The Iron Horse Bake-Off: Video That Converts.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:06 - 00:38
Hello, and welcome to the Iron Horse Bake Off where we grab some of our favorite marketing professionals and hopefully some of your future favorite. If you're not familiar with them, we throw them into our test kitchen and see what they cook up.
I'm your host, Alex Jonathan Brown, senior content strategist here at Iron Horse. And today, I'm joined by Iron Horse own Stephanie Siemens, and from Intercom, Mike Iafreight.

Excuse me. If that's the only time I do that today, I'm gonna be very proud of myself.

Mark Iafrate
00:38 - 00:41
Mark, I am afraid. Often than you think.
Don't even worry about it.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:41 - 00:48
Perfect. We'll move on.
Thanks for joining us, both of you.

Mark Iafrate
00:48 - 00:51
Happy to be here. Really excited.

Alex Jonathan Brown
00:51 - 01:02
So if this is your first time at one of our bake offs, this is basically how the concept works. We gave Steph and Mark an idea, and we let them run away for.

Alex Jonathan Brown
01:05 - 02:42
And what we're seeing today is the result of that work. The challenge that we threw in front of these two was pretty simple.
You have a marketing campaign coming up to promote your product or service to a new audience. The goal is to get demo sign ups.
We're not trying to get somebody all the way to I wanna buy today. We just we just want their email address.
We just want them to, like, have a conversation. So what we're gonna see today is the result of that work.
They're gonna walk us through that thought process, with the focus on how are you using video to achieve those goals. So hopefully I realize this is a lot of pressure on the two of you to have to hear me say this.
So hopefully, this is lining up. But how are you gonna use video as part of that broader campaign? How do you approach creating video content? And how would you promote that video? But this session is not just about our two speakers.
It is also about y'all, the audience. So a couple things.
One, we've got the ability for you to ask questions in the chat. I'll be keeping an eye on on those as we move forward.
But before we get started, we're gonna throw up the first of our polls, just really just asking where are you in your own video journey? Is it something you're super familiar with and you're ready for your Oscar? Is it something you're just dipping your toes into? Or are you a video skeptic? So that poll should be live now. I'll report back with results in a minute.
But three minutes into this, I've talked a lot. So I'm gonna back up a little bit, and I think we said, Stephanie, you're gonna take the floor first and kinda walk us through your thought process.

