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The Marketing Millennials
5 Webinar Mistakes to Avoid with Logan Lyles, Founder of DemandShift | Ep. 344
00:51:03
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- [00:00]
A
We are back with another episode of the Market Millennials. And today's episode is with Logan Lyles, who's built one of the most effective webinar playbooks in B2B. Right now we got into what most companies get wrong, how Logan reworked his entire strategy, and how he's now helping brands turn webinars into one of their highest performing channels. I hope you enjoy this one. Excited for you to listen. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Market Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. What is up? I'm here welcoming Logan to the podcast. Excited to have you on. He has a new playbook he wants to share with everybody. So yeah, let's just get into the conversation first. Like, Logan, could you introduce yourself to the audience?
- [01:06]
B
Yeah. Daniel, thank you so much for having me on the show, man. Longtime listener, first time caller over here. For those who I haven't crossed paths with on LinkedIn, I'm Logan Lyles. I recently founded Demand Shift. And so we help B2B brands break out of the dead end marketing or the dead end webinar playbook that a lot of folks are suffering with and help them implement what we call the webinar fast track framework. And how I got there was actually through kind of a long meandering path. I spent the first 10 years of my career in B2B tech sales locally. In 2018, I had the chance to join a marketing agency. I think he's been on the show. I know he's a good friend of both of ours, James Carberry over at Sweetfish. And from 2018 to 2022, I helped James, especially on the sales side, with the B2B Podcast Production Agency over at Sweetfish. Since then, I've been in a number of different marketing sales roles, both brand side and agency side. And over the last nine months or so, actually on the agency side, I was kind of tinkering with this framework for webinars and initially saw some really good results and hit what I call the conversion cliff, where seeing lots of signups, lots of registrations, but not seeing that turn into sales calls and pipeline. And I was able to tweak a few things. And as I started talking about that, more and more people started leaning in and asking questions. And so just a few weeks ago, I launched Demand Shift to take this framework to market.
- [02:45]
A
Let's Start with the number one thing. Like what's the number one thing most marketers get wrong with webinars?
- [02:53]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. Right now I'm running a research report and I've got close to a hundred respondents. And there's two questions that I think are really telling on on this point, Daniel. One, when I ask them to stack rank, why are you running webinars? What is your desired outcome? What's, what's the main objective? Number one, by a large margin, is to pass leads to the sales team. They see it as a lead generation activity. I'd argue that you can do webinars as both thought leadership and demand gen, but I'll park that for a second. But if that's their number one goal is to get leads to sales elsewhere. In the report, I asked them, what is your conversion rate from webinar registrant to booked sales call or sales accepted lead or however you're measuring that? And the number one answer is, I have no idea. So that is where I see a lot of folks have a disconnect. And the first problem that they're they're having is they want webinars to drive leads, but they're not effectively tracking it. They don't have a system for converting webinar registrants into leads. I've played with a few things on how to actually do that that we can get into, but I think that's the number one problem. To answer your first question, a lot.
- [04:08]
A
Of people treat it as just like a activity to do in marketing or like everybody's doing it, so I should do it instead of like if you were gonna run it like a Facebook, like Facebook or Meta, I mean Facebook or Instagram or Reddit, like a channel like you would go into it with, here's the goal I'm trying to get. Here is the KPI I'm trying to achieve. You wouldn't just go into it and this lot of different, we can get into. There's a lot of different things that you could do with webinars. Like if your goal, your goal doesn't have to be leads right from that webinar, but if your goal is leads and you're not, you're not tracking it then or tracking it properly, you're doing something wrong. But let's get into, let's go into where should I start? So I want to start running a webinar program or virtual event or whatever you want to call it.
- [05:08]
B
Yeah.
- [05:08]
A
Where do I even start?
