Name: How To Fight Webinar Fatigue
Uploaded: 2026-04-30T18:16:10.205Z
Duration: 57 min 31 s
Description: How To Fight Webinar Fatigue

Transcript for "How To Fight Webinar Fatigue": Hello, If you are looking for how to fight webinar fatigue as part of our insider series in partnership with Marketing Profs, welcome. You're in the right place. I mentioned we have speakers from Hootsuite, Flowcast, as well as Cvent. We'll be talking about, the things they're doing, how they're running their webinar programs, what tips and tricks they have to drive promotion, audience engagement, as well as to make it an overall engaging experience. You'll hear that a lot from our speakers. I'll do some rapid fire questions. In the end, we will have time for Q&A and a. Without further ado, I guess I should introduce myself first. I'm Cindy Dubon. I'm the director of growth marketing here at Goldcast, now part of Cvent. Thank you all for joining me today. I think there's over 800 of you all that registered, so I really appreciate your interest in this topic. Also, extra shout out to our partner MarketingProfs profs. We so love working with you guys. Thank you for getting this event out. I'm gonna move on to introduce my next speaker, Emily, if you will join me on stage. I think something we're doing a little bit differently this time because you all always ask these questions is how many webinars are you running? How big is your team? Emily's gonna quickly do an intro and share an overview of Cvent's webinar program to get ahead of these questions. Emily, welcome. Thank you, Cindy, and hello to everyone. It's awesome to see you all in the chat and tell them to know where you're from. Yeah. So I'm with Cvent, and I run our I oversee our entire webinar program. I wrote down that we do roughly 30 per quarter, but it turns out we probably do a lot more than that. We're, you know, rapidly scaling and especially with our acquisition companies. So, that's just a guess from my point of view. We do an entire multi format mix, and that's why that number looks, quite large is because we we run a lot of, smaller, simple webinars, all the way up to our highly complex thought leadership webinars and, highly produced product webinars that we put on at Stephen. There's a team of three of us, roughly, that run this end to end, and we work with a ton of our teams and our product friends. And, finally, what's my favorite AI tool that I couldn't live without at the moment? Now I decided to go with Grammarly, and the big reason is that it just is in my everyday. So it's all it it helps me with all, like, my Slack messages, so my internal folks. And, of course, I use all the other tools for for other, you know, emails and things like that. But that's the one that that makes me sound a little smarter when I'm I'm chatting with my colleagues. Awesome. Thanks so much for the intro, Emily. I'm gonna have you hang out. I just wanna shout out Emily and her three person team. They not only do a ton of webinars, they do it for a global audience spanning new business, customers, you name it. As someone who is funneling into this event, universe, truly just amazing, the volume and breadth of the program. Up next, I would like to welcome Sonia to the stage, Sonia's from FloQast. They if you saw me hyping up DJs in a webinar, Sonia's gonna be the one who's gonna tell us more about that. But, Sonia, why don't you walk us through your webinar program? Yeah. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. I saw a couple of folks are from Denver. That is where I am, so shout out Colorado. We are running about 35 to 40 events per year. This ranges anywhere from, like, seminars, which are, like, product demos, that we're going kind of deep dive into the product to thought leadership webinars. We're really sharing kind of, like, leadership topics across an executive persona, executive audience. We're doing our virtual conference every year, which we run one a year because it's so big, but it's our Super Bowl, called Take Control and, kind of a variety of webinars in between with partners and, a number of other, key players in our industry. We really don't have a huge webinar team. Our our team kind of produces webinars as part of our bigger campaign team. So, the we have a core team of two people who are also responsible for, email and life cycle marketing and things like that. So they kind of they do double duty in some aspects, but they're just like a powerhouse and and churn these things out. And then right now, my favorite AI tool is probably Claude. I mean, a lot of folks would probably say that, but, I'm just kinda nerding out on all the things it can do. Awesome. Thank you, Sonia. And without further ado, last but not least, I'd like to welcome Stacy to the stage. Stacy joins us from Hootsuite. Stacy, welcome. Yeah. Thank you. Hi, everyone. So Stacy Combast. I've been working at Hootsuite for quite a long time now. Yeah. So about my webinar program. Right now, we are running three to four a month. That's quite a difference than what we have done in the previous years where we were up to about 30 to 40 a year. Really scaled it back a lot this year for a number of reasons. And our content mix at the moment are primarily thought leadership because we are focusing more on an executive senior audience. So we're really focusing more on those those deep thought leadership webinars there. Core team, it's myself and my intern, Giovanna. Up until this year, it was just me, but now I have her on the team as well. So we are able to knock out a lot more, especially on our on demand strategy. She's been amazing. And then AI tools, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the content lab, which has been fabulous on breaking down all of the webinars that we do. But then also I've really gotten into Claude this year. And I'm really enjoying exploring and seeing everything that it can come and kinda help keep our program and make it even better in the future. Awesome. Thank you so much, Stacy, and thank you everyone for joining me today. I'm actually gonna open up the first poll, get some folks qualified, for a giveaway. So let me stop sharing. I'm gonna open the poll. You should see poll pop up in your right next to chat. Go ahead and navigate over there. So what we wanna know is what do you wanna improve most in your webinar programs and hopefully that will help us orient this conversation a little bit more. While folks are filling out that poll, would love to, just chat with my speakers, about give me one second. Oh, my computer's freezing. Let's talk about programming and format. So I'm messing around. I promise y'all I'm using run of show. I just it's a little slow for me for a second. I've gotten roasted before for not using Run a Show. Never again. So I wanna let everyone know I am using Run a Show. So just to orient folks, here we are. How are we fighting webinar fatigue? I'm curious. I get this question a lot as power, you know, program runners. What is your response to this question? Emily, I might pose this to you first. How