Content Strategies for Webinar Success: A Fireside Chat with Uber for Business and Iron Horse.

Lindsay McGuire
I wanna welcome everyone to Content Strategies for Webinar Success. I'm gonna start welcoming our speakers to the stage.

They have a wealth of knowledge around webinars, content strategy, webinar programming, you know, pre event, post event, all those goodies we're about to jump into. So first off, I wanna introduce Arianna from Uber For Business to come up to the stage, share a little bit about yourself, your role, and your favorite fall activity.

Arianna Etemadieh

Awesome. Thank you, Lindsay, for having me. It's so nice to be here with everyone.

I'm Arianna. I'm a marketing lead here for US Canada at Uber for Business. Uber for Business is all the benefits of Uber reimagined for your business.

So whether it's managing business travel, meal programs, rides for your clients or your customers or more, that's what Uber for Business does, all in one dashboard. And my favorite fall activity is going to a music festival in Sacramento called Aftershock.

It happens every October, and I look forward to it every year. 

Lindsay McGuire

Oh, I love it. Any favorite artists that you've seen at that festival? What's the music vibe?

Arianna Etemadieh

Yes. So, music vibe is rock music. So, think Guns N' Roses, KISS, Breaking Benjamin is one of my favorite bands, Avenged Sevenfold, for example. So it's definitely a riotous time.

Lindsay McGuire

Oh, I love it. Breaking Benjamin is also a favorite. So love it. Alright. So we're gonna welcome our 2nd speaker onto the stage now. Stephanie, come join us.

She is calling in from Iron Horse today. So, Stephanie, tell us a little bit about yourself and your favorite activity.

Stephanie Siemens

Hello. Thanks, Lindsay. So good to be here. My name is Stephanie. I'm a client engagement manager at Iron Horse. Iron Horse is a B2B marketing agency. So we basically function as an extension of our clients' teams. I am focused on the digital events and webinar side of things.

So we help clients with everything from webinar strategy to content and that strategy as well, and then execution of the webinar in their webinar platform. So I'm really excited to talk about webinars.

My favorite fall activity, I have to tie it back to football. I am so excited that football is back. I am a huge 49ers fan as Arianna knows. Born and raised in the Bay Area. My family just loves the 49ers. We get together on most Sundays to watch football together, and it's just a really special time for everybody. 

Lindsay McGuire

I love me some football too, but I will say my team is kind of sad. I'm in the Indianapolis area.

I'm a Colts fan. We had a somewhat good year last year, so I'll take it. We'll see how we do this year. You know, we started off a little rough, but we did beat the Bears. So, you know, you got to take wins when you can get them.

Stephanie Siemens

Yes. Of course.

Lindsay McGuire

Well, we're so excited to have both of you here for this, fireside chat today about webinar content strategies. You both have a great, great background in this topic, so I bet there's gonna be so much knowledge drop today.

So we wanna start off with our first question. So how do webinars fit into your marketing goals?

Arianna, do you wanna take this one first?

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. I will. Thank you, Lindsay. So interestingly, webinars have evolved here at Uber for Business.

We previously focused on thought leadership, talking about what's happening in the macro business industry. But as we've continued, we started to focus more on product webinars because we found that our webinars are often influencing the buyers within their buying journey.

AKA, they're already talking with sales, and they're seeking to learn more about the product. We also like to use our webinars as a great platform to showcase new products.

We have a quarterly product release event that tailors to that. And we also mostly target our database.

A lot of our registrants and attendees come from people that already volunteer first party data, and they're within our email database. We invite them to these webinars, and then they sign up because they're really interested in learning more about all the use cases that Uber for Business can do and understanding the product.

Because people know Uber, but they often don't know Uber for Business.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah.

Agree. I think my piece of advice would be to always start off with the question, what do you want to achieve with this piece of content? Because at the end of the day, that's what a webinar is.

It's a piece of content that you can use in a lot of different ways. So do you want to educate your audience about something in particular?

Do you want to generate leads? Do you want to showcase a product like Arianna was mentioning?

Do you want to build authority on a subject? So it really helps to ground yourself in making sure you start off with the outcomes in mind because that'll kind of lead you down the different paths to other decisions that you wanna make along the lines of getting your webinar, planned and started.

So I think that we think about webinars in a few different ways. We start off with drawing a line in the sand, whether the webinar is going to be mainly thought leadership focused or product focused, again, to, back to Arianna's point.

There are, of course, other different topics and formats for webinars, but this is kind of helpful for us in trying to decide, like, where are we going to focus, in the session. So once you make that initial decision, then you wanna look at the format of the session and make sure you're tying it back to your original goals.

What do you want the audience to get out of the session? So you could have a fireside chat, which is, having a couple of experts on your webinar to talk about a certain topic.

Or if it's something that's a little bit of a meatier subject and it's something like a master class. Maybe it's a longer session that's a presentation format with slides.

So all these factors are really important to keep in mind at the start of your process when you're thinking through your goals and what you want to, what will you want your audience to come away with after the session because it's really valuable time that people are spending with your brand. So it helps to kind of ground yourself in those questions at the beginning.