- [05:10]
B
Yeah, I think it starts with one of the things that you said right there is viewing it as a program, as an ongoing channel, as a series. Right. Even if you want to say, hey, we're going to approach webinars, but we're going to approach them more like a live podcast or we're going to call them workshops or we're going to call them virtual events, whatever. Right. They can go by a number of different names, but I think a lot of people box themselves in and think, okay, either I've seen, seen survey respondents to our research report we're doing right now say, hey, I'm just doing webinars because my boss says I have to. Right. And it's kind of that checkbox marketing that, that you were just talking about. I think the, the other pitfall is looking at, hey, I'm going to spin up a webinar. It's going to be this one off thing and I it's going to be kind of this mixture of educational content, but it's going to be a pitch because we're just going to do it real quick and try and get some leads. And I think that that's kind of missing the forest for the trees. So one of the things that was effect in the times where I've run effective webinar programs is to look at it as an ongoing series to map out the content. If you're doing, you know, monthly webinars, how do they tie together? What is the story arc that I can put together across multiple sessions so that when people finish the webinar, maybe there is a direct CTA to book a demo or start a free trial or whatever your call to action is. But there's also this built in engagement of hey, guess what we're going to cover next month. It's this, right? And that's how you not only build an engaged audience and you see more leads from your webinars, but going back to what we were talking about earlier, you can be using it for thought leadership and brand building and audience building while you're also using it for direct demand gen. So I think going into it, thinking about how can I do this as an ongoing series, whatever frequency makes sense for our team and how can I tie those together so that they build on top of each other and interrelate so that you can build some ongoing momentum with a webinar series as opposed to a one off thing you're kind of try and do to see how many leads you can get with a quick hit.
- [07:18]
A
Yeah, I think if you're going to do webinars you need to commit to doing them consistently and have some sort of type of thought leadership, let's say thought leadership. I'm losing track of what I want. But like some sort of things you want to get into the market that is uniquely yours that a lot of other people could help or like something that's connected to your products, that you're a demand gen tool, like having the best like a series with the 10 best demand gen people could be a good one. What we do at the market Millennials is we do ours all lead up to like our huge like virtual event. So like every one of them is like a part of what the larger versa event and what we do is pre register get people to register for that and the bigger event when we do the virtual event. So then the list gets bigger for the big, big event and then that's where we normally will launch something big during that event. So all of it just kind of leads up to this huge, huger event that we're doing.
- [08:45]
B
Dude, I love that I've done a lot of ongoing series, but I haven't necessarily done it tied into a bigger in person event or a bigger maybe multi day virtual event. But I think there's a lot of power in hey, you're here, you're showing interest in this piece. This is actually part of a bigger thing that we're doing. Do you want to opt into that as well? And kind of that like double opt in has been one of the tweaks that I've made with our webinar fast track framework that has actually led to people being able to connect webinars to more book sales calls. And the way that I've done it is hey, you're registering for this webinar. Let's ask a few more questions to kind of help us tailor the content for you. And then at the end of those follow up questions in kind of a progressive survey is hey, are you interested in booking a call with a team that specializes in solving XYZ problem that we've just been talking about? Right. Is why you registered for the webinar. And by presenting that there I saw a much higher conversion rate than the kind of typical framework of hey, at the end of the webinar you kind of throw the right hook or in some email sequence after the webinar that everybody's looking for. So sometimes there's a lot of power in kind of striking while the iron's hot, while you've got someone's attention. And you could use that to double opt in for a bigger event or double opt in for, hey, maybe I am in market for a demo of whatever software product it is or whatever the case might be.
- [10:10]
A
Yeah, and I also think people underestimate. You can use like the registration path to and like to pre vet as someone comes into that. A lot of people don't use the registration path to pre to prevent someone.
- [10:26]
B
Have you guys done that?
- [10:28]
A
Yeah, we do it all like we always do all the time. Like are you interested in this or this? Or like a question like are you trying to. Is is like this your biggest problem?
- [10:42]
B
So you can kind of segment people based on not only their demographics, but what's their biggest pain point right now? What's their biggest interest?
- [10:48]
A
Also I think, I think, think people underestimate that. The reason I like doing webinars is not necessarily for like sales, but it shows intention of your audience in a deeper way than like a click an email click on an ad because you're taking them down to something and something that they want to attend of yours. So if you can get someone to attend an event, it shows like that cohort of people like you build a list of people who have attended events. Usually a more like we'll convert more down funnel for sales than the people who have in your email list who might not take another action to download something or attend something of yours.
- [11:30]
B
Yeah, because I mean you look at the people who take the time to register, then the, you know, 30 to 50% typically that take the time to show up for a virtual event or a webinar, like they've overcome some friction to take those actions. So you can, you know, that's true intent data. Right.
- [11:48]
A
I want you to walk us through your webinar fast track framework. What are the key pillars of that framework?