are you fighting? How do you define webinar fatigue and how are you fighting it? So, yeah, webinar fatigue, we run into it a lot. One of the things that I absolutely and I saw a question in here about Hootsuites, why they're dialing back, and I wanna I wanna almost go to that is, like, we see webinar fatigue in a few different places. Sometimes it's, show rates, sometimes it's registrations, and sometimes it's just straight up engagement. So we we wanna look at where those numbers are. And one of the things that we definitely I wanna say we do a lot of webinars, but they hockey stick up towards, the bottom of the Mofu bottom of funnel has the the most number of webinars. And, actually, our top of funnel is where we've dialed back a little bit as well because we did see more webinar fatigue. We'd rather put the effort into making sure that we have great content, great speakers, and and it's gonna be really relevant for the right audience versus having to constantly fill a calendar. So our what we have done is trying to take away that idea of, like, you just have to fill up all these slots on a calendar. Instead of doing that, why are we running this? Who are we running this for? Let's not promote to that group. Let's promote to this group. So that's been a really big emphasis, and in particular, on that thought leadership or top of funnel point, area. Stacy, I see you nodding a bunch. What's your take on blood mark fatigue? How do we fight it? Yeah. I would agree. I mean, it really comes down to the the quality of the webinars over how much you're doing. I think everybody here has had a moment where somebody has presented a a webinar idea that wasn't a good one because people very easily think that every idea is a good idea, and it's very easy to just fill a calendar with just content even if it doesn't necessarily resonate. So, I mean, we've seen this in a number of ways. The biggest one that we noticed were that the was really coming into play was our registration started to go down because we were trying to fill in so many webinars. We were, I mean, at one point doing three a week, and it was just it was too much. So when I start seeing this, I really start looking about one, Are we doing too many webinars? If we are, we really try to nail that, you know, dial it back. But also the content that we're producing. I really take the time to read all of the surveys that come in and really try to cater and develop a a schedule that works for both what the business is asking us to do, but then what our audience wants. And if we're not listening to the audience and they're not seeing the the the themes and the topics that they are asking for, they're gonna get tired of coming and wasting their time with us, and they would just won't show up anymore. So it's really about kind of paying attention and listening to the audience and delivering on what they're asking for as well. Sonia, anything to add? You know, I think I agree with everything, and my first thing is always look at the data. Like, let the data point you in the direction you have to go. So, you know, if, I think one of the things that we've been trying to do, and somebody said this in the in the chat just now, Kelly, I think, you know, everything's AI, AI, AI, and that is no different in our industry. We are inundated with AI messaging. That all sounds the same. And so I think one of the things we're doing to to try and fight that is getting more granular with our topics. So making it, much more value oriented around what we know will change their perception, or what they're asking us in terms of, like we go to our sales team and we're like, what are you getting asked in demos? Like, let us talk about that. You know? Like, what problems are you guys hearing that we could solve for people in a broad setting, and give them information that maybe is more practical in nature so that it's not just this AI thought leadership. Like, you have to do AI. Like, everyone knows that already. We don't need any more thought leadership webinars that talk about how much you gotta do AI. They really want they really want a playbook. Everyone's asking for a playbook and, like, real things they can do. And so we're trying to make it very practical for our audience regardless of whether they're a leadership role or, you know, a practical user. Sonia, you brought up the magic word here, play playbook. And so I'm gonna pose. Let's let's just help out our audience here, and let's walk through each of your individual playbooks. So the topic here is when Webinar performance starts to slip, what is the first thing you dig deeper into? Is it topic? Is it audience? Is it format? I know everyone's kinda talked through broadly, like, these are the things I'm considering and these are the things I'm looking at, but I think a lot of our practitioners are watching reg rates or, you know, show rates just decline. And so what's the checklist? Like, how should we go into this? Sonia, I'm gonna let you take this one first. Okay. I mean, I don't know that my answer is any more unique than what I just said before. I mean, it's really, like, let the data point you in the right direction. So rather than just having your hair on fire and saying, everything's wrong. Let's overhaul our webinar program. I mean, I really think it goes back to looking at the data. If your registration numbers are the things that are falling, you know, I kind of ask was that purposeful? Like, did we do a niche topic that maybe we didn't expect as many people and that's okay? And try to explain that to the business. Right? Sometimes, like, leaders will freak out a little bit because they just don't have the full story. I think if if the webinars are poorly attended, you know, I'm gonna dig into timing, dates, the reminders we're sending out. And if we got poor feedback on the content, then I think we that's when we really dig into, like, what are how are our presenters presenting? Were the speakers engaging, or were they mon monotonous and, like, monotone the whole time, and really look at how are we coaching our speakers and how we're creating the content, what visuals are we using. So I guess, like, I hate to say the answer. Like, it depends, but I think you do have to let the data point you in the right direction. I'm gonna take something you said, the visuals because I know Emily, I believe, has very firm rules around visuals and the dynamicness of a webinar. Emily, running, you know, so many webinars across so many regions, like, what what things are you looking at when you notice a decline? I know just in our prep calls, you talked about format and your roll around slides. Love for you to share that with our audience and more. Yeah. Absolutely. First of all, the the number one thing that I look for is what's the goal or purpose of a webinar. And so sometimes the purpose is straight up education, and sometimes that can be a little bit more, like, slide heavy, from a presenter because people are maybe taking notes, and that's okay. So we just gotta remember to that it depends from