Stephanie Siemens
02:42 - 11:12
I am. Thanks, Alex.
Okay. So we're both given this prompt like Alex mentioned.
When I started to think through this challenge, I start and and I think everybody should start with your audience. So who is this new audience? Learning as much about them as you possibly can because that is going to kind of dictate what you're going to choose as your hero asset for this campaign.
So we're gonna make a few assumptions here as I talk through my plan. The first is that this audience is problem aware.
They're aware that they have some problem, and they're looking for a solution to that problem. So they have started to do some research.
We've seen that there's evidence of some pain. They are, fully on their buying journey right now.
They're in the researching phase, and now they're wanting to see real humans kind of tell them how they should solve their problem. So for my hero asset, I have chosen to do, a webinar for so that's kind of how I'm going to grant ground my marketing campaign.
So like I mentioned, my slides will work. My my hero asset is going to be a webinar, but it doesn't have to be a webinar.
If you're watching this and thinking, oh, I really would rather not do a webinar. You don't have to.
You could choose something like a high value ebook or research report and create video content from that written content. So I'm gonna talk about that a little bit later in this presentation.
But for now, we're talking about my webinar and how it's going to humanize our brand because, we're kind of coming into this thinking that maybe they've consumed some content online, maybe they've used AI to research. Now they want to connect to a human.
They want to humanize, and we want them to, think of our product as the solution to their problem. So I want to give this audience a taste of what this product does because, again, remember, I want them to, to request a demo from us and see us as the solution to their problem.
So there's a first a couple of things that, you want to think through when you're deciding to do a webinar, and that is, do you wanna make it hyper produced or a little bit more informal? There are pros and cons to both of these, types of webinars. Their budget is a consideration here as well.
Tools are, you know, growing really fast, so that is going to maybe be less of a consideration here, pretty soon. But the informal gives you much more an of an authentic feel and vibe to your webinar.
So that's kind of where I'm going to go with my hero asset. You wanna going to wanna think through your webinar platform.
So here at Iron Horse, and the experience we're in now is Goldcast. You can also use something like a StreamYard to collect, high quality video assets for your webinar.
If you're doing a hyper produced webinar or video, you might want to work with a third party AV company. You can use something called frame.
i0 to kind of go back and forth with video edits. You can, have motion graphics in your videos.
It just really depends on what message you're trying to communicate with your audience and what's the right fit for your brand. So, for my brand, I'm thinking I wanna be a little bit more scrappy, a little bit more authentic.
I want people to hear from the humans, so I'm going that informal route. I another really big decision that you're making at this kind of, beginning stage processes of or, part of the process to plan your webinar is what type of webinar is it? So at Iron Horse, we, really like the concept of applied thought leadership.
So this is kind of a hybrid of thought leadership, but it's not too high level up in the cloud where there's nothing tactical that you can take from the session. But it's also not so far in the other direction of being an infomercial for your company and being too product focused.
It's a really good blend of both thought leadership where you're putting your product in the context of the problem, but then you're actually showing the product as well. So it's a really good blend.
So that's kind of how we're going to, reset the narrative for people who have already done their research and kind of place our product position our product as a solution to their problem. So a couple other, a couple other considerations that you wanna think through is do you want to prerecord the webinar, or do you want to have a live webinar? Again, lots of pros and cons to both different perspectives.
Maybe you'll your company is a little bit more risk averse. You feel more comfortable with prerecorded content.
Maybe there's some, legal ramifications if somebody says the wrong thing. You wanna be able to have the flexibility to cut things out of your recording, so prerecorded might be better use case there.
Live webinars, of course, like we're doing now, you can have lots of interaction between the audience, which is great. You get that authentic feel.
Something that we have started to do across the board here at Iron Horse and with our clients is we started to ask questions to, on the registration form to our registrants. Ask them what they want to hear, what they want to learn about in this webinar.
Do they have any questions for our speakers? So we use those answers to really dictate the direction that the session will go, and, we can use answers to those questions and some of the derivative content that I'll talk about here in just a second. So I'll say one quick thing about my, AI POV.
It might be a little bit of a hot take in, with this group, but I am always thinking about AI as an assistant. So, definitely, my perspective is always human led AI assisted.
We can use AI to do certain things faster, and you'll see how we use it in some of the drift content that I'll talk through in a second. But we leave the majority of the thinking to the humans in my world.
Okay. I'll talk a little bit about the inexperience kind of management, when you're in the actual webinar.
So, Goldcast gives you the ability to have ticker messages that run on the bottom of your screen. So we're going to use every available bit of real estate we can to try and get people to request a demo while they're in the actual webinar.
So we will have ticket messages with that book demo language. Maybe we'll have a direct gifting, component here.
So if you book a demo, maybe you get sent a gift. There's kind of those, things you can start to think about.
You can have a prominent CTA in the experience. So right now, we have it, that orange button in the top right hand corner leading to our Iron Horse services.
We've used that with clients to just be a hand raiser. A lot of times, it'll just say get demo.
You click the button, our team is going to reach out to you and, and request a demo. There's no long form filled.
It just makes it a really frictionless process. And then the last thing is you wanna really make sure you're keeping an eye on and kind of collecting all the q and a and the chats that you have coming through during the actual event so you can use that to create your post event and derivative content.
So if you're seeing a top account ask a really great question, maybe you're going to record a quick video of somebody at your company answering that question, and then an SCR can use that in their follow-up to that to that account. So it really is, connecting, you know, the question that they're asking, but also a way into that top account and starting that conversation.

Alex Jonathan Brown
11:12 - 11:45
So before you get too much further stuff, I so I wanna get back to that hyper produced versus informal idea just for a second because all of this stuff requires that production and requires, like, the prework of it. So when we're talking about hyper produced versus informal, we're not talking about hard versus easy, are we? It's really just, like, how the actual video product of it looks Because there's a lot of production that goes into what I think we would call an informal webinar that we're doing right now, basically.
Right?