Lindsay McGuire

Yeah. And I'll resonate a few things both of you said. So, Stephanie, one thing you brought up was that a webinar is content and I also wanna reiterate that a webinar is video.

So I hope everyone watching is keeping that in mind as you're producing your webinar programming and your webinar strategy. So that it's not just content, it is video content, and it's super powerful and impactful video content.

So just keep that in your noggin as we're going through. And then, Arianna, I wanna point out one thing you said, that you all usually tap into your email database to kind of get people into your events.

And it just makes me laugh about how people are like, oh, email is dead or, you know, the whole track about, like, you know, email not being a good channel, a strong channel anymore. I think definitely, we at Goldcast as well have seen a similar impact from our emails list of building that out and the value that has of getting people into your content and building those relationships.

So I just wanted to hone in on those two thoughts. So next, I wanna ask for your thoughts on live versus pre-recorded webinars.

I know a lot of people have strong feelings here. They either do 1 or the other more predominantly.

People on the chat, if you have things you wanna talk about prerecorded or live, definitely drop in Q&A. But, Arianna, what are your thoughts on the, prerecorded versus live conversation?

How do you decide on that?

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. It's a great question, Lindsay. And like you said, there's certainly strong opinions on both sides of this.

We've actually tried both at Uber for Business, a live webinar versus pre-recording. We actually would prefer pre-recording.

The reason is that I personally attended webinars where in real time when they're live, there could be technical difficulties, and sometimes that could compromise the quality of the webinar or result in delays. As a registrant’s and attendee’s time is important, all of you watching, all of your time is important. And so I wanna make sure that we're delivering the information that you need to know without any risk of technical difficulties while still maintaining you know, it is still live, but, you know, we it is prerecorded to help eliminate the absence of any technical issues.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. I think that a lot of that anxiety really stems back from 2020, at the height of the pandemic when everyone was doing virtual events and the load was so heavy on these platforms that we were seeing a lot of difficulties. So I think we're kind of still carrying that in the back of our minds.

But I will also echo what Arianna said. Pre-recording, is also my preference. I think there's a time and place for both methods, but I think pre-recording also takes a lot of, pressure off of speakers. So there's a little bit of a safety net, because it is alive and getting on webinars can be, a little bit daunting for speakers.

So, knowing that, you know, we're pre-recording within a week or so before the actual live event, can be very helpful for speakers. With that said, even with pre-recorded webinars, there is still, you know, as Arianna mentioned, we are airing them as if they are live.

So there is still that potential for something to go wrong. So at Iron Horse, we help our clients by making sure that everything runs smoothly.

A lot of times it is if a if an attendee has a technical difficulty, so for example, they're saying, hey, I can't hear the webinar or I can't see the slides, and we're on, and helping them kind of troubleshoot the best practices, you know, what what browser are you using, refresh your page, stuff like that so we can make sure that they're up and running on the webinar and we don't leave a bad taste in their mouth if they were to have a problem, with with the session that we're hosting. And we're lucky in the sense that we use Goldcast and their support is really, really great.

I wanna say the SLA is under 60 seconds for support when the session is live. So you know that you're gonna get a response super quickly.

And at Iron Horse, we have a really strong relationship with Goldcast we're lucky to have. So, we feel really secure and comfortable, going into a session that's live too.

Arianna Etemadieh

And I think one thing to add too, we also have a great relationship with Goldcast as we do with Iron Horse. And we're a small but mighty team on the Uber for Business marketing side.

And as a result, knowing that we could rely on Iron Horse to help make sure that the technical difficulties on the back end are working as expected and acting truly as an extension of our team is hugely helpful. So making sure that our webinars are going off without a hitch while still delivering that valuable content we wanna give to our audience.

Yeah. Just to hop in here one more time, Lindsay. Another thing that's important to make sure of is your speakers' connectivity.

So, we also make sure to do tech checks with speakers before a session. So regardless if it's live or prerecorded, we wanna make sure that both the speakers are confident that their connection is not going to all of a sudden drop and also we're confident that the speakers are going to be in a good location to record.

It just makes everybody feel a lot more at ease going into the recording day or the live webinar day.

Lindsay McGuire

Yes. And that is crucial to success is to have those speakers feeling calm and confident and ready to present on whatever they're presenting on. So love all those tips.

I wanna ask kind of one rogue question that might not be on a run of show, but for anyone who hasn't done a pre-recorded webinar before and might wanna try it out, any tips or any guidance on, like, you know, that first time? Because it's probably a little different than running something live.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. I'll take this first, Arianna. I think that what's big for us is really urging the speakers to pretend like it's live.

Because I think a lot of times if you're going into a pre-record and there's less stress and pressure, sometimes, there's less energy as well. So that could be a con, but we just wanna make sure that they're pretending like there's an audience watching so they keep their energy up there.