Sonya. Sometimes it depends on what the goal or purpose is. But if I am trying to really keep people engaged and and learning something and I'm trying to really break through and get some new prospects in the door and things like that, yeah, we gotta make sure that we're keeping things in, you know, a little bit entertaining or engaging. And we have this rule where, especially for our thought leadership webinars, it's like a five minute. You can't be more than five minutes on one slide or one one screen because people are gonna get a little bit tuned out. So we try and keep that really engaging. So that is a production piece that we have in place, and that came from what our data was telling us about that certain type of webinar that we were running. So it's very important for us to to keep that dynamic moving and also engaging with our chat if we're doing a live webinar. Stacy, I see you nodding. What do you what do you have for us? Yeah. I was just agreeing with everything Emily said there. I actually like your rule a lot. That's that's a really good one. Yeah. When, you know, when it comes to, like, the visuals, I I have I like to call it death by PowerPoint. I'm sure I'm not sure if anybody's heard that before, but it's really about making sure that you are engaging and interacting with the audience and not just talking off the slides. You know, we really try to focus on creating this environment where the audience feels comfortable talking in the chat. We want them to talk to each other as well as the speakers and not just sit there passively while they're working on the side. Awesome. Thank you. I'm gonna share our poll results. It looks like a lot of us, you know, no surprise, are hoping to create more pipeline from webinars. I mean, I think just create more pipeline period is probably the problem everyone's trying to solve. But next up is getting more people to show up live. That leads by quite a bit more than getting people to register and then lastly, keeping folks engaged. Y'all must have GoldCast, and that's why everyone's engaged. Feel free to confirm in the comments. But, let's let's keep this moving. So with with that, you know, with the challenge in mind of getting more people to show up live, because I know we've all experienced that problem, I'm gonna, you know, tailor our next questions around audience strategy. So first question I have for the group is how do you avoid promoting too many webinars to the same audience without losing momentum in the program overall? Emily, I actually think I'm gonna start with you because you you all are doing six this week. So how are we thinking through that? Yeah. And, thankfully, those are all different audiences at different stages, but that's how we have to think of it. We have to think of this is a a need for we have, different segments for two we have two different business lines at Cvent, what we call our event cloud and our hospitality cloud, and they all have their own segmentations and audiences and stages. And I know that gets complicated really fast, but that's how we do it. So there's a goal for each of those, and that's why we can have different webinars. But when we have a webinar that's combining the same audience, that's when things get complicated really, really quickly. And I'll give you an example. Some of my, APAC regions really struggle because they only have, you know, one audience set, and they're trying to use the same audience to go after same webinar. So that's where we have been working with different partners. It's actually kinda similar. We're working with marketing profs on this webinar. We're doing the same thing in our our different regions, and that's how we're going after audiences for some of our thought leadership webinars so that we can continue to work through, and have different webinars for different stages. And that is how we're we're we're working on segmenting our our database. I'm gonna drill down actually with Stacy just because thank you, Emily. Stacy, you've you've kinda talked through, like, doing webinars through the lens of, like, a TV series. So how do you couple that with, like so you got a segment across different audiences, but then now we wanna, like, also position webinars as an experience for a TV show of some sort. Like, how do you think through, like, the targeting and the positioning for your webinars for the various segments? Mhmm. I think part of it comes down to when I talk about the TV show is creating predictability in our program. With us, we've built a very active community of repeat attendees that come. So we try to create this sense of they always know we're gonna have a webinar on the second week of every Wednesday of every month, for an example. With that, we kind of also layer in those interactive experiences, like I've mentioned before, to keep them more engaged with us and not passive. When we're targeting, it's a bit of a fine tooth comb that we have to go through because we are also working with our email team. Most of our webinar registrants come through email. That is our highest, source of registration. So we have to almost negotiate with our email team to make sure that we're not competing with any of our campaigns that are going out or any of our other projects or programs that are happening there and make sure that everything is aligned without emailing people too many times. I mean, when when it comes to email, you only have so many emails a week that you can send somebody anyways. So there's a lot of kind of behind the scenes negotiation that happens with that. So we'll segment. For example, if we know that we're gonna have two webinars that end up being promoted at the same time to the same audience, then we'll suppress half of that audience from one to make sure that they hit the second email as well just so they're not getting bombarded with too many invites. But, I mean, it really comes back to for us, if we do have that happen, it comes down to the question of, do we really need to have two webinars going to the same audience at the same time? And it comes back to the the quality over the quantity, aspect of it. So if that happens, then we'll shift one out a little bit later, or we'll bump something up where it's a very specific ICP audience. So when we have a larger webinar that goes to everybody, we'll just suppress, say, like, health care from it if we do have a health care webinar at the same time. So it's a lot of giving and taking with our other teams on the promotion side to make it work and, segment it properly. I'm curious either actually for Emily or Stacy. Like, are you guys how are you playing in tandem with, like, in person events? Are webinars promoted, separately together? I'm curious about that because when you have the virtual and the in person and then we're talking about email inventory, I think Kelly said email inventory struggle is real. How are you. navigating those two challenges? Certainly, because I personally know that for marketers, it's 'tis the busy busy season right now. Mhmm. For us, they're separate at