Stephanie Siemens
11:45 - 15:41
Right. And that thank you for making that point.
That's that's super important. Yeah.
HyperProducers, you're send you might be sending a video crew out to your CEO, for example. Like, it's a really polished video.
Maybe this is a video that you're going to have on your your home page of your website. This the experience we're in now, this is informal.
Not to say that it's not, you know, polished, and looks professional because it does. But that's, yeah, that's where we make the distinction between hybrid produce and informal.
Okay. I'm going to move on here to just a quick little road map and how, we are thinking through how to promote pre webinar, during webinar.
We just talked about during webinar kind of, and then post webinar as well. So, this is kind of just a quick and easy look at the, road map that we would build, for a marketing campaign here at Iron Horse.
Our director of marketing, Ellen, has now moved on from these types of looks to creating this in Miro, and it gets super complex and beautiful. But this is just just a snapshot of what this could look like.
So you can see at the top, there's our webinar hero asset. We're going to be thinking through and there are a ton of different, you know, content pieces that you can create from this high value video asset.
That's also the the great part about choosing webinar as your hero asset. It is it's really easy to create that driven content from.
So pre webinar, I chose, a bunch of classic channels here. I'm more excited to talk to the post webinar stuff.
So I'm gonna kind of, breeze through the pre webinar stuff. We're going to send out targeted emails, some outbound personalized offers.
We'll have some short promo snippets that we'll include on social to get people excited and get people to register for the webinar. This is also a good reason to use prerecorded or Simulive webinars is you can create this teaser content before the webinar even goes live.
So, usually, we're recording a webinar. We get done with the webinar.
We have, you know, our speakers' attention. We have maybe a few little scripted things for them to say.
They read that out. We're collecting it with ISO recordings, so that makes those teaser snippets really easy to produce within Goldcast ContentLab.
We are I talked about direct mail a little bit. You can entice some top accounts to register if your salespeople are reaching out, offering a free gift if they register.
And then once you have the webinar, like I mentioned, it gets really fun post webinar. So there's so many things that you can do.
You can, we've started playing around with multimedia summary blogs, and what I mean by that is it's a mixture of video snippets and written content in a blog. So it really makes it easy to consume the content in a lot of different ways.
You can read about it, and then you can watch it, which is great. The social snippets, of course, and we'll talk about this in a second here, but you can do fully AI social snippets out of Goldcast ContentLab.
You can do something a little bit more highly produced with the social snippets as well. The recorded q and a for SDRs to send out, like, we talked about.
Direct mail as well. After the fact, you know, you can thank your top accounts for attending, send them a gift, adding the snippets or the full webinar to your nurture.
And then I'm not gonna talk a ton about, paid channels. All of this is organic thus far.
But, we've found some success with content syndication for on demand webinars as well. So that's why I have that, on my list here.

Alex Jonathan Brown
15:41 - 16:11
So I know we've got I know. I'm trying to tee you up to talk about AI because I know it's, an interesting part of this discussion.
And I think from your slide deck, it might be what's next. We do want to, make sure that we get to that.
I will say, as part of this bake off, I'm kind of the one who's watching the kitchen timer over here, and we wanna make sure we get everything in. So definitely wanna make sure you had time for this.
That's the worst transition I've ever done in the history of.

Stephanie Siemens
16:11 - 18:00
of me doing this. So That's your that's your right mind saying stop talking stuff.
Next is I was just talking about the difference between, basic, you know and, again, I don't mean basic in a bad way, but lower lift social posts, taking those video snippets straight out of Goldcast. The let the AI do the work for you.
And then on the right side, we have more premium social snippets. So this is we take it we take the video snippet out of Goldcast, and then our designers kind of do some magic in Adobe Premiere and put in those motion graphics and, and can kind of make a little bit more of a polished end product.
We find success with using both of these these types of social posts. So it's it's nice to kind of mix and match, again, based on your brand and what you've seen work for you.
The last thing I will say, and I'm not gonna spend too much time on this, but this is I talked about there's so many different types of content repurposing formats that you can choose from. This is just kind of a look at and we can do a whole webinar on this.
Honestly, we can talk forever about this. But, you can, you know, you can pick and choose based on what works for your audience.
But based on the use case, the channel, the journey stage that you want to create content for, and then we have on the right side how much AI is actually used in creating these content snippets because it's going to differ based on the the format. And, again, this, you know, was what we were thinking about it yesterday, tomorrow could look totally different with how quickly these tools are changing.
I I have one more slide, Alex, but I wanna be mindful of time. Do we need to.

Alex Jonathan Brown
18:00 - 18:01
It's a sure one. Go for it.

