Transcript for "Top Plays from 100+ Events That Generated $18M in Pipeline": you so much for joining us. If you were looking to join Goldcast webinar with Martech on top plays from a 100 plus events that generated 18,000,000 in pipeline, you are in the correct place. My name is Cindy Dubon. I lead growth marketing here. In a couple minutes, I'll be introducing two of my speakers that I'm very excited to have with us today. But before we get started, I'm gonna go through some housekeeping items. Firstly, please, share comments and engage in the chat. You know, part of the event here, I think there's a couple 100 of you guys that have registered. Part of it here is engaging with each other. So please comment, chat, let us know what what you like, what you don't like, what you want us to dive deeper in. Drop your questions in the q and a tab. If you're wondering if there is going to be a recording, yes, all of our events are recorded. And so there this is being recorded. You will get a link to the recording within twenty four hours. And then check out the docs tab. I believe we are promoting to our future events, which I will share a little bit about. Let me go to my next slide. And in true usual Goldcast fashion, we are giving away three $75 Visa gift cards as engagement prizes. And how you qualify to win one of these three is join the webinar. Congrats for those that you are joining live. You've already qualified for that piece. Engage in the chat. I'm gonna go ahead and do a test chat here. Why don't you drop in and let us know where you're joining from? Christina, thanks for letting us know. You're ahead of me here. You're joining from Massachusetts. And then submit a q and a. If you don't wanna submit it, with your name, you can check anonymous and we will, hopefully get to your questions. And then also we have some polls throughout this webinar. So please participate and engage in the polls. With the two events that we're promoting, this is part one of a two part series. Next week, on Thursday, that part two will be more hands on. So we're walking through playbooks today. Next week, you'll be seeing demos of how we create things. Specifically some of the creatives that I think you may have seen, Pokemon style promotion, assets. We'll be walking through that with our, creative directors, Zao, and then Brandon on the growth marketing team. We'll be walking through some of the event setups and workflows. And I would not, wanna miss Frostyfest twenty twenty six. I guess we're getting a little ahead. That's my bad. Frostyfest twenty twenty five. It's our big, big giveaway event, so join us for an hour of good music as well as fun prizes. I do know we are giving away a Nintendo Switch two among many other things, and so hope to see you guys there. Again, go ahead and navigate to the docs tab if you'd like to register for those events. On to our webinar. So what we're covering today. What we've learned from a 100 plus events, from the Goldcast marketing team, our playbook from concept to post event and everything in between, what worked, what didn't work, and how we're thinking about 2026 programming, and then taking some questions live. With that, I'd love to welcome, my two guest speakers, on this this webinar. So Anand and Alex, if you can join us. And I'm gonna give you guys twenty seconds each to do a brief intro because I know we got a ton to get through. I can I can start? My name is Alex Bleeker. I run content and brand here at Goldcast. Really excited to walk everyone through, our year of events. Hey, everyone. My name is Anand, or you call me AP like Logan has already shared in the chat. I I drive and lead product marketing here at Goldcast. I'm excited to be with you all and kind of, again, like Alex said, walk through what we've been up to event event wise, over 2025. Awesome. Let's keep us moving. It's got a ton of content going on. So let's start with 2025, the year in review. I'll kick us off. Some key stats. This year, over a 100 plus events on Goldcast from the Goldcast marketing team, 36 customer facing events on the digital side. This doesn't include our in person events, which would be a whole lengthy list on its own. Our highest reg for our digital events were over 2,000 coming at twenty one sixty two. Highest live attendance at seven ninety five. 32% average attendance rate, with average registration being at around two ninety two. Overall, a proud, proud point for us. Over 19,000,000 in pipeline generated year to date. Yes. That's a million more since we've started promoting this event. So shout out to my sales team. These are doing a great job, you know, opening those deals and closing them as well. And then 300 ops generated year to date collectively across all events. I I think it's also important here that behind these metrics are the creative direction as well as how we think through, using our product here at Goldcast. And so I'm gonna go ahead and pass it over briefly, to Alex to talk about our event universe and how we've kind of landed on some of these concepts. Alex. Yeah. So we host, as Cindy's, just said, a lot of events here at Goldcast. And since I've been here, it seems like every year we try and outdo ourselves and do even more. And I'm sure 2026, we're gonna have, you know, maybe even 200 plus. Who knows? But, we tend to bucket them into a few different areas. So, we start off the year with mindshare, which was a hybrid event. We had a San Francisco and a New York activation, and then we also had a virtual summit, to tie that all together. Beyond that, we also do series. So we have Insider, which you're in right now, and then we have another, ICP series called AI revenue playbook, which we'll get into a little bit later. And then we also try and do these, like, big marketing moment events, sometimes to launch something, sometimes just for thought leadership. This year, our big ones were summer camp, which was a four day event with basically, like, seven sessions per day. So there was a lot of content there. And then we also did an embedded event called AI Marketing School, which was just around the time for for back to school, which was was timely. And then the last one here, which was, quite recent was Marketers Got Talent. And that's where we launched our agentic editor. So it's a product launch, and we really wanted to think outside of the box. So it was a contest based event. So there's gonna be way more to come, and we're definitely gonna get into this, all of the details there in in a in a few minutes. Awesome. Thanks, Alex. AP, why don't you, walk us through how we think about our product and events? Because I think that's something very unique to us here at Goldcast. Yeah. So as as you probably can tell, we like events here at Goldcast. It's a it's a big, activation for us, especially when it comes to product launches. And we typically, as a marketing team, like to have a quarterly marketing moment. And with that, there is typically an event. Right? We are are we our genesis as a company was events, and so that is a big part of how we go to market as well. And, typically, every quarter, that quarterly