the moment. We we actually, the in person e events team and I are now sitting under the same team. We did it before in years past. So it's more of a newer working relationship with us, and we're we're just kinda sitting down together at that table to figure out, okay, now that we are together, how can we kind of work and collab to see how we can bounce off of each other on the in person versus the virtual side. But right now, our audiences are different enough that they don't compete on any type of invites. I see you, Emily, about to jump. in. And then I got all distracted. by the got all. distracted by the chat, and I was like, oh, these are really good questions that are coming in, and I appreciate them. We have a a hierarchy. So I'm just gonna say, like, they're separate. In person, webinar invites, and then we've got, like, our default, we're gonna call this there, our always on nurtures. So in person gets prioritized first, then virtual webinars, and then whatever else is leftover goes into, like, our our always on. That's kind of like the typical rotation, but that's that's how we do it currently. Is it the best way? I don't know. But to Stacy's point, like, there's only so many email inventory that we have in a given time frame. And you also don't wanna run the risk of having everyone just, like, mentally unsubscribe and ignore you because you send them a webinar invite every three days. So rest periods are okay as well. Thank you. Sonia, I'm gonna have you come in and close us out in this section just because you're not in the space of marketing to marketers, and I think more. people probably feel your pain of marketing to not only not marketers, but you market to accounting. Right? Accounting professionals, We do. which, yeah, which I'm sure has its own set of challenges. I'd love to hear your take on things and whether whether Emily and what Stacy is saying is resonates with you or if it's different. Yeah. Let us know. Yeah. Definitely resonates. Right? I think I think no matter what it's about prioritization of your audience and what what is the core message that you really need them and want them to hear, Our team meets on our overall email calendar and, like, jockeys for position. Right? So, like, they we actually have those conversations together. So if there is a an in person event happening in Boston that we wanna prioritize because we want the in we'd rather have them attend in person than virtually on a webinar. Like, we are gonna prioritize them getting that email. And so we try to make really good decisions just based on what is their next logical step based on where they are in the journey. Is it better for me? Like, we really try to do like, cut away the competition between teams and, like, oh, no. My thing needs to get out because that's what's successful. And it's really like, no. The the business's success is what is successful. Right? So your webinar is important, but so are all the other things we're doing, and we just have to have those conversations. I think the other thing for for kind of email fatigue and, like, we're trying to get a little bit more a little bit more creative, and and we were talking about this backstage earlier. Like, going through third party media publications and using their newsletters to promote our webinars to their audience. We are really focused on using our sales team and our BDRs to get the word out about webinars because the great leave behind, once they've had an intro call, like, hey. We have this webinar coming up. So we try to give them those outreach sequences and templates. So we're really trying to use all of our resources to make sure that like, we have the same problem as everyone else else with email. There's just so many emails you can do. And so I think we're just trying to get creative. Only because I I see a question in the chat, but I know we talked about it, behind the scenes. But one of the questions is, does anyone here promote their webinars through LinkedIn? Specifically, this person's asking Melanie's asking, has anyone created an event through LinkedIn? I'm gonna start with Stacy because I know you have some fresh off the press notes across there. Yes. So we are working with our paid team right now to pilot this. I will say that we've tried it in the past with not a lot of traction, but, you know, webinars are kind of like social media. Your your audience evolves constantly. You always have to test and try new things. You can't get comfortable with the status quo. So we are working with the pay team right now to create LinkedIn event ads there. We actually just launched one yesterday to see how that was that one does. The first one we did was I think it was last for our last webinar last month. We only had it running for two weeks, and we only had about 11 people click on it. So this time, we have a longer runway. We're running it for about four weeks, and we're gonna see how well it does. But it's definitely a pilot for us. We're not sure if it's going to generate a lot. So keep your fingers crossed that it does. Sonia, I know you guys dabble on, like, you know, Yeah. investing in LinkedIn as well. What do. you guys do? I think it it depends on the event. Right? For our take control annual virtual conference, we promote heavily on LinkedIn. Like, we spend lots of money on it because it's a huge pipe driver for us. So we it is very expensive, Kelly. Like, I agree. So I think you have to be very selective in what you decide to use or what you decide to promote there. Like, we don't promote every single webinar with a bunch of paid promotion, but we do paid promotion for most of our webinars. I would say things like our seminar series, we're probably not doing as much paid for because we really only want people who are interested in our product and actually want to see it in action. We're not really interested in just, like, thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Right? We want qualified people on those. But for our thought leadership webinars, we are pushing LinkedIn. We're also boosting posts by our our speakers and our CEO and really try to focus their posts on thought leadership and sharing something of value and then just, like, putting a kind of, like, tag in for the webinar, like a small little intro to the webinar, not necessarily it's not a full on promo post. So, we do use it. It works for us, all of our audiences on LinkedIn, of course. Awesome. Before I close out this section on promotion audience strategy, In lieu of in light of everyone, you know, struggling to get people to show up, I'm curious what what percentage you guys kind of think is, let's say, a benchmark for show rate because I think oftentimes we can be harder on ourselves than is actual reality. And so if you're able to share and you feel comfortable sharing, like, what's a show rate for you all in your webinar programs that you kind of think that's a solid show rate for registrants? I'll, I can go. Emily. And my team's probably, like, in the chat, gonna, like, correct me as I go through this. But we do we we have show rate for our entire program, but it's very important that we have this benchmarked by the webinar type in our tiering strategy. So that's a that's a key piece because, I was just reading in the chat again. Some people are talking about, like, we have final audiences and things like that. We do too in one of our business lines. It's a very finite audience that we're going after. It's very known, very highly engaged. So they have to have completely different benchmarks, and we're seeing well over 50%, show rates from that group. And those are but those are smaller webinars, still just as important. Some I would say, overall, I wanna see at least 40% from my webinar program as a show rate of of success. 