They're practicing active listening. They're, you know, nodding their heads, smiling as we go, to make sure that it's super engaging for the audience because we don't want it to come across as a previously recorded session.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. And I think another piece I'd add, absolutely pretending that it's live, and also just maintaining contact with, you know, with the camera here. I think that's just a general best practice.

I think sometimes folks will have a tendency whether they're referencing some data points or they're looking off to the side or they're looking at fellow speakers. And I think looking at fellow speakers is right.But when you're actually, you know, presenting and speaking, just a general best practice is, you know, make eye contact with the cameras. That's the other piece I would add.

Lindsay McGuire

Yes. 100%. And then going back into the idea of this is video content we're creating, and the better you can make that video content, the better off you will be long term. Think about all the ways you can use this post webinar too.

So great advice there. Love it. So we've talked a little bit about making speakers comfortable.

What other advice do you have around ensuring your speakers have the best experience or comfortable presenting on your webinars?

Arianna Etemadieh

Certainly. I'll take this first step. I think whether it's a pre-recording or it's live, one thing that I would recommend is starting, of course, with making the ask to the speakers. For me, being at an enterprise organization at Uber, we're 30,000 employees globally.

Many of us have a lot to do. Also, odds are that not all of us know each other.

So how do you get people to basically carve out time to be a speaker at your webinar? What I do is I actually have a template I use that I created to make the webinar speaking as clear and concise as possible.

In your docs tab over in Goldcast, I actually offered it as a Word document. You guys are welcome to download it and use it for your webinar speaking request if that's all helpful.

The idea with the how I crafter the message is you wanna anticipate any and all questions that you would get in this initial message. This also helps instill confidence that the speaker that you're making the ask of, they feel confident in you, that you're gonna carry them through this webinar process or virtual event process and help them look as best as they deserve to be.

Steph, anything to add?

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. I will just encourage everybody to download that template because I can attest.

I use it after I saw it from Arianna, I was like this is perfect, because I think you wanna take away as much murkiness in the process as you can. So I feel like sometimes my middle name is over communicating.

So, webinars can be really daunting for speakers, like I mentioned, and not everybody feels comfortable doing them or public speaking, or maybe just not used to it yet because I think that webinar speaking on webinars is kind of a muscle that you have to strengthen over time. So the more you communicate with speakers, the more information you give them upfront and the more lead time you give them to 1, ask questions and 2, review the content, get comfortable with what the ask is, the better.

And while Iron Horse and Uber for Business, we we partner on a lot of the content and the outline for the session and the deck and all of the copy, while we're working through all those things, we also share those assets with the speakers, not in their final form, just in their work in progress form. So they feel like they're brought along with the process.

We encourage them to add notes, add color, really make the copy their own so when they go into the session, it can feel super natural and they feel like they had a stake in the game going into it.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. And, again, being whether we're whatever size organization you're at, but particularly as you get to larger organizations, think over a 1000 employees or even bigger, helping people feel involved and brought along in the process like Stephanie does by sharing with our speakers, here's what the deck is going to look like, here's what the outline is going to look at like, etcetera, helps them feel involved in the process, and then we all get to celebrate the wins when the webinar performed successfully. So, definitely couldn't agree more on over communication.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. And I think something that's also really, really important with their speakers, and it's something that we didn't always do at the beginning, but once we started doing it, we have never looked back, is having a dry run with the speakers. So that's about a week prior to the session, and we usually do it a day or 2 before the pre-record just so it's fresh.

But it's basically running the session from start to finish as if we were to hit record, but we're not really hitting record. So it can it's helpful for both the speakers and for us on the admin side for seeing, okay, is how is the session flowing?

Is there anything we're missing? Are we running long?

Are we running short? Sometimes it becomes a really collaborative process as well. I know a couple weeks ago we were doing this with Arianna and a speaker group and there was one part of the session that just didn't really seem to be working so we reworked that live during the dry run, updated the deck, updated the outline, and everybody felt much more comfortable going into the session.

So it just takes stress off of all parties involved to kind of know what you're going into before you go into that reporting. So it's super helpful.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. And the other piece too is, you know, first of all, shout out to college professors that creating content for a 30 minute webinar, a 60 minute webinar, or in their case, a 60 minute lecture, it's it's a lot of work. And one thing that we have found in our dry runs to what Stephanie was saying is sometimes the net, the net net of how long our content takes is 20 minutes out of a 3rd minute webinar.

Then, yes, that leaves more time for Q&A, but at the same time, we wanna make sure that we're delivering sufficient information, within the 30 minutes that folks are committing to us. So dry runs certainly help us, like Stephanie said, with making sure that the content is flowing and also that we have sufficient content to meet the run time that we're asking folks to give us.

The other piece I'd also add, so kind of shifting back to, thinking about speaking and speakers and helping them feel comfortable, is after running dozens of webinars, you also start to pick up who's a good speaker and, you know, who's a natural and who's an expert. So after the webinar recording goes well and everyone's feeling that post recording high or post live webinar high, I feel like that's a great moment to ask speakers if they like to be part of webinars again.