moment, that quarterly event ties back to either a big launch that we're doing or a way for us to promote and advocate for, like, use cases as well as capabilities. Because, ultimately, as any company, you're doing a lot of these activities, events, marketing, etcetera, to help build mindshare with your audience around what you do, what your product does, how you can support them, how you can help them, and how you can provide value for them. Right? And so that's kind of our approach is every quarter have a large event and make sure that we're getting across the value that we can drive for our audience and for our customers. And as Alexander had has already mentioned, we had a couple already this core this year, which I wanna just quickly touch on, and I'll I'll dive more into these later on. But we had mindshare early earlier on in the year, and that was really our kind of moment. It was the hybrid one where we had two cities, and then we had the virtual. It was a way to showcase you know, we can do things in person as well as virtual. But, also, we were launching a recording studio, which allows our customers as well as myself, because I use our product a lot, to, record high quality, locally recorded video content, whether that's for prerecorded webinars, for customer interviews, for thought leadership, you can for even podcast. Right? And so we use mindshare as an activation to talk about recording studio to to announce it to our market, because, again, this is just another way to use video content to win mindshare so tied into our our overall theme. And then we had summer camp where there wasn't necessarily a specific product we were launching, but we, as a company, have transitioned from being just events focused to a larger video content play. And so we wanted to leverage an event to educate our market, not on just our change and evolution as a organization, but also the variety of ways that you can use video to reach your audience and engage with your audience. And it was an opportunity for us to try a different format, which is multi day. And, again, I'll go into that a little bit more. AI marketing school, as Alexander mentioned, we we, you know, everyone's launching agents, and we're part of that. We have agents and a bunch of AI stuff that we're launching and have launched, and so we wanted to tie that into AI Marketing School. And we took a little kind of, interesting term where we where we, also did it as an embedded event. I'll share a little bit more on why we did that, but it was a great way to also showcase one of our functionalities as a as a platform. And then finally, we had marketers got talent where we launched the agentic video editor, and we decided to take a unique approach to that. So I'm gonna dig into this a little bit further, but I just wanted to really highlight, ultimately, like, we are using these events, especially the large ones that we have each, quarter to to advocate and champion for our product, what we can do, what what value we can provide our customers, and ultimately win mindshare in the market so they remember us for the, you know, what we can do and how we can support them and our product and the overall, value it can deliver them. Awesome. Thank you, AP. Keeping us moving here, Let's get into playbook number one. So talking about strategy and creative, I'll kick us off. I think setting up your program your event program for success starts at the very beginning. I realize this is, you know, no brainer, but comes down to goals and business impact. So what is the current state of your funnel? Do you need more more people entering the funnel? Do you need to convert more because you've done a ton of events already? It sorry. Consider is your audience, probably most of them are out of market. This is where thought leadership content, more how to type types of content come into play. Then also it's important to consider gaps in your database. If you're launching into, like, a new vertical, if there's a new persona you're getting after, you may not have those names, and so it might make sense for you to partner with other, publications such as MarTech, or leverage, you know, other subject matter experts, other companies in the space, to do, you know, the event with you together. Also consider your audience needs and preferences. You know, if you're in an industry or people are in the field all the time, like, does it make sense to have a webinar in in the middle of the day? If they tend to start early, maybe it makes more sense for you to have your webinar in the late afternoon. Maybe a monthly format works better than a biweekly format. Overall, you just wanna consider your buyer's journey. So, you know, how how do they interact with your brand? What is their capacity to interact with your brand and then meet them where they are? And at the end of the day, how are you gonna differentiate? You know, we we certainly put up over a 100 plus events, just this year alone, and I can only imagine that we're gonna increase that. We're one, you know, one entity in this space. There's a multitude of other people. I know you all are running events all the time, and so what's in it for your audience? And this is where you can have creative, outreach strategies, ABM, ABX, which we'll get into as well. And so I just wanna echo that it's very important for you to consider, you know, what is it that you need to do, what do you need to accomplish, and kind of map your event program, that way. And, Cindy, just sorry. Just to interject, if anyone is interested on data around, like, when they should actually be putting out their webinar or wanna understand some industry benchmarks for the best time or how to, name your webinar, whatever it might be, check out on Goldcast, we have a report section. We have a webinar benchmark report, which we do every year, and that'll give you a lot of really valuable data, to help understand how you benchmark against, the average. Awesome. Thanks, Alex. AP, I'm gonna I'm gonna bring you back on. So, you know, let's talk through opportunity to showcase, in our case, our product. I'm gonna hand the mic over to you. Yeah. So I'm gonna kinda dig in deeper into some of the things I've already mentioned. But but as Cindy said, ultimately, there is a lot of content. There are a lot of webinars that are out in the world right now. Right? It's it's a it's a play that a lot of organizations and companies use. So our approach has always been to, like, how do we like, even if we're using a a webinar or an event to to launch a product, how do we make it sure it stands out versus just saying, hey. We're launching so and so. Come watch what it does. Right? Like, no money nobody wants that content. And so we we are very intentional about how we approach it. And so if if you wanna move to the the next slide, Cindy, I'll I'm gonna do a little bit of a deep dive on a couple of the events that I've already talking about talked about. So AI Marketing Alliance school, which was in September. Again, we decided, hey. We wanna talk about AI because that is the topic that all marketers are, you know, really invested in. Us