Stephanie Siemens
18:01 - 19:45
Okay. Okay.
I have a quick few honorable mentions, and I promise I will hand it over to Mark. So these are just a few cool things that we've done at Iron Horse that I didn't bake into my broader plan because I chose webinar as my hero asset.
So the first is creating a video guide and embedding that onto a landing page. So the use case here was we just had a few slides, that we wanted to repurpose, but they really didn't make sense without somebody having a talk track over them.
So we you can use a loom, a Google slide, even has it natively, in their platform where you can just have somebody talk through these slides and throw it up on a landing page, which is great. The second is our marketing team had, a really extensive ebook about website personalization.
There are a bunch of different plays that were written about in that ebook, written content. Keep in mind, Ellen wanted to spotlight one specific play and talk through it, and she used Descript to do that to kind of spotlight that that particular play, and and that was fairly easy for her to do, which was super cool.
The last thing is if your company is focused on product led growth, and really wanting to lean into the fact that your audience self serves, and wants to, you know, maybe talk find out about the product and not talk to sales. You can use interactive demo softwares, like Walnut or Novatic, and it's really cool.
I've seen them embedded on some websites. You can kind of click through the actual platform or feature that the company offers and kind of do a self serve demo yourself right on your website.

Alex Jonathan Brown
19:45 - 20:32
Yeah. I think that's one of the things that and you mentioned it earlier when we were talking about the webinar.
It's one of the things that we've seen kind of across the board of, like, if you've got a platform and especially if your website is set up in the kind of, like, marketing and sales y language that we're used to seeing in a lot of places, so often, your ideal customers see video content as a way to, like, in live or semi live time, see what the product actually looks like and how it actually works and finding any kind of place you can to, like, get that in front of them, can be super valuable. And we've had success marketing webinars as basically just like, hey.
Come see come see the product. And it it does, decent enough numbers.
Steph, thanks so much. Not just for your presentation, but for your time in the kitchen.

Stephanie Siemens
20:32 - 20:33
Yeah.

Alex Jonathan Brown
20:33 - 20:40
Mark, this is where we pit. The screen share is now available to you, good sir.

Mark Iafrate
20:40 - 20:42
Oh, man. No pressure.

Alex Jonathan Brown
20:42 - 20:46
No pressure. So give us a little walk through what you've been cooking up.

Mark Iafrate
20:46 - 20:57
Absolutely. I'm gonna go ahead and share this, little, like, presentation I put together.
Hopefully, everybody I'm guessing everybody can kinda we can see it now. It's good.
I'm in that area. Yeah.

Alex Jonathan Brown
20:57 - 20:58
Yep. We're good.