This allows you to create a bunch of speakers, and so the benefit is that it's less request to people that may not know you. And also, you can also start to build webinar content and ideas around that bench of speakers' expertise.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's so huge. And something that happened to us last webinar recording, Arianna, that I actually haven't brought up with you yet, but one of the speakers asked if you had any specific feedback for him after the session, like constructive feedback because he wanted to get better at speaking.

So I thought that was so cool and such a good, something good to keep in mind, because these speakers, a lot of these people do want to continue to speak at webinars and kind of showcase their expertise. So the speaker bench, speaker profiles are super important.

We list, you know, what speakers are good at speaking about, what their subject matter expertise is, what past webinars they've spoken on, and we include links to them. So this becomes, like, something that you can look at.

So say Arianna picks the topic for her webinar and she's thinking who is going to be my speaker for this session, she doesn't have to pull out the org chart, go back to the drawing board to kind of look for who's gonna be a good fit. She can pull up her speaker bench and profiles and say, Lindsay is great at content.

Let's ask her to join our next webinar. So, it's it's super helpful.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. And, certainly you know? And and I think the the last thing is, you know, I feel like we could talk about, you know, making our speakers vulnerable all day.

But I think the last thing I'll say is giving kudos, I think, is quite critical. Again, when when you're in larger organizations, recognition is so key for making people feel seen and appreciated.

So after our webinars, what I like to do is I'll post in high visibility forums, whether that's Slack channel, your, you know, formal feedback tool, things like that. That way our speakers have it as a point of reference for them going above and beyond their scope by helping marketing something that has, you know, great benefits for the business.

And I also we also send them short blurbs on LinkedIn for them to post on LinkedIn because we want them to get their personal brand out there. Like Stephanie was saying, that one speaker that was asking for for more feedback so he could do more webinars in the future, that's great.

His you know, speaking at our next webinar is going to be his 1st foray into starting to build that personal brand and giving them free written LinkedIn text, and the URL, the registration page helps put them as a thought leader on their LinkedIn profiles, which is super nice.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah.It's great because they really are volunteering their time and their busy schedules to help with this. So although we do try and make it as easy as possible for them by giving them all the tools, they are volunteering their time.

And so we wanna make it as mutually beneficial as possible.

Lindsay McGuire

Yeah. And I'll add a few things onto that too from some things that we've seen work. One thing kind of going into that appreciation and building your profile and getting, you know, yourself out there. One thing I always offer to speakers is, if you're a Goldcast customer, you have ContentLab embedded within Goldcast. I always offer my speakers.

There's a specific clip that you love or, like, a talk track that you want a clip of from that event, let me know and I can just do that clip for you. So that has worked really well too, I think, as an appreciation token to speakers, especially some people I feel like are very specific on what they want to share and what clips they want to put out.

So it's always nice to offer that up to people, and it's so easy. I can do it in, like, a minute, so it's it's not a heavy lift at all. And then another thing, like, when you're talking about that speaker bench and creating that, one thing I always love to do too is once a webinar is done, asking, hey, do you have any referrals of people who might wanna speak at a Goldcast event? Because you've already created, like, trust and authority of these people, and then they have people in their network who are friendly, so they're like, oh, yeah.

I'll recommend, you know, Sue to come speak with you all. So great tips there. You're right. We could talk about how to make speakers comfortable all day, but we only have so much time. So our next question is gonna go into length of sessions. So what do you all think is the ideal length for a webinar session? Arianna, we'll start with you.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. Great question. And speaking of, we only have so much time. I think, you know, at Uber for Business, we used to do 60 minute webinars. This is especially common during the pandemic when we were all, you know, living off of Zoom. But that said, I think for us to be smarter with both, our speakers' time and our time as well as our audience's time, we started focusing on 30 minute webinars.

As I was mentioning earlier with the heroes that are college professors, and then creating, you know, 60 minute lectures on a regular basis, You can still get a lot of content out in 10 to 15 minutes. But I think a lot of us are used to 30 minute meetings, so that's why we tend to simulate our webinars to take a similar amount of time. Steph, what do you think?

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. I am also on the camp of shorter the better. I do think that it depends on, again, going back to your marketing goals and what you want to achieve in this session, but we too have been kind of leaning towards the 30 minute mark for webinars.

And to your point about speakers is it's also a very different ask if you're asking a speaker to speak an hour webinar versus a 30 minute webinar. An hour can sometimes feel a bit daunting, but one example I wanna bring out about a shorter webinar is something that we do, at Iron Horse.

It's our webinar program called our coffee breaks. And this program started off as the attempt was it to be a super short snackable pieces of content, once a month, 15, 20 minute sessions, sometimes they extend to 30, but we really wanted it to be a a space and time for people to grab a cup of coffee, take a break from work and spend a little bit of time with us and learn something new.

And that has resonated really well because again, you don't have to block off a huge chunk of your schedule because I know, as we all know, we're all super busy, have lots of meetings going on. So, it's nice when you can kind of sprinkle in some short learnings with your audience if that's something that resonates well with them.