45 to 50 is what I'm definitely aiming for. And then we even go so deep, you guys, as to, do all the data cuts by prospecting customers. So I wanna see upwards of 50% for all customers joining our webinars. Sonia, you wanna share yours? Yeah. Yeah. Ours are ours are honestly around maybe 50 to 60% depending on the webinar. Our we I will caveat ours because we get good attendance rates because of continuing education credit, which I think I mentioned, but, people show up because we offer it for free. They don't have to pay for it. And so we've seen like, for our annual user conference, we have people joining for two half days, and our show rate is 70%. But it's because there's so much packed in there, and they they know they can knock out their continuing education credit. Stacy, how about you? Yeah. For us, we are averaging between 4045% show rate this year, which has been pretty good. But, again, I mean, it all goes back to looking at your data. I know we'll probably say that a million times. You have to look back at the the webinars that you've done in the past and set your benchmark and work off of that. So last year, for example, our benchmark was 38%, and we've already increased it this year. So, you know, you just have to make sure that you are constantly trying to work up from your previous benchmark. Yeah. And I I would say for Goldcast, very similar between 30 and 50%. Certainly, the more demo style ones, I think, is way more lower in volume. The show rate tends to be higher for us. These thought leadership, top of funnel ones, I think the show rate's a little lower, and part of that is because we tend to do our programs at a certain time. And so I think for global audio, they register really to watch it on demand. And so I think it's important to you to, like, think through that, you know, your database, your promotion list, where people are located. Because, like, if it's not at a a time that's, you know, great for them and you only run one session of it, I will look for the on demand, numbers a bit more closely. Alright. Let's move to what I think is the funnest part of webinars, which is the actual experience of it all. So engagement, I see I see a bunch of people throwing up emojis. I hope you all saw that is a brand new, feature that we have rolled out at Goldcast, so you can now react to folks. There we go. We got some clapping hands and some celebration. I'm a huge emoji user, so please use those. I'm gonna kick off the first question, which is how do you design a webinar so the audience feels like participants, not spectators? I think really at the heart of this is how do we make sure this webinar is not stale and flat? We've talked broadly, you know, slides and creating a TV show. Like, in the nitty gritty, what things what's your checklist for making sure this is an experience for everyone? Stacy, why don't you kick us off? I think hands down, it's the speakers. And this is something that I'm evangelizing a lot at my company at the moment is that the speakers make the experience, especially because we are targeting a more senior audience than a a manager and below. People are gonna take the time to sit with us for an hour if it's a known brand or a higher ranking senior speaker versus somebody that's more of a junior. So then with that, we really like to start with, like, a base groundwork outline for the speakers and then allow them to evolve that conversation from there. So I'm a real big advocate right now for a panel discussion. Like I've mentioned, we're doing all thought leadership at the moment. So not a lot of slides, a lot more like we're doing today where we're sitting down and we're having a conversation. And we always try to find speakers that are not only of the, you know, the role that we're looking for, but are charismatic, are able to go off script a little bit, can sit and watch the chat like I think all of us are doing now and be able to pull in some of the comments of the chat during the live webinar. So, again, so the audience feels like they're part of the conversation, not just watching it. I also like to include polls throughout and encourage q and a throughout the entire webinar and not just hold it till the end. A lot of people can't stay typically to the end of the webinar, so some of those questions that we see coming in, we'll bring them in as quickly as we can. And that then really falls more on the host. So I have a couple hosts in my back pocket that do a really, really good job on our webinars. And whenever the topic is right, I always make sure to pull them in before everybody else because they know how to steer the conversation in that really engaged panel format that we like to use. I mean, I I do agree with the the speakers. We have been doing a lot of speaker training internally at our company. So we actually gave them a an outline on how to prepare their presentations. We went we brought someone in to talk with them about, like, how do you stay engaging? How much how many words actually need to be on your slide versus, you know, the 5,000,000 you're trying to pack in there. And and we run a lot of panel discussions. So more formats like this where there's conversation as opposed to someone reading off a slide, and we try to mix that up quite a bit. I think I think for, you know, there were some questions about Simulive webinars, and and our webinars are a majority of them are Simulive. We record a portion of the sessions ahead of time. If we run a demo, we honestly do it, Synulive, because who knows when your product's gonna go down? I'm not really willing to take that chance. And so we usually have product experts and this and people who are ready to engage in the chat from a product standpoint. So we don't just run it and not show up. Right? But we are letting it run a bit so that we can focus on the engagement piece and make sure that, you know, it's coming across well. We're in the time limit. We're not losing people and those sorts of things. I love it. Emily, To wanna close us out on this question? How are we designing a webinar? to yeah. To to so for us to design a webinar, I love, love, love doing live webinars. I encourage it as much as possible, and I love when we have like we have today, like, external speakers, you know, assignees, and things like that. I will say sometimes that makes a webinar a