- [11:56]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So to me there are a few key pieces. The first part is the promotion. So thinking about how are we going to get people to the webinar. And when I started out doing webinars, I was kind of doing the same playbook, you know, email our existing list, then running some organic social posts and then maybe some paid social posts. And that was really it. And I actually found that like two additions to those, you still using those as the core. But two additions that a lot of people aren't typically using for webinar promotion can really help in this first area of giving driving more registrations. The first was finding partnerships or even paid placements in industry newsletters. So if you've got someone who has an engaged audience of a newsletter or A community either doing paid ads in those, in those channels to promote your webinar or collaborations. Right. You could, it could be pay to play or not. But I found that really, really effective. I started partnering with my friend Marketing Max, who has a large email list for his CEO report and Growth Daily. Both of those newsletters total I think something like 115,000 subscribers, which to me is a lot. So some people, maybe that's not that big, but I started working with him to put ads for our newsletter, for our webinars in those newsletters and I saw my registrations jump up quite a bit just by adding that new tactic. And then the other one has actually been cold email. So a lot of people think, you know, hey, if I'm going to promote my webinar, I've got access to my email list and that's pretty much it. If we're running cold outbound over here, that is usually straight with a direct ask or demo request or you know, going for the right hook of the sales call. So I started actually blending those and running cold email campaigns to targeted audience with just the content offer of hey, we're hosting this webinar. This is what it is. This is the only ask, no straight up sales ask on the front end. And I saw as much as 40% increase in my registrations and signups by adding cold email to the mix of my promotion on, on the front end.
- [14:16]
A
Yeah, I think you can only rely on your like existing like list or like you like if you're going to do something, you also need to bring other people into the mix and figure out like if, like I always get, get confused when people put out such great pieces of content and they forget that like that's only 50 of the job or less of the job or less. Yeah, like get the really like if you're going to put out something great, you want people to be there for it. So you should one, put some money behind it to get people there. If you're a brand, you should put it in places where you're the people you desire to come on those places. Like your ICP is there and you should be marketing it as great as you can because like, what's the point? I mean, I also think this benefit of using webinar is like a content engine. Like one webinar could supply like content for two, three months if you're, if you, if you're doing, if you're doing it right. Yeah, but like I said, I'd never get why people don't invest in one. Well, we can go into this next, like, I think promotion as well. One thing I see people doing really wrong with webinars, but I want to see what if it's in your playbook, is how they set up the title, the description. I feel like every webinar these days look the same. So what in your framework is different than what other people are doing?
- [16:08]
B
Yeah, and some of this I've been experimenting with, and it's right along the lines of some of the things you're saying. So, one, there's usually not a whole lot of thought given to the title, right? And you talk to people who are in B2B or outside, they. When they think about YouTube, they think about title and thumbnail as two of the biggest things of how they're going to package that YouTube video before they even get into all of the rest of it, how are they going to promote it, you know, even scripting the video and those sorts of things, like, what is the package? And I think spending more time on that because what. Let's talk about both of those. The title and the graphic, right? For a webinar, typically the title isn't outcome based. It's not written like a YouTube thumbnail to entice some curiosity or maybe some fear. Right. I see these boring webinar titles where there's no number, there's no outcome, that sort of thing. And so I think part of my framework has been to write an initial title and then iterate on that 10, 20 times to really hone it in, much like a YouTube strategist would for their title and their videos. The second piece is then the thumbnails. What do most webinar thumbnails look like? Like, Daniel, I'm sure you and I and a lot of the listeners have the same thing in our head, right? The little circles with the speakers and maybe the titles on there. And then we've got both company logos or at least one company logo. And then taking up a lot of space is the time, the date, you know, the join, the zoom or whatever webinar platform is. And I've started taking a lot of that out, even taking oftentimes the time and date off of being prominent on the landing page because it's not really adding a ton of value. Because when most people decide to register for a webinar, at least for me, I'm not necessarily like checking my calendar to see, oh, is this a good time for me to attend? I'm saying, like, hey, is this content going to be valuable? I'm just going to sign up, it's going to throw it on my calendar and if it's at a good time I'll try and show up live or if I'm really interested I will. Otherwise I know I'm going to get the recording, that sort of stuff. And so two things on this point I've started designing webinar graphics more like YouTube thumbnails to increase click through rates. I'm actually partnering with a YouTube thumbnail designer on a series that I'm doing right now to see what that lift is going to be on a certain series. And then with the landing pages I've stopped leading with hey, here's the time and the date and how you join and that sort of stuff and really optimizing the copy on the landing page to be short punchy. What are you going to get out of it? What is the outcome that you're going to get from this content of the webinar and try and summarize four to five key takeaways and really have that front and center as opposed to like the big typical graphic with the small faces and the date and time way too large I think.