Arianna Etemadieh

Meetings are definitely the name of the game here at Uber, so us being, like, really intentional with folks' time, is something that comes to mind for us a lot. We've also seen with our own webinars that people tend to stick with us for about 25 minutes. And beyond that, data shows that people's average attention span with webinars ranges from 10 to 20 minutes. So just food for thought when it comes to thinking about the length of your webinars.

Lindsay McGuire

Yeah. I will double click on that one because we're actually about getting ready to launch our 2024 webinar benchmark reports. And one of our findings was the average drop off time is about, like, 30 minutes when you look across our dataset.

But one thing that was really fascinating that's a little, like, off Richter from kind of where our conversation is going is we've actually seen a growth in webinars being 60 minutes or more, which I thought was really fascinating. I think the number was like 15% of the webinars we reviewed, which was like, I think, over 6,000 webinars.

So a lot of content, 15% of them are doing 60 minutes or more, which I thought was fascinating. But again, I think going back to the start of this conversation, it's all about your business goals and what the point of your content is.

So always keep that in mind. So we've talked about session length. So now I wanna talk about topics. How do you pick topics based on your audience's needs? Arianna, what are your thoughts here?

Arianna Etemadieh

Yes. So personally, as a marketer, I think it's balancing between what we want to say as a company versus what your audience actually wants to hear or even how they want to hear from you. So some things that we keep in mind, B2B is human too. Nobody wants to be sold to. It also doesn't have to be stuff you're bored with. So that's something we keep in mind when it comes to the creativity of the topics that we choose and also the presentation format that we deliver them in. Tying back to what Stephanie was saying earlier, whether it's fireside chats, whether it's, you know, live demos, whether it's, you know, your typical presentation with a slideshow format, things like that.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. Agreed. I always come back to the question. If you're wondering what your audience wants to hear about, you should ask them. So we really, we really live and breathe that every day. So for our webinars, we ask during the post webinar survey, what do you wanna hear about, next from us?

So we do this both for our Iron Horse webinars and also for Uber for Business. And really it's been really great, to have a running list of topics that the audience is hungry for. So Arianna and I will go back to this list, really often and see if there's anything we can kind of bubble up to the surface for a future webinar. We also do that post event, but also pre event you can ask your registrants.

We include, a form a a field on the form, the registration form that asks what questions do you have for our speakers. So it could be on a certain topic, the topic of that said webinar.

And that, that is really great insight into the webinar as you're creating it along the way. Right?

So you can kind of sprinkle in some of those questions to the session if it's applicable. If it's not directly applicable to that session, we can add it to our running list of other ideas and questions from the audience.

So you can get really good insights from your audience base. They have a lot of great ideas and you can get you can, yep, add that to your running list.

Arianna Etemadieh

And a shout out to the Iron Horse team as well. Like, what Stephanie was saying, whether it's a post webinar survey or when folks are registering, asking them if they have any questions for our speakers, that was testament to their expertise.

I actually hadn't even thought of that, but I thought it was a brilliant addition because I'm very data driven. So taking into account what people are saying pre or post webinar on what they wanna hear, what their questions are, also keeping in mind what's happening in the market, and, of course, what are our customers asking us about? Are they saying? Keeping all those three elements in mind help inform the webinar content strategy that we create together year over year.

Stephanie Siemens

Yep. Agreed. And I think that, you can always kind of think back to what unique point of view does your company have on a specific topic that's really hot in the market or in your specific industry. And those can kinda give you some good ideas of jumping off points of different webinar topics as well.

Lindsay McGuire

Yeah. And what we have done ourselves is in your reminder emails for your event, put in a line that says, hey, do you have questions about x, y, z topic? Email it to, you know, lindsay@goldcast.io. Builds report between whoever is your webinar programming person or whoever your host or moderator is, building that relationship. But then also like opening that channel of conversation like you all said with your audience. So love that advice. And also, if you have any Q&A to ask of Arianna or Stephanie, please drop that in the Q&A tab. We will have some time at the end if we need it.

We're gonna get into our question now and that is talking about investments. So we all know that you have to have some investments to run a webinar program. You can't just do it with 0 budget because it takes time and tools and technology and all those fun things. So, Arianna, what's your perspective on how you stretch your investment with webinars?

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. Well, I have a couple of thoughts. For my situation, being in the US, Canada on Uber for Business, even though we're in an enterprise org, we're still a small but mighty team, and there's often a lot of competing priorities and our webinars are strong content. They're also video content, as you were mentioning, Lindsay. So I believe that they should be aired more often, especially considering all the work that goes into them like you were saying. Therefore, I'm actually quite a big fan of re-airs.

Sometimes I'll re-air a piece of content or a webinar rather. I'll re-air a webinar a few months after it initially premiered. Why? Because odds are that the original distribution list, and, again, in my case, I'm hitting my email database, odds are they don't remember the original webinar that I was promoting a few months back, and it could help bring in new leads into that webinar type topic if they didn't see the original email a few months back, especially if you're generating new leads since that original email went out or that webinar invite rather. The other piece, which is something I think we all know very well as marketers, is that not not many people observe the message the first time you tell them something.