little bit more complicated to produce, so that is also an element you wanna take into consideration. But we have found that the engagement is worth it. So that's a piece that makes our audience feel so much more engaged. I think if you have to Stacy's point of training your speakers, if you have those people who can then go call out and, work with with your participants, your audience in the chat and talk to them or pivot the content for them. I think that's a really great, way of making people feel engaged. Start with a poll and then let them dictate where, you know, where the conversation is going. Kinda like to say, not everyone can do that. Not everyone. Every webinar is meant to do that, but that is one thing for a thought leadership webinar that I think works really, really great. And and if you find those speakers, double down, try and get them in your webinar program on a continual basis, familiarity with the audience as well. Thank you. Alright. That concludes the panel discussion. I'm gonna save some time for Q and A because we actually got a handful, through some pre event outreach, which which we like to do here at Goldcast. While I get our presubmitted questions up, I'm gonna do a quick round of rapid fire for the ladies here. What's one thing that you've tried recently that worked better than expected? Emily, I'll have you go first. personalized follow-up has worked out really, really well for us. So knowing who your audience is, getting to know the, attendees, and then having teams do personalized, outreach based on even the discussions had during the webinar. Can I do it for every webinar? Not not necessarily. It's it's to to everyone to scale, but if you're looking for those quality we were looking for, like, you know, specific, personas, and and that's something I would I'd love to figure out and do more of, going forward. Sonia, how about you? I would say and so, obviously, we talked a lot about, like, the fact that we had a d we have a DJ on some of our webinars. So DJ Graffiti, if you're looking for, like, a really great corporate DJ, he's amazing. I can't recommend him enough. He so, originally, we had prerecorded most of his sets because we didn't wanna deal with, like, going back and forth between live and prerecorded. We recently tested kind of having him be live, and he was interacting with the audience while he was spinning the latest hits, and people just ate it up. Like, you it sounds kind of cheesy, and I think we were a little nervous at first to do anything with a DJ for accountants, but you would be very surprised at how it brings them out of their shell. And, like, we get on sessions and people are like, where is DJ Graffiti? And we're like, we can't afford him for every single webinar we do, guys. But I think just that move and I'll say it, like, plug for Goldcast, they didn't ask me to say this. Like, moving from live to recorded back to live, it was way easier than we thought. I know Sarah who just shouted out DJ Graffiti was very nervous about it, but, like, you would have never known that we did it. Stacy, how about you? What have you tried recently that's worked? You know, I have to say that our whole program this year is a test, with our our newer audience. So that is a whole changing and evolving. Our content strategy has worked really well. But the one thing that I do wanna kind of shout out in here is we've been really doubling down on our allowing our audience to network with each other throughout the webinar. So one thing that I have been doing is creating a Google Sheet to so they can drop all their LinkedIn profiles in there and allow them to connect with each other both in the chat, in messages one on one, but then also with that tracker. And it seems to be working so well that people, if I don't put it in there, ask where it is to make sure that they can get in there and connect with people. I couldn't agree more, Stacy. I find that, I've gotten a question before. Like, what do we do with attendees that show up every time but aren't ever gonna be in, like, a demo state? And I'm like, show them some love. Like, they're they're your number one fans. They're coming in. They're hyping it up. They're creating the community, that not everyone can engage with in an in real life setting. And so I think I I, you know, used to be a drink the Kool Aid so hard that I joined the team. But I remember joining this platform through a community and feeling like, man, this is this is nice. Like, getting to, you know, network with folks from a virtual setting and outside of, you know I think someone actually asked here is anyone using Teams or Zoom. But, outside of the normal, like, you know, two by two, four by four meetings that we have to do back to back, like, I think having an experience and having the community allows people to network and engage. So I like that Google Sheet. I'm gonna steal that idea. Sonia, I'm also gonna have you back at some point to train us all, to have speaker training, but topic for another time. So one of the top questions, as a reminder, please put in your q and a, like the ones you really want us to answer. But first up are the folks that replied, to their top burning questions and why they joined this webinar. So, top of mind is boosting live attendance and finding ways of getting more registrants to actually attend the webinar. I know we've hammered on this a few times, so I'll ask you again to summarize, you know, what tips do you have for these folks that are just struggling to find ways of getting more registrants to attend? Sonia, I'll have you go first. Yeah. I mean, gosh. If I had all the answers for this, I would be able to run a entirely different business. But, I think, you know, for us, and I kinda mentioned this in the chat earlier, we are trying to get more creative with with things like gifting. We will like, for our biggest conference, Take Control last year, we sent VIP watch kits to each of our to our ABM customers. So people who are, like, on our target account list, we've really wanted to get in the account. We've so we sent them, like, a little blanket and some snacks and a little card from our CEO just to kind of, like, bring them in early. And, you know, do I have, like, that directly impacted registration and attendance by this much? Not necessarily, but we're just trying to, like, surprise and delight our audience, right, and have them, feel like they're a part of our community and our ecosystem. I think we also have done gifting in the sense that, you know, we'll raffle things off during the sessions. We don't, like, broadcast that in a huge way. It's more like in some of the follow-up emails to remind them of the webinar. We'll say, oh, and you can get a chance to win x y z. We've done, like, $10 gift cards where it's like, go get coffee before you join the webinar sort of things. And then, you know, honestly, for us, a lot of it is just, like, the timing and cadence of our reminder emails, which is, again, not like a rocket science thing for anyone, but, like, we've played with that a