ourselves are, like, trying to figure out how do we leverage AI as much as we can in our marketing. And at the same time, as an organization, we are launching a bunch of AI features as well as agents in the world. So it really made sense to, like, pair it together. It was also back to school time, as Alex said. So, like, we took a nice twist on it to make sure it felt relevant, a little nostalgic, but also allowed us to really introduce, our new agentic functionality and features in a fun exciting way. So, like, the three agents that we did launch there was the agentic video editor, which, as I mentioned earlier, we actually had a whole separate event for later on, which is market has got talent. But we also launched our AI, event analyst, which takes your event after your event takes all the data, it does all the analysis for you and gives you back information on how it performed, who are the most engaged accounts, etcetera, as well as our agentic content curator, which then surfaces all up the right clips for anyone that goes into your Goldcast account. Right? So it it does a lot of the work for you behind the scenes, and so we use that as a platform to introduce those agents. But then we had earlier in the year also, released our embedded events functionality. It was a capability that we started to hear about every now and then from prospects and customers, and it was pretty apparent that not many of our, folks knew that we had that capability. And so we wanted to use this opportunity to showcase, hey. We can embed events. You may have not known that, but let's just show you. Right? And so this whole experience, as you can see in the screenshot here, the whole event experience was embedded on our website, our design team, and creative team, which are incredible. They did this whole look and feel on the website where it was playing in, like, a little, was that QuickTime? I forgot what I used to use, WinApp or whatever it was back in the days, player. And so it reminded me of, like, when I was in school and, you know, listening to music and watching videos on those fun little players. But we have built a whole experience around it. Right? And so, as an organization, we, you know, we have a take on when you should embed versus host. But this was a great opportunity to embed to, one, showcase the embedding functionality, but to build a nostalgic feeling around the event theme itself. So that was really a great way for us to, again, introduce new agents, but also showcase the embed embedded events capability. Then there were two other there were two other kind of, events that I wanna deep dive on. So, Cindy, if you wanna move forward. Yes. So summer camp, again, as I mentioned earlier, there wasn't really a product that we wanted to launch for summer camp, but it was it was about educating the market on use cases and how they how they can use video to reach their audience. It was summertime, and so the team did a lot of brainstorming. And the summer camp idea came came to life because you go to summer camp, you meet people, you network, you learn from them, you have fun with you know, that's what summer camp's all about. And, typically, at Goldcast, we we usually do, like, one day events, but we decided summer camp typically is a week long, sometimes even longer than that. Right? It's it's it's something that you go to, for multiple days. And so we wanted our event to have that kinda same feeling. As Alex said, we had multiple speakers at sessions each day, which just FYI, it's it's a lot to coordinate. It makes it a lot harder, but it allowed us to bring that theme to life. It also allowed us to showcase to the audience that, hey. With Goldcast, you can actually host multiple days, multiple session on each day, and and how we connect create a connected experience around it all, how we use, like, those event session days to have, engagement before and after. I I think Alexander is gonna go into that a little bit later as well. So, again, ultimately, we are using our events and webinars to showcase not only what we're launching, but what our product can do because we, you know, luckily enough, are using our own product to do this. And then the final one I just wanna mention is market has got talent. This one, we, we were launching our GenTech video editor, and we decided, hey. We don't wanna just do another webinar where we showcase the product. We wanted to be creative. We wanted to make sure that our audience felt, like, felt what the value is, not just from us saying it, but from our customers. And so what we ended up doing was having three of our customers actually do a contest live on stage using our agentic video editor. Again, completely live. So it was a very, very risky decision, but we had judges on. We we put the whole theme around it, like America's Got Talent. And it was just a really unique way to showcase a product versus just doing a stale demo. Again, intention here was to stand out, and really make sure that we're showcasing our product, but in a way that resonated and was fun and entertaining for the audience. Although this event, we didn't necessarily, like you know, for AI school, we showcased our embedded events, you know, organically. For summer camp, we were able to kind of showcase the multi day, aspect of of Goldcast. We didn't necessarily do that for Marketers Got Talent in terms of, like, the format, but we did internally. So, internally, we end up using our new live run of show feature because there were just way too many things happening during that event. We had to put up polls, we had to take off speakers, take put on contestants, show other things. And so we use our live run a show, to really make sure that we were coordinating that whole event, you know, seamlessly. And then we leveraged that experience to create a playbook, around live run a show. So I'll put that in the chat right now just in case you wanna go look at that. But, again, even though our audience didn't see that they had the live running show, we were able to use that new functionality and build a playbook that that we can then share with our audience after the fact. So all in all, the themes that we chose really helped dictate the format. Like summer camp, we decided, hey. Let's do multi day because it's the summer camp, kinda theme. But it allowed us to choose, like, themes that made sure that we were showcasing not only the products that we're launching, but the functionality of our tool and platform as well. And so that's what we try to do with all of our events is make it exciting, make it unique, but also showcase what we can offer for our customers. Awesome. Thanks, Anand Patel. Looks like we got a a lot of love for Markers Got Talent in the chat. There may also be a request for, Markers Got Talent season two. So may maybe something we can take back to the drawing board. Awesome. Yeah. So speaking of drawing board I I I since after the. first one, the first one was really stressful, but it went well. So maybe maybe we'll bring back a season too. Yeah. If you ever think we're not stressed, when it comes to our events, you would be sorely