording later. Alright. First question I saw was, what have you found works best for driving registrations to prerecorded webinars? Yeah. There are many different ways. Like, a, like, we don't always mention that it's prerecorded. It really depends on the webinar we are trying to do. If it's very obvious that it's prerecorded, then yes, of course, we're going to mention it. But if we can, we make it like a live experience. So what we do is usually we try to use, you know, the right channels for the right audience. A lot of, like, email marketing is driving most of our registrations. If it's a bigger, like, a virtual event, our sales team, paid experiences, newsletters. So it really depends on, you know, the size and the importance of the webinar. And I think there's a second question. We were actually very curious about this too. Do you make clear to attendees that the content is prerecorded or, it depends? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I kind of answered the question a little bit. So it really depends. Right? Like, for example, we have, like, a big virtual event, and we prerecord all of the content, just to coordinate everything better. So, yes, we make it very obvious because, you know, you can see, like, it is prerecorded. But sometimes if we have a event where we have a live q and a, we don't really mention any of the language. Right? Like, we mentioned our promotion that there is a live q and a, but we don't mention anything else. So it just really depends on the goals and the audience we're getting for the virtual event or the webinar. Yeah. That makes sense. I know we're five minutes past. Alexandra, if people have questions for you, where should they find you? Would Lincoln be the best place? Yeah. You can message me on LinkedIn. I can share my link here in the chat. Feel free to ask any questions. Alright. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Alexandra, for joining us today and also for doing the recording with me earlier. Thanks again, everyone, and we'll see you at the next one. Thank you. Bye bye.