So resharing that webinar content, having them re you know, reinforce the same message or maybe framed a little bit differently will continue to help land the message more and more the more that they are exposed to it.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. Definitely agree. I think that working with a lot of different companies, sometimes budget constraints do come up and re-airs are more budget friendly. You put a ton of time and energy into creating a webinar. Webinars are a lot of work, so why not get as much out of them as you can? I know, Lindsay, you will probably bring up video repurposing because that's a super important topic on this question.

But I think that when you're thinking about re-airs, you wanna think about how to position them. So the first is, like Arianna mentioned and something that Uber for Business has seen a ton of success with is positioning it as a net new webinar, which is great. You can also position it and use it at the kind of FOMO angle, like you missed out on this great webinar, as a driver to create excitement and kind of intrigue into the topic. So with that, you can use actual quotes from the session, some memorable moments.

You can use clips using ContentLab to clip up the session and promote the session prior to the re-air with some of those really salient moments from the session. There's also some lower effort and, of course, lower effort always needs a little bit of a grain of salt attached to it.

But there's some lower effort sessions that you can do as well to kind of stretch your webinar investment. And that's the no slides kind of casual conversations.

Similarly to what we're doing today, and Einherst does this as well with their webinar coffee break program, but really let your SMEs be SMEs. So make this a super low lift for everybody involved. Use your speaker bench to select speakers that you know are super strong and won't really need a lot of oversight or scripting done for them. So that can kind of mitigate some of the really big lift that some webinars take.

Lindsay McGuire

Yeah. And I think, too, people sleep on re-airs. I see so few organizations do re-airs. We have done a few over the years, and I always like how powerful they can be, but how few people actually do them. So for anyone in the audience who might be interested in doing a re-air kind of a similar question, like any pointers advice there to be thinking about if they're doing, like, a re-air for the first time?

Arianna Etemadieh

I could start with this stuff. One thing I think about, which, again, came with collaboration with Iron Horse, I truly can't say how much I love working with them, is reposition the webinar. So don't use the same title. Don't use the same description. Rewrite it. You frame it as a brand new event. Hey, this webinar is premiering on July 26, for example. What we found in my experience, granted it's a limited experiment, so take that with, you know, take that into consideration, is we tried positioning webinars as a re-air. Hey, this is a brand new topic with a different description. But in reality, it's the same content. Or, hey, catch this webinar on-demand and catch this webinar on-demand. It's the same one for a few months ago. And which performed better? The re-air version did. Because, again, redundancy, you know, people don't often recognize things the first time they see it. But if things continue to seem net new, then that will attract attention. That gets more registrants. And so that's what we do when it comes to the strategy.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. Totally agree. Refresh that promo copy. Refresh. You pull in, you know, something that's happening in the market that's more current than when the session originally aired just to make just to put a little bit of a freshness veneer on top of it.

Lindsay McGuire

Yeah. I love it because, obviously, we as a brand talk a lot about repurposing and using your video content strategically and thoughtfully and getting the most out of that investment. And, man, now I'm like my brain is spinning. I'm like, I need to go make some content about rear. So, Arianna, Stephanie, I might be reaching back out to you all for some expertise in this area.

Well, we are coming to the end of our webinar today. Wanna do one last ask if anyone has any questions they wanna ask.

So a few moments if you wanna throw those in the chat or the Q&A tab. But while I'm waiting to see if there are any final questions, Arianna, Stephanie, kind of just to close us out, you know, why webinars? Like, why do they work? Why have you invested a lot of your time and career and expertise into doing webinar programming?

Arianna Etemadieh

I think of webinars as temple moments. So in marketing, particularly in B2B marketing and in demand, events are huge, whether they're in person trade shows or they're virtual events like webinars. It seems to be a great way to continue to get to know your business, get to meet people from your business, and put a face behind the name. Because, again, B2B people are human too, whether we're working at the company or or, you know, we're working with you to partner with your organization. And that is why I continue to invest in webinars. And like I said, for us, people will often engage with our webinars when they're already talking with an Uber representative.

But it's like they're wanting to get to know us more, very understandably so. And so continuing to see that our audience in our large database resonates with webinars in that way is something that I'm going to keep in my strategy definitely for the next year and hopefully for years to come.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. I will just add that webinars work. I mean, they're super versatile as a channel. They do not have to be boring. You can create excitement. You can make them interesting, engagement. There's tons of different tactics that we could go on and on about there.

But, webinars can take so many different shapes and forms and formats, that they're just I just I love the versatility of them. I think that that's the number one number one point.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. And, Steph, you just reminded me of, with webinars too, it is also tailoring how does your audience enjoy consuming content? I'm a visual learner. Right? Like, I actually am a fan of ours. I, too, register for webinars because I'm a visual learner. It's time I'm setting aside my date to learn, so I'm already getting that benefit from it. But with the beauty of the ContentLab, for example, now you have this great video content, you have this long form content, you can create short clips for your social media, for your email blasts, for example. But then some people like to read. Some people are reading learners.