mistaken. Most of our events are very, very stressful, but fun nonetheless. So speaking of drawing boards, I'm actually gonna move us on over to, Alex here who's gonna talk through kinda how we land on, our creative ideas, the framework for it, and he's gonna share a little bit more around the events the very events that Anand Patel was just talking about. Alex? Yeah. I I have to say, I I feel like I have the best job, here because I get to, you know, work with the design team to come up with these really fantastic, honestly, pieces of work artwork. The the creative and design team here is, is unmatched. They're so great to work with. And so it is definitely a team effort, in coming to decide how we actually do the branding and designing, for these events, but it's an extremely fun process. And there's a couple of buckets that we, look at when thinking about, the brand and, the overall design. I would say at the core of, our department's ethos is really trying to especially well, particularly for, campaigns and and big events is around this notion of nostalgia and trying to get, the audience to connect with something or feel something when they, like, virtually walk through the doors, which I think we were really able to hit with, with summer camp, with AI school. And a lot of, different buckets inform this decision, to get there. One of them is timeliness. So, for example, AI school, as we mentioned, we know we wanted to do something in AI. And at the moment, there are very few, like, air quotes, experts in AI. So a lot of people are learning. We're all learning about AI. So that was a very close connection to going back to school, and it just so happened to be around the fall. So it made sense to go back to school with, AI marketing school there. Seasonality also has, a play in this. We do Frosty Fest, which shout out again if you haven't signed up, definitely do. There's, like, iPads and a lot of fun stuff to win. I wish I could win them. But frosty pads, we do every year. And then it made a lot of sense as as AP was mentioning, but summer camp, it was a four day event. We really wanted people to feel like they were a cohort and altogether going through this, this series of days altogether. And so summer camp made a lot of sense. And what we did with the visually with the branding, we we made, like, a full map of, you know, where each event was physically even though it was just a virtual event. So there was a lot of fun elements that we did there. I'll get into some of the details, in a little bit. And, also, if you haven't signed up for the the second webinar of this series, we will actually dive deep into the branding and design, with our lead creative, on it. So definitely check that out if you wanna know more. And the third bucket was pop culture. We've we've talked a lot about, Markers Got Talent. Some of you went and loved it. We wanted to do something outside of the box. We start to think about competitions. We we didn't wanna do just a run of the mill product, launch. And so competitions came up, then we start to think about America's Got Talent, how big of a phenomenon it was. Just now instead, we would get three amazing marketing judges and three amazing marketers from our network and have them compete. So that's really what, informed a lot of these decisions. But, again, this was totally collaborative. It's not just one person. It it really took a village to get us to where we where we were, in that polished polished state. Awesome. live. Yeah. So the poll was, what's your biggest challenge with event planning right now? Coming at the top was coming up with creative concepts that stand out, followed by measuring ROI and pipeline attribution. So congrats. You were at the right event. We will we are you're hopefully gaining some insights on how we do things here. Next up, we're actually gonna talk through how to ladder up to pipeline attribution. And so, we're gonna move on to playbook number two, promotion, attendance, and engagement. Let me advance my next slide. So promoting your events to maximize registrations. Obviously, you know, if you're not promoting your events and you're not maximizing reg, it's gonna be pretty difficult at the end of the day to generate, probably the huge pipeline goals that we all have here. Alexander, I'm gonna have you launch us off and talk about how we do things organically. Yeah. For sure. So I look at our, trying to increase our our registrations essentially with no budget. Not an easy feat, but, luckily, you know, we we have a lot of really, great channels that we can tap into. So the first one, which a lot of, you all probably have access to, is own channels. We often will look at emails. I try and, start promo about six weeks out. But if we can't, we do four weeks, and we'll tend to do one email per week to not overwhelm our base. And then in conjunction with that, we'll also do and launch a social campaign around it. Sometimes the two inform each other where we'll have people on email go to social, like what we're doing with Frosty Fest. But, definitely, those two are some of our biggest drivers. Internally, we also do something called company social posting day where, we'll ask, employees of Goldcast. We'll send them assets and, some copy, and we'll ask them all to promote this on their own personal LinkedIn. So we try and tap into those, networks as well. And then beyond that, just the standard website, you know, homepage banner. We use a, company called popper dot ai for, our website pop ups. Those do okay in conversion, but, it's it's always great, to have just as an in case. I would say some of our bigger ones that we've started to really lean lean in on this year have been our partner channels and our creative assets. So we have two communities, event, EMC, event marketers club, and then also the AI Marketing Alliance, which we partnered with for AI marketing schools. So we were able to leverage their network and reach, as well as the speakers all associated with them for that. So that really helped us on on reg. And then we'll also, lean on our speakers that we bring to to our events. We try really hard to get some top tier speakers, and so often, a lot of them will come with a really big following. So, you know, we'll do what we can to make sure that they do post. Sometimes they ask us to pay for it. That's, you know, I would say a a rarity. Usually, they're they're open to doing that, just, you know, to have people come. But, you know, occasionally, we'll also pay for influencers, but, I would say usually the the bigger lift is from our speakers. And on that, interestingly enough, something that we did this year, was we really leaned on our creative assets to help, drive reach and, just like overall brand awareness of the events. So we did something for summer camp and AI school that got a lot of buzz, which was you can kinda see a little small AP on there. We gate we did, like, a Pokemon trading card type of thing with our speakers, faces, and details on, like, a holographic card, which we animated into, like, a GIF. And, then the speakers posted that on social, and it went totally viral. We