- [19:01]
A
I mean that's amazing. I would say 99% of webinars don't do that. I think rarely people care who the people are speaking are. I mean that's a hot take. But it really like unless you have a huge name or someone from like a huge company, really they're gonna really care. And people like put their face, these people's faces like we were supposed to know who they are really they trying to go forward the problem they're trying to solve or yeah, like I want to figure out this. Having the people there are good in the description and having them in part of it so people know who they're learning from but they first gonna look at problem. They're not gonna be like oh, unless you have like a huge name speaking. They're not gonna be like oh I this random person. Yeah, I want to hear from them.
- [19:59]
B
I completely agree with you. Like it has a spot maybe on the landing page, but it's more like like lead with the problem. What are the things that they're going to get from it? And oh by the way, it's kind of like your social proof on a landing page or on a website, right. Of like oh by the way, here's who's presenting on this and why they're the person speaking about it. Right. But like that's down here for anybody watching video, right? Not way up here at the top, like we normally do with our webinar graphics and landing pages.
- [20:27]
A
Yeah. And the promotion could have some like, promotion, you can, layered storytelling, all that thing. I think the next question I have is I know a lot of people, so they get to say, mark could be good depending on your, like, say you got 100 people registered for your event. What are some ways to improve, like people coming to that event? Because you want, I mean, you want people to register, get the email. You can build an email list with that. But how do I get people to show up at the time of that event?
- [21:07]
B
Yeah. So to me, I don't think I did a good job earlier of kind of talking about all parts of the framework. So we're kind of jumping, I think number three, which is fine. But I think about promotion, I think about the signup flow, I think about how you deliver a quality live show and then how you repurpose and, and amplify. And so we're kind of in a mixture there of like two and three. And I would say with, with a live show, if you are doing it as a series, as we talked about earlier, one way to get people to show up more live is to get them to show up the first time and then engage them and like, make it valuable for them, not just the content, but what can you do to get them more engaged so that they're more likely to become a repeat webina attendee. And I've seen that as I've done more series. So step one we already covered is like, do it as an ongoing series and you'll get more people showing up live because they'll have experienced it. The second piece is doing things live that only people live get to experience. And I find that, you know, even when you have a pretty good engaged audience, getting them to type into the chat still is, you know, it still is some work. Everybody's not going to do it. You got to make it easy. And so I find that when you're pre planning the content, pre plan the polls that you're going to launch, usually one at the beginning, one in the middle, one at the end, because it rewards those attendees of feeling like, hey, I'm experiencing something that other people didn't get to. And now a poll isn't anything magical. It's not like super high lift. But I think that's something that again, 90% of webinars are probably not doing, not pre planning and having baked into kind of their run of show. I've seen that. And this varies depending on what platform that you're on, everybody kind of does the Q and A thing. Very few people are like, allowing people, quote, unquote, up on stage to ask their question. And I think that that again, kind of rewards that engagement and gives you something live that you're not going to get if you just watch the on demand recording and makes those attendees feel a little special, feel invested in. So it's a lot of those. I wouldn't say there's one silver bullet, but I think it's a lot of those little moments of what can you provide as a unique aspect of attending live?
- [23:28]
A
Yeah. One of my friends, Jay Schwedelson, he runs a lot of virtual events. One thing that he does, which I think is so smart is he basically says, like, this is, no, you're not going to get the recording if you don't come. So you'll say that and then you'll say, like, if you attend the first, like 15 minutes or more, we'll send you the recording. Like, like, if you come, we'll send you the quoting or like. So he like, kind of like gets that action of, hey, you're not, you're not going to see this again. So.
- [24:02]
B
Right.
- [24:03]
A
It's like, for forcing you to see.
- [24:05]
B
I've seen rand fishkin at SparkToro do that with some of his here recently as well.
- [24:10]
A
Yeah. I think there's ways to get like you say, if there's exclusive giveaways, there's polls, there's things that people can't get or see live. Like, I mean, you and. Or like asking questions to be able to consult, like, things you have to add those aspects. It can't just be someone's going to tend to hear your cool thoughts.