So then you're able to take the webinar content you created, put it in ContentLab, spit out a blog post or an article or, you know, a key takeaways follow-up email, and then you are able to to meet those folks and and their preferences, and they prefer to read things versus watching things. So it's all about the versatility and meeting the unique preferences of your audience.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. Something that's great also you're just we're just getting excited about this, Lindsay. With a new on-demand experience with Goldcast, the on-demand page, so the video sits on the page, you can include 3 key takeaways. You have those snippets from the session. If someone doesn't have the 30 minutes to spend with your on-demand content, maybe they want to learn, you know, what about one specific Uber product that we covered. So they can do that as well. So getting back to where do we meet our attendees, how do we meet our attendees where they are, and how they let give them a lot of different options to do that.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yes. And then like Stephanie said, I am getting excited about this, and I promise it's unpaid promotion. I don't recommend things lightly. But what I will say is, you know, previously, we were using a Goldcast competitor. And one of the reasons why we moved to Goldcast, for Uber for Business, was, again, that idea of the derivative content that could come from the Content Lab.

There are, you know, there were a few reasons as well. You know, I needed to more proactively notify my sales team of engagement with webinars. We found sizable 6 figure deals come in simply from registering for webinars. Even that could indicate sufficient intent that someone's ready for a conversation. On the side, so in addition to proactively notifying my sales team of engagement with things like virtual events, the other piece is, again, small but mighty. I feel like that's just the label of my team.

So how do we create content, you know, extrapolate more of the richness that comes from webinars and the rich material into other formats to educate people in the way they prefer to be educated? So the Content Lab, this was something that was unique to Goldcast. I didn't see many other competitors with this feature, so I was really interested in that. The 3rd piece is, again, tying back to whether it's B2B, B2C, marketing doesn't have to be boring. And as such, the interface and the platform for hosting webinars, you know, we want to bring it up to 20 24 standards. You know?

It doesn't have to look like a website that came out of 2004. You know? We all remember what those look like. So, you know, certainly, the modern interface as well was something I considered in my decision to move into Goldcast. So, like I said, I think finding the right platform that could serve multiple jobs to be done, is definitely something to take into consideration if you're gonna strengthen or amplify your webinar program.

Lindsay McGuire

Wow. What a cherry on top y'all gave me there. I love it. Well, Arianna, Stephanie, thank you so much for spending time talking about your webinar content strategies today and just all of your perspectives, all of your experience. It was super valuable. Even I learned so much today. And I feel like, you know, I do a lot of webinars in this role.

So I love that you could share so much. Again, if anyone's watching and you want to learn more about Goldcast, click that button and get more out of webinars because, I mean, you just heard Arianna and Stephanie talk about how great Goldcast is and then, you know, I'll toot our own horn toot toot. It is pretty awesome. I mean, you're here right now. You see it.

So, Arianna, Stephanie, thank you so much. We really appreciate your time today. Thank you for sharing so many great things, and we just are so grateful you took some time today with us. Right? Hello. If there's any audience still checking us out, we actually do have some Q&A we want to cover. I am going to pick up some of our Q&A that I accidentally missed off, but we want to be able to capture these questions and snip them in ContentLab and send them to the viewers who submitted them. Here we go. Rachel is sharing. Let's share this actually on stage for this. So Rachel wants to know any tactics for on-demand promotion.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. I'll start with this one. Basically, what we do with on-demand is, you know, once a webinar has aired, subsequently, we'll send an HTML email that is saying, hey. You know, we wait until the webinar airs to write this email. Here's some clicks from the webinar. Here's some quotes from the webinar. If, you know, if you missed it, here's the link to go watch it.And then we'll send it off to that same email database, of course, excluding folks already registered and attended. We've seen this. We've only done this just once recently. We saw a boost of 10 to 20% in on-demand attendance. So we look forward to continuing to optimize this over time. Stephanie, anything else?

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. I will add, to make sure you include social in your on-demand promotion. So using those clips from ContentLab, repurposing for social to kind of get more eyeballs on the on-demand session. I think also it's really great to include your webinars in different channels as well. So I know Arianna does this with webinar. She'll include a webinar in a nurture series or, you know, in other channels where you can kind of just get more traction from the webinar and get more people to watch it and consume the content.

Lindsay McGuire

Awesome.So we have one coming in from Lee Anne. I'll share this on stage. I'm wondering what kind of promo emails you're sending out. Are you using graphics, video? What kind of copy content? Informative, short, and simple. What kind of promotional emails are you using?

Stephanie Siemens

Oh, good question. So I'll jump in here, Arianna, for us on our behalf. We have been doing plain text emails for promotional emails. We started off with HTML. We weren't seeing a ton of great traction. So as kind of a test, we switched over to the plain text email from Arianna herself.