Mark Iafrate
20:58 - 26:56
Good. Awesome.
So I decided to use a real example for this bake off because I feel like that's a, bit more bit more applicable to a lot of folks, but I also thought it would be useful to do that on the backdrop of this kind of repeatable playbook that I've built and honed, here at Intercom. And it kinda details how we develop webinar content and video content that aligns to our overarching marketing messages, and that includes the planning to execution workflows that go from brainstorming through on demand activation and then into that really important derivative content and the distribution strategies that we use.
So I will do my best to keep this tight. I trimmed it down a bit, but happy to talk more about the details if we want to.
I chose the, webinar that we did a while back in February, with Anthropic to talk about this. This was a webinar that was tied to one of our really large content offers, our 2025 customer service transformation report, which is used in a number of our evergreen integrated campaigns even to this day.
It's still building pipeline for us. And getting kind of into it, I you know, Stephanie talked about this, which I think is important, but in our new world of AI, I think it becomes really imperative to spend some decent time really dialing in your differentiated kind of thought leadership narratives.
And so a while back, I'd worked with some folks at Intercom to develop a framework that we could use internally to help with clarity, consistency, and kind of scalability of content creation. And this could be like a whole webinar in itself, but it's basically designed to consistently translate the core beliefs into really clear compelling narratives for for your marketing.
And it works by kind of anchoring all of the messaging in an overall strategic narrative and then breaking it into a set of strong opinions and then kind of cascading that into specific topics that guide the content creation across all of our different channels from webinars to to normal content. So it makes it really quick and easy to select the relevant topics that you wanna use and ensure it aligns to your broader narratives, but also to your ICPs, your audience, your verticals, the things that, Stephanie touched on before.
So getting into the weeds, I tried to be as practical as I could. I would say to build a really successful, like, kind of video content or webinar program at scale, the key isn't just knowing how to execute, but it's about building an execution engine.
And so this is the process that I use over and over again. I just did this for a webinar I ran yesterday.
But the idea is that, you know, once you kind of select a topic, you've found your speaker, I typically try to put together some basic notes that are allowing us to work backwards from that goal of driving, demos, which is exactly what we were doing. It was either demo requests or or sales requests.
And then I made some notes and work backwards, and then I used AI to basically develop a set of kind of open ended questions. And then I schedule a quick thirty minute call with the speaker, and I always record it and transcribe it.
You can do that in Goldcast, Google Meets, whatever you're using. But your only job and my only job doing this is just to ask questions.
Constantly ask questions, go deeper. I'm just trying to uncover as much insight as I can from that person.
They don't need to do any prep, which is nice. They just get to talk.
And when you're done, I then I kind of take that, and I take that transcript, and I use AI to transform that kind of really rough long transcript into an initial talk track with a really basic format of just discussion questions that I might ask and then bullet points with the notes from what that that individual said. And then you can just kind of hone that async as needed, or you can go back and forth as you need to.
And the really nice thing is that this transcript and recording that you have can also be used later on for more derivative content. So I always recommend people save that.
I recorded a loom, like, literally showing exactly how I did this. And so, we can, like, share this out later, but it takes, like, five minutes, not even some really basic prompting, but it really does save a lot of time.
So I'm not gonna talk about webinar execution. Everyone here knows how to run a webinar, but I'll kind of skip to that immediate on demand motion.
And to me, this is where an AI centric or an AI first webinar platform like Goldcast really pays dividends. And this is the process that I use every time.
I've honed it multiple times, but it's probably pretty straightforward to folks. The first thing I do is, you know, the with Goldcast, the webinars automatically goes into on demand mode when that's done, and it gets audit added to our kind of global webinar and event hub that we have on our website.
We typically gate any of our demand gen thought leadership webinars for lead capture. You don't necessarily have to.
I then take that transcript from the web webinar as soon as it's processed, and I use AI again with some basic prompting to develop a summary of the key takeaways. I always recommend to prompt it in the chat to say, ignore the intro, ignore the housekeeping polls and q and a, and just focus on the content that was discussed.
And then I take that, you know, clean it up a bit, and then I go into the on demand page in Goldcast, and I actually update the description to have all of those key takeaways and summaries. It's already pulling in all of the same resources that I had in that webinar, and then I always make sure in that top right that we have that CTA available for people to go book that demo.
And I think it's important to remember to make that summary something so that if somebody never watched the video, they can still get value from it. And, obviously, you know, you Stephanie talked about this.
I use GoldPASS to create clips for the most interesting parts. You can use the AI generation to do it.
I typically know where the interesting snippets are, and so I clip those. I go and I upload them to Google Drive for internal use, and then I I kind of log it in all these different places so teams know where to find it and how they can use it.

Samir Mehta
26:56 - 26:56
And the.

Mark Iafrate
26:56 - 26:58
nice thing about this is go ahead. Yeah.

Alex Jonathan Brown
26:58 - 27:28
Oh, I'll just hop in super quick. About the AI summary creation, this is just a pro tip from someone who's done it too many times.
When you when you find your prompting that works to get the result you want out of it, save that somewhere because it's gonna work again the next time. And so often, you see people who are like, oh, this this tool is supposed to make everything so much faster.
And they realize it might take you two hours to get that prompting to work once, but it shouldn't take you that long to get it to work again twice.

Samir Mehta
27:28 - 27:28
Thank you.