lot, and I think we still have a ways to go. okay. to the. reminder email, Sonya. A couple years ago, we manually set that up on the Cvent side based on the data of when people join webinars, and we would see a boost of what the time of people would join based on that. So I'm sure that was a data driven product decision and all that good stuff. But take advantage of that because it for for so someone who's actually seen the impact personally on their webinar program, that's been a big one. I think people have done the gifting. We do it on some webinar types model because it didn't have a big impact on some of our thought leadership, which is interesting, but try it out, see what works for you. And I loved, loved, loved what the engagement that, Cindy's had on this webinar. I think we should all be doing this. You know, engage your audience in your community, get them to submit questions ahead of time for for, experts, and, hopefully, they show up because they wanna hear their question get an answered. So I think that is a a great approach as well. yeah. You know, for me, I would double down on the calendar invites and the and the reminder emails. You know, since we moved to Goldcast Coast a few years ago, that did significantly help improve our attendance as well. But then, I for us, it really comes down to delivering what the audience wants. We have tried in the past not doing that and just coming up with the themes and the topics that, you know, we think that the audience wants and they really would appreciate based off of data and insights. But then when we stopped listening to the audience, our numbers went down. When we started listening to them again, we noticed a significant height back into our attendance. So So I think that's a really big factor into making sure that our attendance stays up and continues to climb. I know we talked about speakers making, you know, the webinar. I think leveraging your speakers as well and having them talk about what they're gonna be talking about, what they're excited to showcase, and getting them to promote it. That's part of our motion here, with the Goldcast team is getting all the speakers to do a little bit of a preview of what they might be talking about, giving them that video to post on social, and getting them to post about it on LinkedIn because that's an extension of another network, but also reinforces what they can see and expect on the the webinar. And I mentioned, you know, we have questions that came in. We work our online events like we do in person. So we have our SDR org, actually do pre event outreach just to introduce a name and a face, so that you tend to hear more from them from the post event as you navigate through the Goldcast journey. That's something that's also worked well for us. And much like Sonya, we incentivize some of our folks to also show. We've tested out coffee, lunch, we run the gamut. And I think it it, like I know it sucks to say this, but it just depends. It just depends on the webinar, the type of event. For virtual events, if you're running a long session, we've actually done in event email reminders. So if you have multiple speakers panel topics, you can send custom emails through Goldcast. I'm sure other platforms probably could do this. But to remind people, like, hey, the next session's coming up. Like, if you can't make the whole day, you know, the keynote speaker's coming up in two hours, and we'll do that reminder. Okay. We got a couple minutes left, but let me see which questions. So someone says, what are the highest leverage changes you've seen to reduce fatigue without cutting volume? So anything around how you're using first party data and automation to personalize invites, experimenting with formats, or how you're connecting web or engagement data back to the broader demand gen engine. So a very loaded question that very well might take a lot of time, but I think it's an important one, because I think the key here is, like, what are the highest leverage changes you've seen? I'll kick us off, and I will say, in your pre event outreach or you can do this in your promotional emails, you know, asking the questions of, like, what are they hoping to get out of it? You know? So maybe you do that in your first promotion email and whatever responses you're getting, you use that to promote your second your you know, the second email blast, your second social post, and whatnot. Stacy, I'm gonna have you kick us off after me. What are the highest leverage changes you've seen? I think it's the way in which we've been talking to our audience. That that is the biggest change. You know, I keep going back to our strategy is different. And I know somebody in here asked, you know, what happened? Why is our strategy different? You know, we're we're at Hootsuite, we're we're targeting that senior audience. So because of that, the whole manner in which we are speaking to our webinar audience has changed. We're not so much talking about the hows and the, you know, the tactical side of what we do. We're talking about the whys and building confidence in leaders in the spaces that we work at. And so we really are starting to double down in that kind of conversation in all of our promotion, and it's really significantly increased the number of senior leaders that join our webinars. I'm gonna kinda go a little bit back to our our speakers. Speakers are really, really important. We like external. We like live. As much as we possibly can, we lean on live for the engagement. That really helps. Can't always be possible, but that's what we've leaned on the most. The type of speakers that we're able to get, are critical. And I'm just gonna throw one extra little thing in here that, I think has really helped just in general of, like, not the death by PowerPoint or the droning on of speakers, but is almost in the first five minutes of the webinar when when speakers come on stage just to, like, include a personal story to humanize stuff, especially if you're you're you're, you know, delivering heavy content or practical content or something like that. Just, like, humanize things a little bit more, and I think that is something that has really helped pretty much any webinar that that we can deliver. And that that would work for CineLive too. I agree with everything that you guys have said. I think one one thing we did, and, again, this is probably more in relation to, like, if you're running a big virtual event that's, like, spans multiple hours and days and things like that. We actually worked with our we call them our studios team to create entertainment breaks, in between each of our sessions. So they scripted them, and they got to use their creative chops. Like, I was so impressed impressed because they did, like, a skit where they had different FloQast children, answer questions about accounting, and, like, it was just so funny, and and everyone loved it. We had our CEO's daughter do a skit with him about closed management and accounting, and, we played one of those in between, like, the ten minutes between every