got so much reach out from people that we did not know asking us how we did it, you know, who what company did it for us, but it was just our own design team. So we did that again with AI Marketing Alliance. We did whole passes, and then we, we animated them with the lanyard and and had a really great background of a of a classroom. Also did extremely well, and we were able to see that correlation through UTMs, speakers posting that and actually seeing an uptick in registration. So that was really fantastic. Obviously, the last one being giveaways, people love free stuff. So that always definitely helps as well. Awesome. Keeping us moving. So I will talk us through some of the page strategies we have here at Goldcast that we use. So I mentioned earlier, like, considering your database and your funnel, what what things, you know, do you need to support your program? And so some of the things we invest in is third party media partners. Like I mentioned, this webinar is in partnership with MarTech. Next week's webinar is actually in partnership with MarketingProps. So we'll have sponsored webinars and key public with key publications. We'll also sponsor and community newsletters in order to promote our events. You may have seen us do events with the marketingops.com community. We also will promote our events through there as well as in addition to other newsletters in the space. We do targeted paid channels, so guaranteed distribution, if you will, to your target accounts, target prospects. And so we'll boost some of our, you know, own channel posts or speaker posts, as thought leadership as ads or sponsored posts, to our target count list. We'll also, again, engage with industry influencers as part of a campaign in order to get them, to promote our events as well. You may have seen that earlier this year when we had a five part b two b marketer survival series. And we also actually, dabble with gifting and direct mail. Some of you may have been recipients of our our ABM marketing boxes. I believe we had a really fun one, that went well with the GenTek video editor as well as Marketer's Got Talent event. And so really just, you know, thinking through how we invest our dollars and how we get in front of our target prospects and delight them at the end of the day. And so, you know, starting at the core of the events, delivering value all the way down to the the thing that we're sending them. There's some level of personalization understanding that, you know, we understand what it's like marketer to marketer. And then we actually also, partner with a a external agencies. So we work with an agency called Growth Today. They do I AI based outbounding for us for non opted in contacts. And so, obviously, to spare our domain and, our our outreach limitations, we will have them do outreach on behalf of us to promote some of our events, both for in person as well as virtual. We also have an external, SDR agency that will occasionally help us as well to promote some of our our events with, you know, outbounding through cold calling and whatnot. I will keep us going. If you have any questions, please be sure to submit them in the q and a or drop them into the chat, and we'll make sure to take them at the end of this. I'm gonna keep us moving so that we can get. to the q and a. Alex, I think this one, I originally had you take it, so I'm gonna go ahead and pass it back to you. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So, you know, it's tricky getting the it's hard getting people to register or, you know, it can be hard getting people to register. And then you wanted people not only to register but also to attend. And so we try hard to get that conversion, that ratio as as high as possible. And there are a few ways that we do this. I would say the first thing as just, like, as advice is make it easy for people to attend. It sounds silly and it sounds sort of common sense, but, what we do here is we will send out, a reminder email a week before, a day before, an hour before excuse me. And then the moment that the event is starting. We have seen a total correlation between sending these emails and a serious uptick in the attendance rate. I believe actually even during summer camp because it was a four day event, we sent one out in the middle of the event just to see, what that would do, and we saw a huge boost in attendance once we sent that out as sort of a reminder like, hey. This is going on now. If you're not in, it's still going on. It's a you know, I think it was a a half day event. So we had a lot of content, and we saw a big uptick there. Definitely promoting the, exclusivity of the event also helps. You know, we've had we've had the privilege of some really great speakers and pushing that, you know, it is their one opportunity to ask someone from HubSpot or WPP or whatever it might be. Those burning questions is a really great way to get that conversion going. The other the other thing which we're doing right now, and I'm I'm feeling very positive that this will correlate, but tying a social, a social giveaway to attending the event, will definitely help. At the moment for Frostyfest, we have a few social activations where, you know, you need to comment or you need to repost plus attend the event in order to, become eligible for whichever prize it might be, you know, an iPad or whatever. And we have seen some of not only our biggest engagement on social as a result, but we're also seeing really high reg and I'm imagining that's gonna convert into high attendance as well. Beyond this, I would take some inspiration from in person events. I know, what we've done in the past is some pre event engagement, trying to collect questions or saying, you know, the first number of whatever people to attend, will receive a gift or or something, that also definitely helps. Awesome. Thanks, Alex. And to kinda wrap up this playbook, I'm gonna share some of the engagement tactics that we use here. So, you guys should all be familiar with the giveaways for engagement. I started us off at the beginning of this. You know, encourage people to comment in the chat, participate in the polls, submit a q and a, ask a question on stage, which we've done from time to time. Surprisingly, you know, when I first started, I think that was probably the most nerve wracking thing for me was asking if there was anyone that wanted to ask a question on stage. And, occasionally, there's that, like, wild card of them not being ready. And so I will say that if you're gonna do that, definitely have your your your back back, green room folks confirm that folks are ready to go on stage, but it actually drives a ton of engagement. I find that people, engage a ton more when they see one of them or one of the attendees on stage asking the speakers a question. In the chat, I would encourage participation with verbal cues and text prompts. I think it's you know, people join at all points, come and go, and so I think it's important to remind them, like, hey. You know, we're all communicating in the chat. You might have seen me respond throughout. So I think part of the reason why people show