Mark Iafrate
27:28 - 33:32
100%. That is a great, great point.
Yeah. So by the end of your webinar, you're gonna have everything that you need for a really strong immediate on demand activation, all that new derivative you have net new derivative content in those clips and summaries, but it's also all the starting points for additional derivative content later on.
One of the things I always shout out, I from my experience talking with people, they often spend way too much time just on content creation and not really thinking about distribution, especially right after a webinar happens. And, yes, you should be spending time on doing a really good job building fewer pieces of content that are really gonna resonate, but then spend a lot more time dialing in that post webinar on demand promotion.
And so I always make sure that we have the automated follow-up emails that are built into Goldcast. Those go out twenty four hours after the webinar, one version to the attendees, and then one to non attendees.
And those typically have a link to the recording, and on that page are the takeaways. And then I usually include the, some of the basic resources and next steps for them.
They can go access the clips if they want to. But then what I do is I leverage the scheduling functionality in Goldcast, which to me is awesome because I can self serve all that and do the targeting and not have to go into Marketo and work with our ops team.
And so I schedule another bump email in Goldcast to the non attendees, usually early the following week. So if I do the webinar on Wednesday or Thursday, maybe Monday or Tuesday, I just kind of tweak the content in the body and I change the subject line and I schedule that.
And then I do one more scheduled email to all the remaining non attendees, which is kinda like the week after, so maybe twelve or fourteen days later. And that still does link to on demand, but I typically include the entire recap, like, all the the summary, the takeaways, everything in that email body to provide a lot more value for people.
So even if they just up up, open it and read it, they'll still be able to get some some value. And then from there, we typically move into kind of the the the latter stages of the derivative content creation, and this is typically for a lot of the cross functional teams to use, but also for use in our evergreen ongoing integrated campaigns.
And the possibilities are endless with, like, what you can be creating and doing, but, obviously, everybody should be focusing on what are the assets and the formats that you know will resonate with their audience. And I would argue more importantly, create assets where you know you already have strong existing distribution channels for.
And so there's a number of, like, kind of traditional content offers. We still do those, but I've been trying to focus on building out a lot more kind of modern AI first, AI centric assets, which I'm happy to talk more about later if we want.
But just make sure you're optimized for that value addition authenticity. I love the comment about polish versus not polished.
Like, we've actually done testing and found that a lot of the scrappier, not as polished content often performs better than the more polished assets. It doesn't mean they should always not be polished, but that does that that is the case for us at least.
And then the same note as before, always try to be thinking about, as you're going through this, how do you operationalize and kind of streamline all these processes and where can you rely on AI? This is just an example gated playbook I created from a webinar transcript and some basic AI prompting. We could then take this and then gate it, use it in nurtures, outbound, ABM, anything.
It's really simple, like, kind of get the content created, drop it into a Figma file, and then you're you're good to go. And then from there, I always try to do bespoke distribution plans for all these new assets.
This looks a little different than the immediate on demand strategy, but today, to me, distribution is much more difficult than content creation. So I spend a lot of time here.
And so what I literally do is have, like, two work streams. One is the promo plans for the derivative content that other teams are gonna be promoting through their existing channels and motions, and then I'm gonna have a dedicated promo plan for the content offers that we're now gonna be layering into our evergreen integrated campaigns.
And same as before, just make sure you're focusing your attention on the channels and tactics that you know are actually gonna drive results and forget everything else if you don't have the time. And then the last bit here, be data driven.
I I not just reporting on the basic metrics, but spending time diving into results to uncover the insights that you could use to maximize the impact of your webinars and your video content. I also recommend not just to look at the success of individual webinars, but your kind of program in aggregate.
So, like, yes, you wanna know how to improve, how to make one webinar better, and how to do better promotion, but you also wanna be able to figure out what you should be doing holistically with your program. And, again, AI here, I think, is a big game changer.
I threw up some examples here, but if you have accurate data in different systems and can export it, you can use off the shelf tools like Claude or ChatGPT to read that data and kind of curate it. And so I used Claude to build this artifact on the top that was kind of like an MVP when I was evaluating our program, and you can treat it as your own personal data analyst.
I went through and just started to ask it a bunch of different questions to do comparisons, all these things I didn't know how to do in SQL. And then what we were able to do with our with our team, internal team, was be able to translate that into a live Tableau dashboard with live data, and we're able to normalize it to be able to look at how much lifetime value a webinar was generating.
So how many MQLs, how much pipeline, and then you can identify top performers, but also see what tactics you're doing that are actually driving that consumption. So that's it.
That's the recap. I mean, the summary, I won't go go through everything, but I I will say, keep leveraging AI, hyperfocus on being authentic with your content.
You know, substance, is important, And just be really prescriptive with the formats that you decide to to create and really spend a lot of time on your promotion and distribution because that's where you're really gonna see the business impact. So that's it.
I tried to get it done in ten minutes.

Alex Jonathan Brown
33:32 - 34:03
No. No.
You nailed it. Mark, Steph, thank you both so much for kinda taking us, through those walk throughs.
I'm now going to politely ask that you, head backstage for a second, and I will bring on our next two speakers to kinda take a look at trends coming out of that overall, video industry marketing type stuff, all that fun stuff. So thank you again both so much.
I will ask that you stick around just in case we have any questions that we need.

Mark Iafrate
34:03 - 34:03
I'll.

Alex Jonathan Brown
34:03 - 34:22
leave that thought for you, but thank you again both so much. And then coming to the stage, I was gonna see that nobody popped in first, but I'll introduce you both at the same time.
From Iron Horse, it's our SVP of digital experiences, Sameer Mehta. And from Goldcast, their CMO, Kelly Chang.
Hi, everybody.

Kelly Cheng
34:22 - 34:25
Hello. Thanks so much for having me.