- [24:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like, you got to make sure that you know the content is valuable and package it the right way, like we were talking about earlier. But you can't just rely on that. One thing I'm going to, I'm doing with one of my clients right now, where I'm running their webinar series for them is we started talking about what is a unique offer that you can bake into the webinar only for live attendees. And so they're a video as a service agency. And one of the things that they often do for qualified folks that are considering their services is they either do an audit of their video strategy or they offer one free video. And so we were talking about, like, how could we use that to say, hey, the first, you know, there's going to be this value Added free giveaway. That's not just content, it's actual service, either consulting or some actual work. And it's going to be open to the first five people who book. That's only going to be available during the live session. So you can play around with different things like that as well.
- [25:38]
A
I think. Yeah, I mean it's all playing around. But I do think starting from the beginning, what you said is I have something consistent that don't just do a webinar and then forget to do another webinar or just do it in a random like keeping people. It's just like content in general. People expect a certain thing at a certain time or a certain part of the month or I'm doing, you do it once a month. Like people started expecting those things and it becomes habitual to them instead of, instead of I don't know when you're going to do your next webinar or things like that. So I know we skip, we're skipping around. So promotion. Is there anything you want to go down on like the reg path that people could do differently to help?
- [26:26]
B
Yeah, this to me. And it sounds like you're doing a little bit of this too, Daniel. So that's encouraging for me to hear because I rarely hear of people doing what I call a two step signup. And this to me was one of the key unlocks. I went from running webinars where I was getting 250300 registrants per webinar, which to me was an increase over what I was kind of expecting and kind of hovering in the 100 range. And so I was seeing more registrants but I wasn't seeing that turn into pipeline at all. And that was my goal or at least one of my goals in this instance. And what I did was I implemented this two step signup process so I would have a landing page that I custom built. I wouldn't drive people just to the Zoom registration page because you have very little control over what that looks like, what you can do do after someone submits those sorts of things. So I started building custom landing pages that integrated with Zoom and would register them and then as soon as they submitted it would redirect them to a survey type form. So think of like Typeform or a progressive form on HubSpot or high level or something like that where you can kind of present one question at a time. And the beauty of this process was that it's two steps, right? So I'm going to ask maybe five or six more questions of this person who just signed up for a webinar, but if they don't complete it, it's fine because the first step was complete and we still captured them and they're still signed up for the webinar. But by making it feel like a one step process to the person signing up, by making that first question just say, hey, thanks for registering. Complete your webinar registration by answering a few more questions and then making sure your first couple questions are super easy to answer, like what's your role, what size of company? Those sorts of things. But then you kind of have permission to ask a few more lead qualification questions about like you said, what are your biggest challenges? Let's say you're an agency that specializes in doing LinkedIn ads, like how much do you spend on LinkedIn ads per month? Those sorts of qualifying questions. And then you give people the option just say, hey, last question. Would you like to book a call with a team that specializes in xyz, whatever that that is. And by doing that, I went from 1 to 2% of my webinar signups actually booking sales calls to as high as 10%. So it was a 5 to 10x increase of making sure I was capturing the hot leads just by asking that question. Because if I only asked it at the end of the webinar or in the email follow up sequence, we know that only 5% of our market is in market at any given time. But I was not giving myself the opportunity to always capture the maximum of that 5% that was in market. And so there's some nuances to how you set that up, different ways you can do it, how you design that survey. But that to me, I started booking sales calls before the webinars were even live. And so one, I was reaching my goal faster and two, it allowed me to show up with less kind of pressure of I really got to sneak in the pitch here during the webinar and I can just focus on thought leadership and education.
- [29:31]
A
I also think it helps you not burn the rest of the audience that you trying to sort of. I honestly think the problem with a lot of webinars is you get a list of 300 webinar attendees, they send it to SDR or AE, like, go reach out to these people. Instead of like, here are, we had 300 webinar attendees. 50 of them said they're interested in learning or interested in getting help with their revenue program. Go send custom reach out to these 50 people. Instead of saying like. And the other 250 just let them or are not ready yet and just let them keep nurturing. Like, there's 50 of them that we need to. Like, why are we sending a whole list? Because you don't want to burn. Like, those are people who showed intention. So why are you, why are you burning those people?