So it comes from an email that looks like Arianna is sending it out. And that has resonated really great with her audience. Now other audiences may be different, so you might want to kind of test this out. But, short and sweet, really simple, has been really great, for promo emails, and that has seemed to be resonating a lot.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah,  and one more thing to add. Couldn't agree more that plain text emails seem to be working really well for us. So curious if it'll work well for you all. I also have to say that it's from Arianna from Uber For Business Marketing. Sometimes, you know, folks receiving the email, they think I'm a contact representative. And I think marketing is more behind the scenes than my sales counterparts. So even having that distinct qualifier, whether it's in your from name or your sick nature, hopefully, could help, you know, clarify for folks that you're just marketing saying hello and not a different representative coming to pitch them.

Lindsay McGuire

And kind of a follow-up question to what Leanne had asked. How long do you promote and how many promos are you sending? This is a great question. I feel like this comes up all the time with webinars.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah. Steph, I wanna start with this, and I'm curious what Iron Horse does. What we did a few years ago was we only get 2 webinar sends pre events, so 1 2 weeks. So we send it once a week up to 2 weeks before the webinar live events, and then, we would, you know, have the webinar. And so the second email will go out 1 week prior. Then when Iron Horse came aboard, they actually gave us a great idea of sending a 3rd email a day before the webinar because often we find a lot of last minute people will sign up. So, and, currently, our promotion strategy is about 3 weeks prior to the webinar live date with the 3rd email going out one day before the webinar live date. But, Steph, what do you guys do on Iron Horse?

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah. We do something very similar. So I like to try and get registration launched a month before the session just so we're ready. And then at that 3 week mark, we usually send our 1st promotional email. We like to send 3. And to your point, Arianna, we like to get the last minute people, with the day before. We've also tested day of sending a promo email morning of, but we've seen more success with the day before email. So, and then, of course, you know, social promotion, sprinkled in throughout there the 3 weeks before.

Lindsay McGuire

Yeah. And I'll say that's about, generally speaking, for our kind of single session webinars, what we would follow. And then if you're running any kind of larger, virtual events, what I like to do is do one email promoting each session.

Usually, we'll start promoting about 6 weeks ahead of time to give enough space for that. So that's kind of like the differentiation there between, like, your single session webinar and your larger virtual event, and also using your emails to drive any giveaways and contests.

That's another thing we like to do to try to engage people, you know, throw a little bit of a giveaway in there and give them a little incentive to sign up and attend live. So that was one other one that we always like. So I think that covered our Q&A. Is there any other Q&A that we wanted to answer today, either Stephanie or Arianna, anything that kinda jumped out there?

Lindsay McGuire

Oh, wait. Actually, Lianne, you are still here. Oh my goodness. Hello. I'm so happy to see that. You actually just submitted another one. So Lianne is oh my god. I love this. So Leanne asked which social platform have you been able to track slash see registrations from?

Stephanie Siemens

Social plat yeah. Question master over here. Social platform, do you mean, like, social media, like, a LinkedIn, or? Yes. Okay. So we attach UTMs to our registration links. So for social posts, the reg link will have a UTM attached to it, and we can track the registrants that are being captured through that LinkedIn link in Goldcast's back end. So Goldcast will tell us where that traffic came from, if it came from promo email 1 versus 3 or if it came from a LinkedIn push or a paid social push. So we look at all that information within Goldcast itself.

Lindsay McGuire

Arianna, you got anything to add on that one?

Arianna Etemadieh

No, Stephanie pretty much covered it.

Lindsay McGuire

Cool. And I'll say one thing we have found very successful is doing ad placements in news letters of other organizations, of other brands. That's been super successful for us as well. And then one last one I see here that I'm always interested in is any tactics for on-demand promotion. So any tips, tricks, pointers on boosting those on-demand views because like we said, video is important and you should care about your webinar just as much as when it's on-demand as it is live.

Stephanie Siemens

Yeah, definitely. I'll jump in here, Arianna. And just point to social. I think social's a really powerful avenue for on-demand promotion. Taking those clips like we talked about, promoting them, having your speakers promote them as well on their socials after the fact, and then including your webinars into different different activations as well, helps to kind of further your on-demand asset.

Arianna Etemadieh

Yeah, you can link to your webinars in a content library. You can link to webinars on a blog article. You can link to webinars in a dedicated email nurture, for example. So definitely, like Steph said, you know, taking this asset and then applying it across your various channel distributions.

Lindsay McGuire

I will say one thing now you can do with Goldcast and our smart events is you can actually embed your webinar into your content. Whether it's gated or ungated, you can use it either way.

But that is a great way to boost those on-demand views instead of just linking to your, you know, external page or another page, embedding it directly in the content. Well, anyways, y'all, well, this was fun. I'm so glad we saw that Q&A. It somehow snuck by me.

You know, I'm having a long week post inbound, y'all. So appreciate all the questions that came in. Thank you so much, Stephanie and Arianna, for jumping in and answering them. We super appreciate it. But now we're really gonna say we're gonna say goodbye until next time.

Stephanie Siemens

Thanks, Leanne. That was great.

Arianna Etemadieh

Thank you. Thank you, Lindsay, for having us. Thank you, everyone, for watching.