up is to engage. Right? It's these are virtual events, and if you don't have the budget or the ability to go to in person events, like, this is the next best thing. And so we want that human contact. And so if you're gonna promote the chat, like engage in the chat, and I think some of my best webinars have been when our speakers kind of chat back, while they're speaking on stage, which is really, really, interesting as well. Utilize polls. We use this for two reasons. One, to better understand our audience. So we do things from understanding if this content is something you wanna see more of. Seeing some of the comments, I wish I woulda launched a poll asking if you guys want us to do Markers Got Talent again, next next quarter. But, yeah, utilize the polls to get to know your audience, have some fun. I've literally, started a webinar launching a poll. What's your favorite, like, Starbucks drink? You know? And I think just just get people going, provide that human interaction. We also, you know, consider adding a booth floor or other interactivity element. And so I think for some no. AI marketing school, we had the AI headshots, which is a really fun activation. It turned into, you know, a social posting loop for us. And at the end of the day, I'd be remiss not mention the event format. So things can get stale when we we do the same things. We kinda get used to the same things, and we tend it tends to drown out. And so I'd encourage you to play with, you know, q and a, fireside chats, competitions, concurrent session, multi day format. You know, the sky's the limit here. And I think if, I I often tell my team the question to ask is if you're dreaming big enough. And then the other question to ask is, is it possible? With that said, I'm gonna keep us moving. Let's move on to Playbook three and talk through post event follow-up and content content repurposing. I did see some questions already around, content repurposing and how we do it here. And so, hopefully, this section will, address some of those questions. Again, this is me, so I'll kick us off. Event leads workflow flow for pipeline activation. As, you know, the lead here for growth marketing, we treat events as another step in the buyer's journey. This isn't a single one off program. It's a step, to build a relationship. It's another touch point. And so for us, you know, working event leads actually starts pre event. And so it starts at registration. It starts from the day we launch the event, and so we do pre event outreach. Sometimes it varies from just, like, our marketing inboxes. Other times, it could be, the BDR team. It really depends on the account, the prospect, the level of engagement that we've seen them have, the signals, if you will, that we've been observing. But pre event outreach, intro, connect with them on LinkedIn, DM them resources, Start the conversation and see if they have any questions, and maybe that's gonna shape some of your content. During the event, some of you may may already be DMing, with various folks from Goldcast, but we do try to work these events much like we do an in person event as well. Summer camp, I think, was the first time we ran this playbook where the BDR team actually actively were having conversations with their target prospects. I think the question we get a lot is, isn't that too salesy? I mean, yeah, if you're gonna DM everyone and be like, wanna book a demo, sure is. But I think there's a way to do it where you're providing value, whether that's offering a link to our resource, you know, just saying, hey, I'm Cindy. I'm I'm your point of contact if there's anything you need. And maybe there's a world where there's exclusive swag that we're promoting, you know, that we're giving out, and it's really for those VIP, you know, folks that we're trying to have a conversation with. And so that that's another way for us to deliver value and work events, virtual events, digital events as well. And then post event, I think, everyone, should be familiar with this. But, you know, event post event follow-up, we ensure that we try to follow-up on leads within twenty four hours. At a minimum, it's the link to the recording. And then, you know, in most cases, it's the BDR and the sales team just sending that introduction post event follow-up, sending the resources, just making sure that, that, you know, attendee has everything they need and that any questions they have, is being answered. So, I think also another thing that's unique to us is a lot of the event engagement data powers the personalization that allows us to follow-up, post event and convert those, you know, attendees into meaningful sales conversations. Alexander, I wanna pass this over to you so I can get out of the hot seat here, but I wanna talk us through content repurposing and how we build mindshare. Yeah. For sure. So, I would say content repurposing is really at our core as a company. We as we have said a million times, we do a lot of events here, and we put a lot of effort behind the events. There's, there's a lot that goes into it, and so we wanna make sure that we are extending the ROI of said event, for as long as possible. So we have a pretty robust system in place to repurpose our content to essentially extend, by about six months, the ROI of just one event. And we have this in play for each one that we do. And it fuels a lot of things. It will fuel our YouTube content. It will fuel our blogs, our social, like LinkedIn carousels. And, you know, we've been able to see a considerable increase in our followers on YouTube, as well as our watch time and actually our, like, our general just views, from uploading a lot of our event, event clips onto YouTube. And we and, obviously, this fuels a ton of our our LinkedIn, content calendar. So it's been pretty, fantastic. And we actually drink our own champagne, like, use our own product for this. And I will say as someone who has done this before ContentLab and after ContentLab, I'm very happy that I work here and get to use this all the time, because it is it can be a pain otherwise. So, essentially, we just have the AI select a number of, you know, top moments from, from the, from the event, and then I'll sift through them and basically upload them right there, or I'll turn into a blog post, whatever it might be. And a really great example of this is actually at summer camp, this year. We had a lot of content. It was four days as mentioned and, you know, almost seven or eight sessions a day. And so after every single session, I would go in, get one or two clips from each session. And then at the end of the day, we would get all of the clips, like, the sort of the top moments, and we would send out an email to the registrants and to the attendees. So we would either say, hey. Here's what you missed. These were our top moments. You should come tomorrow to see more. Or to the people that did come, we'd say, hey. You know, if you missed one of these, you know, this is this is, you know, basically what you missed. And we were able to see, a steady, amount of people come as a result of those emails. We would see the click through rates, and we