- [30:29]
B
It's like we, you don't want to miss out on the 5%, but you don't want to burn bridges with the 95%. And that's exactly what we're doing by kind of putting everybody through the same playbook of like webinar. Hey, sales, here's the list. Go follow up with them. Right. And by asking some of those questions in the front end, you, you separate the hot from the cold leads. The hot leads go straight to sales, maybe even straight onto their calendar because they rose their hand and said, yeah, I want a sales call or I want a demo or whatever the case is. And the other 95%, you ask a few more questions and you get some idea of like, like, hey, we can actually segment these folks and we can tailor our follow up. They've already been asked, do they want a sales call? And they've said, no, not right now. But we can tailor our follow up based on the answers to their questions. We can prioritize those. We can say, hey, they're not ready for a call. But how could we position our sales team to add value, to share some other resource, those sorts of things to nurture those relationships? But right now we just take the 100%. We drop them all in the same bucket. I completely agree with you. I think that's a big part of the problem of the typical webinar playbook.
- [31:34]
A
I think that's part of the problem. And part of it is like you, the, the question you're asking, the reg path needs to align with that, that hook that you had.
- [31:46]
B
Yeah.
- [31:47]
A
At the beginning. If you can't have like one, you're like five ways to improve email. And then your things helping, like, need help forecasting revenue. Like those.
- [32:03]
B
There has to be a connection.
- [32:04]
A
Connection. Yeah, everything. Like, then people are asking the question, answering the question because they know it feels natural to what they're trying to do. And then also you, you're getting a whole list of people who are at least like semi interested in that problem or that type of content. Maybe they're not ready now, but at least they're semi interested in the. So, okay, okay, going back. So promo reg path, the quality live show. Good quality live show. Which I think. What, how, like, how would you Define like, I know quality. We said some things about like, how to keep people in, but like, what is. Like, how could I up level from just two people speaking on a zoom call, like the, the playbook that is right now to something that is more. Higher quality.
- [33:01]
B
There's some other ways that you can create some interactivity that aren't even necessarily like official polls. I did a webinar probably three, four months back with Casey Hill at Do what Works. And part of what they do is they, they analyze the results of a lot of AB tests that brands are running on their websites. Might be on their homepage, might be on their checkout page, might be on their pricing page, and they have a lot of this data and they can see the A B test and they can see which one won. So instead of just like breaking down these examples and talking about best practices, we actually brought up, hey, here's a test that Shopify ran, here's a test that Asana ran and we had people vote in the chat. Which one do you think worked, A or B? And that created a lot of engagement by kind of doing that like live interaction. A little bit different than just like a poll, right? Of like, hey, where are you at with your, you know, your demand gen efforts? And kind of rank one to five. But it was actually like they were involved in the content. So that was a, an interesting one that I found was helpful. And one of the other things that we did is we had a few slides, but I think that slide decks are kind of overdone in webinars. Like, if you're watching a podcast on YouTube, you don't expect people to have a slide deck. And so I think part of what you can do is ditch the slide deck, only have visuals when you really need it, and treat your webinars more like a live podcast. And the benefit of having video is, you know, they can see you. And if you need to bring up something that is a quick example or you're visualizing a framework or something like that, then bring that up then. So those are kind of one specific example and one kind of broader strategy that I've been using for the live shows too.
- [34:56]
A
So, okay, promotion, reg pass, live show is any step after that that people are missing.
- [35:03]
B
Yeah, I think it's the repurposing and amplification going back to what you and I were talking about earlier. And I think the natural thing here is to think about repurposing the content and we can talk about that. And I think that is a big, big miss But I think there's also a missed opportunity to say, hey, we run webinars and we do them once a month. Right now we typically get 250 people to register. This one we got 500 people to register. That was great. But then it just sits on the shelf and you don't do anything to drive traffic back to that highest engaged webinar. And that's where I think going back to your point about promotion is like you should have a promotion engine for your highest performing webinars that are now on demand and they get the same. Even if you're promoting them on demand, you can still have that split reg path and the two step signup process to segment your hot and cold leads. But you're getting more of those people in because you're doubling down on content that your audience said we want more of that. So I think a lot of people, if they're running a series, they just oh, that hit. How do we replicate that? That maybe we don't have to reinvent it. Maybe we can just repromote that same thing in different channels or in different ways to get more people to consume that, that version on demand. So I'm curious your thoughts there. And then maybe we can talk into like repurposing and repackaging the content.