Alex Jonathan Brown
34:25 - 35:03
You're you're you've both done webinars with me before. So we covered a lot of ground in the first half of that.
And now as we move into the little reception, coffee chat version of stuff afterwards, there's a bunch of stuff I want to touch base on, get some, get your opinions on. So, obviously, you are both two people who spend a lot of time thinking about the video space.
One of I guess, I'll open it to you first. Are there any big takeaways coming from you that, that you heard that are interesting that you wanna maybe chat a little bit more about in the time we have left?

Kelly Cheng
35:03 - 35:40
First of all, I I just wanna say that I love this format. I think it's so, unique and engaging just having, you know, these mini presentations and having sort of a discussion afterwards.
But I, first and foremost, love that both, Steph and Mark, used, webinars as, like, their hero anchor, asset for their campaigns because, you know, coming from Goldcast, I am a true believer that webinars are are super, super powerful. It looks like my my video isn't give me one second.
I'm gonna refresh, my stage one. I'll be right back.

Samir Mehta
35:40 - 35:49
I'll fill it. Thanks for having me.
Excited to be here, and, I'll pass it back to Kelly.

Kelly Cheng
35:49 - 35:52
Is my video back on? This sometimes happens on camera.

Alex Jonathan Brown
35:52 - 35:55
It was great, Phil, Sameer. Really nailed it.

Kelly Cheng
35:55 - 36:34
Well, But I I love that both Mark and Steph started with the webinar because for for me, I I I think that authentic video of, especially when you have a subject matter expert and using that as a source derivative asset to really anchor everything really, really helps take that heavy lifting so you can have that really, really long shelf life. I love that, that slide that Steph had, that overview of that road map that shows all the, you know, the shelf life of exactly how long that webinar asset can take you.
So, I just I just love that both Mark and Steph, anchored with the webinar.

Samir Mehta
36:34 - 38:09
Yeah. To build on to what Kelly said, I think webinars have been part of b two b marketing for as long as I can remember.
And if you're just taking a little step back in history and we think about, you know, webinars and I'll be one at first was, like, you know, kinda when I first got into b to b marketing, b to b product, I was like, do webinars? Like, do they actually really work? And, the pandemic hit, and everybody sort of started consuming content online. And one of the best benefits out of the pandemic was just the production value, and the artistry went up significantly, and people bought nice cameras and nice lighting and nice mics.
And then the AI revolution revolution happened. And we've seen over the last, like, five to eight years is this democratization of of creating not just video content, but good, really good video content and being able to produce it quickly with high quality and amplify it.
And I think we're in this sort of, you know, what's next now with AI here? What are the next sort of set of use cases that I dream about? I think a lot about, sort of, you know, Mark and Steph are are living it day to day. They have built really good programs and playbooks to execute today.
Goldcast is obviously powering a lot of what both, Intercom and and Iron Horse do. I'm I'm I'm Kelly, I'm kinda thinking about what are you guys thinking about the next evolution here? What's sort of on the forefront that people perhaps are not thinking about? I have my own ideas.
But.

Kelly Cheng
38:09 - 40:03
Yes. That that's a great question.
So I, you know, I think both Steph and and Mark, highlighted this so strongly in their presentations of derivative content because that's exactly what AI really helps unlock and enable. If you wanted to repurpose a webinar before AI, we I did a ton of research on this.
I interviewed marketers that, you know, wanted to do this. They would have to watch that, like, forty five minute video at least five times to find those key time stamps manually to be able to clip those up and then work with a video editor or producer to then create the videos.
And so AI really helps shrink that that that time up and really empower and democratize this process and to take that into the marketer's hands to be able to self-service. And so the next step for that is is making that process a bit more advanced but still as easy as possible.
So on the Goldcast side, I love the conversation about, you know, for derivative content, what a highly produced versus informal and the sort of the the works better. And so at Goldcast, you know, we're we're we're thinking about how we can use AI to, prompt AI, video editors so you can, be more dynamic in your your post event, you know, derivative content, like add in your zoom ins and zoom outs, background we're so used to seeing that that TikTok style podcast that has, like, overlays and, like, really cool dynamic captions, and really figuring out how we can replicate that for brands that still feel on brand but still as engaging as that.
So that's how we're thinking about, you know, the the evolution of of video at Goldcast and how to make it easier for marketers to be able to self-service and not have to rely on other teams that really, really drag out the process. And and, not only that, but are extremely cost prohibitive.
Like, it's very expensive to work with video at sometimes.