session. And I honestly, I was, like, skeptical if people would stick around for it. We had so many people in the chat being like, we love Harper. We like, they she had, like, a fan club. Like, our CEO's daughter had a fan club. And I think, you know, we don't ever wanna be cheesy or not genuine. Right? Like, we always wanna be genuine, but we also realize that, like, you're asking for people's time. And, I think sometimes making it fun and, like, re like, recognizing their people and treating them like people is a good thing. Right? And so we try to infuse some fun. I think we also varying the format has helped us a lot. Right? When I think about our everyday webinars, moving from a thought leadership webinar and doing more product demos and, like, showing AI agents in action and actually showing them how we're building AI agents and, like, lifting or, like, opening the door to them a little bit has helped a lot. People I mean, I'm not surprised anymore having been in the biz for a long time, but children and pets. That's people just. love children and pets. Anytime you can, use them in your campaigns, it tends to do well. Okay. So the most popular question in Q&A and a is actually around promotion with Regina asking sorry, guys. How early do you start your email promotion? One month out, a few weeks. What is your normal cadence of invites? we're probably for our, like, day to day webinars, it's, like, four to five weeks. We've noticed that people are registering later and later, so it actually doesn't help us that much if we start earlier. For something like our bigger, like, product launches or bigger events that we're doing virtually, we're starting earlier than that. You know, for our take control conference, we're starting, in July for a September event. It's, like, two months ahead. Emily, how about you? Yeah. We, you're gonna get used to this answer, but because we tier our webinars, our promotion strategies are tiered as well. And this this gives a lot of flexibility for for folks, though, to run their webinars. Sometimes they need to turn things around really quickly. They only need a two week promotion time, because this is a webinar for a very specific audience and sales is hoping and so on. I would say for, like, a lot of our thought leadership where we might have a bit more promotion muscle that we need to be built in and especially, there was a lot of discussion about paid and LinkedIn. You need more time for that, so you need to be able to to launch and promote at least four weeks in advance to get that paid going, at least I do with our if you're generating audiences for LinkedIn, you need you need more time. So just keep that in mind. How about you, Stacy? Yeah. And for us, we always try to have our registration page live four weeks out, for any of that social promotion that's happening, whether it's through the LinkedIn or we use Amplify and get our employees and speakers to really boost up how much we're doing there. On an email front, though, we're only sending two emails. We found that sending the first invite one to two weeks and then the second one to two days before the webinar tends to have the best results for us. But, I mean, again, I think one of the big themes here, it depends on your program and your audience and what the data is telling you. We've done extensive research and testing in the past to know that that cadence works for us, but it might not work for you. So try it and test out and see what the cadence works the best for you. Awesome. The last question I'm gonna close us out on because I got I see six people vote on this is, can you talk about your on demand strategy? What are we doing with our content? How are we promoting the recording? We all know that, you know, the misnomer of when you do the event, it's over, is a recipe for failure. How are we extending the life of our content? Stacy, I'm gonna have you go first because you love ContentLab, and I'm hoping. you'll tell us a little bit about how you use ContentLab for this. So, one thing that we learned a few years ago, and I think this is just in general, we all know this, is that the content sits behind a video makes it hard to find in search. So we are developing an on demand page where we can create a blog so it's easy to find in search. In addition to that, my intern Giovanna, who I can't say enough how awesome she is, has created a new YouTube channel called the Social Intelligence Report and where she is clipping out our webinars to create kinda like video podcast or, enterprise soundbites, if you will, of our webinars. We're doing that. We're pulling out important quotes, pushing those out onto social, having our speakers push things out on social. And then we also promote the on demand webinars within various newsletters that we have. Awesome. Sonia, I see you nodding. Any final thoughts on this. one? I mean, we are, we have been digging into how we promote on demand better too. I think we're including we're always including them in our nurture programs, and we've been also using ContentLab to cut up our content and use it for social posts, pull out sound bites, and and things like that. So, I mean, I think the big thing is thinking about it before the webinar is over, and having an actual plan and a playbook for it as opposed to being like, man, we have all these webinars. What should we do with them? Because everyone's a little bit different. Awesome. Emily, anything to add? Yeah. I think we we follow a very, like, similar strategy. Like, we go from live webinar to an on demand. It's available. We have it on our website. But where we have really unlocked a lot more, potential is we put the we put certain webinars, I will say, on YouTube. That actually gains a lot of traffic traction for us, helps with our SEO and our GEO, which has been huge. And now we're just starting to work with, ContentLab to create YouTube Shorts, which will probably translate into other channels, so stay tuned for how that goes. That's a new key piece of strategy for us, and then, potentially, we're gonna boost those with Pete as well. So, like, that's a that's a big new, unlock for us. Awesome. Thank you so much, ladies. We're at time. I really appreciate all the knowledge that you've shared with our audience today. You're welcome to exit the stage, our deepest thanks. For those that are wondering. what our upcoming events are, join us for insider next month on May 28 at 10AM Pacific. You can register. There's probably a link in the docs tab. We will also be in person at Demand Expand. I'll personally be there in San Francisco at Booth 19. Come say hi if you will be there. And lastly, save the date. We have the Make Pipeline a Breeze event, two day event going across May 27 - 27th starting at noon eastern time. Lots of fun prizes, lots of speakers that you will want to engage with, but we hope to see you there. If you are at all interested in getting a demo of Goldcast, please go ahead and click get a demo. Hope you all have a wonderful Thursday. We hope to see you at our next event. Thanks all.