- [36:26]
A
Yeah, I mean one thing on repurposing I think that I'll go into like a high level is I think webinars, like webinars part podcast, it's hard, it's hard to write 40 plus minutes of words. Like just think how many blog posts you have to write up 40 plus minutes of words. So now with AI you can digest so much more content by putting out webinars to create more content and also you utilizing most of the time like other people's expertise to even add more expertise to your content. So now you're even creating more. So to be able to feed AI a transcript of like 30 plus minutes of solid content that you can use forever that you could use in your marketing for to that you could reference and other pieces that you do that you could do spin offs of that is invaluable. So I think that's where I see like the biggest like beside like it's hard to write, even writing like news, it's hard to write all these things. So to be able to, to speak and transcribe and is I think is the biggest unlock when it comes to these like virtual things or podcasts or whatever you're doing with guests.
- [37:44]
B
Yep, absolutely, man. Because if you've been intentional about. What is this content serving? What problem is it helping solve? How is it structured? Which you had to do, right, to show up and add value for a podcast or a webinar in the first place. AI isn't great at. You know, I'll use one of the things you mentioned earlier. AI isn't going to develop your brand point of view. They're not going to. AI isn't going to develop out of scratch a narrative that you're going to be able to take to market. Right. But if you've spent time developing those things and you're breaking those down into pieces of content, like a 30, 40, 60 minute webinar that you know, build and speak to that larger narrative and unpack your pov, AI is really great at summarizing and organizing that information if you give it the right guardrails. I've done that quite a bit. I actually downloaded all of my LinkedIn content. A lot of people don't know you can do this. You can go and request all the Downloads of your LinkedIn content, all your connections, all of the posts you've ever written, that sort of stuff. If you've been active on LinkedIn for a long time like you and I have, Daniel, I would suggest you do this. You can actually take that and then go and feed that to ChatGPT and say, hey, here's how I write. Build me a custom prompt so that I can train a custom GPT how to write like me and so you don't have to take a ton of the time to think about like what is my brand voice, how do I write those sorts of things. So I think a tweak like that that I got from my buddy Dan Sanchez can be really helpful if you are thinking about how do I take this live or asynchronous video content and turn that into written words that actually do sound like me.
- [39:26]
A
Yeah, I think, I mean AI is only good with content. I mean it's great, but you got.
- [39:31]
B
To feed it with context.
- [39:32]
A
Yeah. Content is what takes it to 100 the next level. And it also you could do is like help you. If someone is really active that you know and you say you are using someone else who's on LinkedIn, you can help pre write a post for them and that's in their voice so they can. You could reshare content. So there's a lot of things you could do with that. But I think like everybody says repurpose, but not many people actually do it. It's just such a It's such an unlock to just keep like not having to keep thinking ideas over and over and over and have posts that are in your, that are fitting your narrative. Yeah, but like again, it goes back to starting with what is the hook of this webinar and how does it align to what we are doing as a brand?
- [40:25]
B
Yeah, you've definitely got to start there. And you know, a lot of, you know, it's funny, you know, you see the marketers on LinkedIn that have the tagline of like arts and crafts department, but we call it marketing or whatever. Right. And a lot of us joke with that who come up from more the creative side. We don't want to put constraints, we don't want to put too much process. But I find that the more that you give yourself those constraints, the more actually creative you can be. So if you set up a system to say, hey, we're going to run a monthly webinar, we're going to turn that into a blog post, we're going to pull 10 to 12 video clips from it. But wait, it doesn't have to start there, stop there. We could have a structure to it. One thing I love about a lot of the stuff you guys do at Marketing Millennials, Daniel, on your different channels is do funny memes and gifs. So what if you had a process that said, hey, we're going to think about how do we create a meme out of five different points that we made in the webinar. Like why couldn't we do that? Right. Everybody stops at repurposing of turning it into a blog post and chopping clips for social. But you could think about how do we actually feed the transcript of that webinar into ChatGPT to have it help us write an engaging script for a five minute YouTube video. And if we made our webinar graphic look like a YouTube video, now we can combine those. So all of these things can work together in your process, but it just takes some pre planning for it to actually run super efficiently.
- [41:57]
A
Is there any else in the process you want to add for people who are trying to run webinars today? I know we went down all the way from thinking about the hook to the branch path to the actual show to repurposing. Is there any other, like key things that people are missing that need to know?