would see people attend, or, like, new people attend. So that was that was really great and and something that we were, quite proud of because, obviously, there's so much going on, but we were able to really rally everyone and and get a lot of content out to people, essentially within the hour of, the event finishing each day. Awesome. Thanks, Alexander. Anand Patel, wanna bring us home on this playbook? Yeah. I I just wanna also give a shout out to all the so I I realized I should have probably prepped this early, but I've been putting playbooks in the chat. Right? So a lot of this stuff that we do, we do create playbooks from them. So we have a whole playbook section on our website where it's playbooks run by us or some of our customers. So go to to check it out. Some of the things that Alexander has talked about about the custom emails during summer camp, the repurposing, It's all it's all on that playbook section of our website. So check it out. Please leverage it. Let us know if it's if it's helpful. But, we also do leverage a lot of the content that we do for, webinars and events for other things, especially, like, from from my product marketing lens. So a few things I'll just mention is, earlier this year, Cindy and I kinda partnered up to figure out how do we create, email sequences for specific personas that are sitting in our email database. And, obviously, at the end of the day, I wanna make sure that we're educating them, we're providing them value. And so I did a simple thing. I I don't know if you all have used it or if you're for the those who are customers of ours, we have this feature called AI search. When you go into ContentLab, there's a little search bar, and you can search any keyword or topic, and it will look through your full library of content and pull relevant clips. It'll also create blog content and social content if you want, but I I use the clip part of it. And I found a bunch of clips that are relevant to demand gen marketers, and I use those clips to, seed some of the nurtures that we were doing and provide them value, provide them content that they can leverage without having to go watch a sixty minute video. They could I was like, hey. Here's a quick thirty second clip, with some great advice from so and so from this organization. So it's a great way to leverage the content that you've created over the past few years and make sure you're giving it more life. We also as I mentioned, a lot of our events are product related. Even though it's not always product first or product forward, we always organically include product as part of the event, where we're showcasing, some new things that we've released or launched. And so I'll take some of those, run throughs that we have or walk throughs that we have of features and products, and I'll create clips from those and share those with our CX and CS team so they can share with their customers. If a customer has questions about, a Gentec video editor, we have this whole section that we from this one event, a webinar that we can just share with them. And so it just makes it easy to give them access to walk throughs or or talking points around the features and products that we're launching to market. And the other thing I'll just quickly mention is, like, we do look at a lot of the data that we get from our events. Right? Like like I mentioned, we we launched our AI event analyst. It's in beta right now. So, like, we're starting to use a little bit more to understand, like, what's working well and what's not. But for, the AI marketing school example, as I mentioned, we decided to embed the event on our website. And so we have a very strong point of view here at Goldcast where there are times where you should embed and there's times where you should host. Right? When you when you're hosting something like we are right now, you want people focused, engaged, and really, like, engaging with the content. While if you're embedding on your website, it's either to create a whole experience around it, like we did with AI Marketing School, or it's probably more lower funnel, bottom funnel stuff where you want them to actually start taking action on things. And so we actually were able to compare our AI marketing school engagement data with some of our other events, like summer camp, and see how things differed. And we we basically allowed us to see that we were right in our assumption and our point of view that engagement is a little bit less when you're embedding it on your website. And so if you if you have these high level speakers or you want people engaged and focused, it's better to to host it on in a separate environment. If you want more of a creative experience, and or you want them to be kinda clicking around and getting into the funnel, then the website is a is a definitely an ideal place to embed. So, again, we're using all that data to make decisions as well as educate our customers as well. Awesome. Let's let's wrap up before we head into q and a. Learnings and looking to 2026. Let me see. What would we do again? Who wants to take this one? I can take it. I think, connecting our design, our design elements to social, like, what we've done with, the holographic cards, and also just what we've been doing on social for Frosty Fest has had a really big impact on registration and just brand lift in general, for the events. So I think that's something that we'll definitely be doing next year. For what would you do differently? I'm gonna go ahead and just take this one. I would clearly use run of show for all of my front events moving forward. No. I I think for us, it's probably like you can never plan too far in advance. And so I think with, you know, a 100 plus events, on our docket, I think trying to figure out a way to maybe do less and have more impact would be something that I'd be interested in exploring. And then, you know, the sooner you can get the to that concept, the sooner you can start reaching out to your speakers, and it all makes that process a little bit easier. AP, I'm gonna point the last one to you. How is Goldcast thinking about 2026? Yeah. So there's probably two things I was thinking about. It ties into what you just said. So so, obviously, selfishly, we are able to get use of our own product early. Right? And so there's a couple of things that we're thinking about as we go into 2026, and that's around, like, using AI to brand events, quickly. Because our creative team is incredible, but it takes a lot of effort and work for them to put together the branding for especially, our big kinda quarterly, events. But so we wanna make sure that we can smooth and make make those things a little more seamless for other events that we're doing to scale the amount of events that we have even though we have a ton already, 100, right, plus. We wanna do more. So how do we get to market faster? And so we're gonna be using AI more to automatically brand a lot of our event content, like the registration page, the event, like, experience itself, cut down some of that work and capacity that the creative team has to then use, and they they can then use that kind of thought process of creativity elsewhere, but ultimately get get, events and and, more content to market quicker. And so that is something, as a Goldcast, as a company we're launching soon, is AI branding. And so we are definitely gonna be leveraging that as a marketing team. The other thing, thankfully, that Alexander and team have been doing a lot around is YouTube. I think we probably doubled down on YouTube maybe or sorry, investing in YouTube, maybe, like, a year, year and a half ago. And, like, his team has done an incredible job of putting a lot of content on there. And so we wanna double down on that investment. And, within Goldcast, we have a lot of GEO, AEO, whatever you wanna call it, kind of functionality to make sure your videos have the right metadata, the video object data to really get seen and discovered in the LLMs. And so we wanna start leveraging our product to pull the right descriptions and metadata so we can leverage it on YouTube, to start getting high discovery on LLMs. So that that's definitely a focus. LLMs and stuff is geo is a focus generally, but I think we could do a lot more with our video content because our product allows us to have the right metadata and video object information to to increase discoverability. Awesome. Thanks, Anand Patel. Thanks, Alexander. Let's take a a couple of questions here. I know we have six minutes left before we ramp this down. I'm gonna go ahead and share the first one. I'm gonna give Alexander and Anand Patel a chance to quickly run through the q and a in case there's something you wanna take. But the first one I see is how do you manage all the moving parts of this internally, Trello, Asana, Monday? Alexander, I'm gonna I'm gonna have you take that one since that kinda sits. with your team. Yeah. It's, it's a production for sure. We use a combination, actually. So, I will have a hub on Notion for, things like run of show, documents, list of potential speakers, our some of our social assets, things like that, but I'll have a a big hub on Notion. And then, we have a very detailed Asana board for specific tasks, like, you know, post our social, our our company, social posting day or make sure x, y, and zed is done in creative, make sure that we've sent email one, two, three, and four. So it's they're both interconnected, but Notion is definitely a little bit more of the, actual details of said event, and Asana is more of the task master there. Alright. I'm gonna share the next one. Have you noticed improvements in attendance, engagement with inclusions of gifts and giveaways? How do you get leadership buy in for budget? I can start us off, and then, Alex, I'd love Anand Patel, if you guys wanna jump in as well. We have. So for me, for my events, I have noticed, for sure, increased engagement. People are always after those big prizes, and in attendance as well. I think the thing is, like, positioning you know, this is where I said understand your audience. And so we were running an AI series, and I imagine a lot of folks didn't have, like, a premium, you know, GPT subscription. So we've raffled that off as well as an engagement prize. And so part one is, like, knowing what's kinda hot in the market and trying to do what people want and, like, being able to give that to someone. Oftentimes, unbranded on our side, is really helpful and gets people excited. And then how do you get leadership buying per budget? We you know, fortunately, we market to marketers here, and so I have a budget to achieve those pipeline goals. And so it comes down to trade offs. Right? So if I'm doing this, what am I not doing? And this is just an a priority because with a 100 plus events, we have to differentiate somehow, and that's just one way we differentiate. I I mean, I think, like, also having the giveaways as something to promote outside of just, like, come to our our event via email and on social has made that, a differentiator for us. This is a funny. one. How big of a staff do we have? My first answer is not big enough. Yeah. There's. also there's also one question, Cindy, where someone asked. whether we're remote and, like, do we come together in person to coordinate all this, or do we do it remotely? We do it mostly all remotely. We do meet every now and then, like, couple times a year, but it's not necessarily to plan an event. It's, like, just more general high level stuff. Sometimes these ideas actually come from, like, we're in, like, a team meeting and, like, Cindy Cindy Cindy's our idea gal. Right? So she has a random idea that comes up and, like, we kinda run with it and we see what what could come out of it. Right? And so, like, they come through just us having conversation. We we don't I don't know if we necessarily have, like, hey. Let's put together a meeting for us to brainstorm a theme for a so and so event. Right? Like, we it just comes up naturally. We were always, like, thinking and, like, encouraging each other to think outside the box. So, yeah, I I don't know if Cindy, Alex, any any other kind of thoughts on, like, how do you how we coordinate and kind of brainstorm remotely? I mean, I will I will say for the also, just FYI, if anyone was curious, I was I was on my second screen for a minute just trying to find one of the, Pokemon cards, and I found one from our CMO, Kelly, for AI Marketing Alliance. I know Anand Chow you had asked. So, if anyone's curious, take a look there. I I I will say from the design perspective, we actually do set aside brainstorming sessions for for, these. Those are, like, the best part of my day. That's really fun to do. I'll often just scour the Internet for references, put them all in a bundle, and then we'll sort of talk through and work through directions from those foundational assets. So that's a that's a really fun one. But, you know, it's interesting that, like, my design team is almost exclusively in India. So we're always plan I'm in The UK, so we're always playing with and the both of them are basically PST. So, you know, time zones are always a a fun challenge, to get those brainstorming sessions sorted. Awesome. I'm gonna shut this down because we're at time. Thank you both, gentlemen, very, very much. It was a pleasure having you both today. If there are any questions, we will definitely be following up with you with the questions you submitted. But if you're curious about our marketing team, what we want what we do, what how we do things, please send us each a note individually, collectively. We're happy to meet with you. We love meeting with other marketers. But as I mentioned, this recording will be available. You'll get a link via your email. And as a reminder, please join us for part two next week. Part two is featuring hands on demo with Brandon and Zao over from our team. And then the following week, we have Frostyfest. So part two, the buttons up at top. Frostyfest, you can click on docs. There'll be a link on there. I look forward to giving you guys a prize or two. Please join us then. But until then, we will talk to you all soon and have a great week, everyone. Thanks all. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, all. Take care.