- [42:17]
B
I want to double down on one other thing that you touched on there, Daniel. If you are bringing in outside speakers to be guests or featured speakers in your webinar series, oftentimes we expect Them just to share it. And I see this with podcast guests as well. And they might have every intention, but you haven't been very prescriptive with them and you haven't kind of enabled them to share it very well in a lot of instances. And so if you're bringing in outside guests, a few tips I would say is when you get them to agree to be on the webinar, ask them, hey, will you be willing to promote this on the front end and talk about what that looks like. And if they say yes, equip them with how to do that. Write posts for them, write email copy for them if they have a good email list and they can plug it in their newsletter or whatever. And then on the back end when you create get buy in from them on the front end to say hey, if we chop up six clips of your best moments on the webinar, would you post those? And they might say yes, they might say no. If they say yes, they then ask like hey, could we pre write some copy for you so you don't have to do it from scratch. You probably tweak it but maybe it'll get you 75% of the way there. If you have outside guests and partners who are helping you produce the content, bring them into the promotion and the amplification and repurposing on the front and back end and think about how could I build a process to make it easy for them. So when they say yes, say great, here's how that'll work.
- [43:51]
A
Yeah, I think, I mean to me people are soft and asking people to do these things for them. I mean a lot of people are willing to do it but I think think sometimes you it's not soft ass like hey please like share this with your audience. Or a lot of times like you know, people aren't getting that you're also giving someone else exposure. Like it's like on both sides. Like so don't always if they, if they're getting it's both of you are doing favors for each other. So this will also if you could frame like this will help you get more expertise or, or show your audience this. Like there's a lot of ways that to and then also make it easier for the easy for them to share like share things that are like I would typically people share things like this or here's an example post or here just make it easy for them to share as well. Because for me when I get people will send me share this clip and I'm like first of all like could you have given me, like a little options, maybe clips that I would want to it that fit some narrative that I'm trying to say? I don't just share things, just to share things. And I'm not just saying that to be like, because sometimes I don't look good in the video or I don't care about, I don't want to share. Like, there's a lot of things you're going to make me look like the star. Yeah. So lastly, I want to ask you, say, ask everybody on this podcast, what's a marketing hill you would die on?
- [45:23]
B
I mean, I, I think that it's got to be the willingness to invest in brand and play the long game. I think these sorts of things, you know, we've talked about it a number of times here, webinars, social, whatever channel you're talking about. If you're only invested in the short game of marketing and you're only looking at kind of your direct lead gen and performance marketing, then it's not going to be sustainable. I was part of a marketing team when I was in house at a SaaS brand and we recognized this, that, that like we were spending all, most of our marketing budget on kind of the middle and bottom of the funnel. And one of our, one of my team members on the management team said this line that I'll never forget. He said, it's like we're running around just trying to hug strangers, right? Like we're asking for the hug. We're presenting the proposal. And these people don't even know who we are. We haven't spent time brand building. And so at times I think you can, could, you could go too far. You could just try and, you know, build the brand and just, and never ask for the sale. Never make it easy for people to say yes to you and get further down the funnel. Like, there's, there's an old Irish proverb that for every mile of road, there's two miles of ditch. And I think there is a, a ditch on both sides of, you know, not making it clear how people can buy from you or just running around and saying, hey, do you want to buy from us right now? But I think if I had to pick one that most B2B marketers fall into, it's probably that second one more often. So the hill I would tie on is like, you've got to have brand in order to do demand gen. Well.
- [47:01]
A
I mean, I will always agree to that. And like webinars, if it was a.
- [47:06]
B
Hot take, it wouldn't be too hard for you to agree with.
- [47:09]
A
It is a hot take though for most. But I think it also all depends where you are the like what phase of the company you are at.
- [47:19]
B
Right.
- [47:20]
A
It all depends of that as well. But yeah, I think if you're trying to like your first goal is to build trust with the artist. And how do you do that? Through expertise, through like showing up for them for not just asking the first time. Also we said this before at the beginning. It's like how are you track. There's ways to track this like have webinar specific tracking that's like, like okay, this is the first time registered and this is the second time registered. How many have they attended? How long have they did they attend this webinar? Like you need to have like detailed of like what these people, like what do they say in the reg path? Like you can't just say registered or not registered or like attended and not done.
- [48:06]
B
And then yeah, that is like table stakes. We've got to get beyond that that if we want this to be effective.
- [48:12]
A
Exactly. So like you treat someone who's the first time versus the fifth time differently.
- [48:17]
B
Exactly.
- [48:17]
A
So it's. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on Losy. Where can people find what you're doing?
- [48:25]
B
Yeah, so two quick ways you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find. Logan Lyles L O G A N L Y L E S Or you can check out our my website at demandshift.co.
- [48:37]
A
Well thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.
- [48:40]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me man. This has been fun.
- [48:44]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast us. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.