Alex Jonathan Brown
40:03 - 41:18
I think we're especially in a space now where, a lot of organizations find themselves in a place where there's one person who's developed the skill to do, like, let's say, that TikTok video edit on their own and kind of outside of their job description. And then they tell too many people about it, and then that sort of becomes their job.
And that's one of the areas where I see that ability that you're talking about, Kelly, to be really, really valuable of being like, okay. Now sort of anybody can do that level of work, like and it's stuff that if you're a, like, a super involved video producer person, it's not a hard lift for that person to do it.
The point is it's now not a not a hard lift for anyone to do it or for many more people to do it. And I think that's where, we see a lot of that being especially valuable.
We did talk a lot about AI, and I know that if we're talking about AI and video, there are some people who are probably like, can I just can I just not have people on my webinar? Can I have just AI do that for me with little little avatars? From the conversation, from what I've heard both of you say, I don't think we're there yet. Is that is that a safest assumption to make? We're still gonna have people on webinars?

Samir Mehta
41:18 - 42:03
We're still gonna have people on webinars. I do think that, I think there is gonna be some are gonna be some use cases, maybe not fundamentally in marketing, but perhaps in customer success, customer support where you will see, sort of AI avatar human AI avatars where you can script and have the likeness of Kelly talk about, you know, the upcoming trends in in in video marketing that might be more of a training video for people internally or, explaining sort of what's happening.
So I think that, ultimately, it it it's I think the technology is getting there. It's gonna be a question of trust and taste and sort of, acceptance.

Kelly Cheng
42:03 - 43:33
Yeah. That's a that's a interesting take.
I you know, I I at this point in time, I still think that there's always going to be that human aspect to to good webinar marketing. I think that that that's that for me, that's the difference between something that is authentic versus not, and I think authenticity always wins here.
I have no idea how quickly AI is going to advance and, you know, what's gonna happen with avatars. I think there are some countries that are using avatars as news anchors now, so they're they're building trust with the public, which is is wild to think about.
So it's not that Farfetch'd to think that, you know, there might be Avatar Kelly speaking in a year or so. But I do think when it comes to creating that content and making sure that that content resonates with audiences, the human process is extremely important.
So whether or not they're on camera, humans are on camera or not, but the the back work the the backbone of what the the content of a webinar, you know, is conveying is very human. And I I I maybe I'm I'm an optimist here, but I I still believe that it's it's authenticity first.
I always look at AI. I think, it was Steph, that was talking about how AI is, like, a a great assistant.
You you still need to train and give feedback at this point at least. And so that that's my perspective on AI.

Alex Jonathan Brown
43:33 - 44:39
I agree with with both of those stakes, I think. One thing that came up a lot that I wanna maybe wrap up on is the idea, and, Kelly, you mentioned it as well, of using derivative content and, like, ongoing promotional tactics to really extend the life of webinar content.
And I think one thing that makes a lot of people who are doing, doing kind of webinar programs, the thing that makes that tricky is that when my webinar is done, my brain starts thinking about my next webinar and, like, doing the the pre pro to get that ready to go. So from where kind of y'all are both situated, do you have, like, tactics or best practices for how to kinda handle that? Yes.
This resource has has shipped. It's aired.
But how do we keep a little or the right amount of focus on that while we're also working on the next thing to make sure we're really getting the ROI that we can out of that that first asset?

Kelly Cheng
44:39 - 46:14
I can I can go first on this one, because it's very top of mind for me, because this is something that I hear about the the webinar problem is that as soon as it goes live, you know, you move on to the next thing and and it's forgotten? And it's so sad to me that this great webinar content is just sitting on a shelf. And now that we have these tools to help you repurpose really quickly, how how do we enable teams to actually do that? And I think that for for me, it's it's a change from the top down, and so I actually have it as part of my o my team OKRs, to actually repurpose any kind of live digital event that we do, and build it into our project management system.
We use Asana at Goldcast. So every single time we run a webinar or virtual event, there's a post event process that has a very specific timeline that is assigned to individuals to actually complete.
So nothing gets dropped as soon as the webinar is over. We move on to the next thing, and and and so that kind of helps reinforce that framework for for my team management.
But I think another piece of it too is is data, making sure that you have the right data infrastructure and systems to track all of this. It is extremely difficult on the marketing side to collect all this data when it's all over the place.
Like, if you have a video that's hosted on a website versus the, the on demand video versus on your YouTube page versus on your social media versus on a blog post on your website. It's very hard to aggregate everything, so it's really, really important to really think of your systems first to make sure that you're you have that framework to report out on so you know that the investment is actually worthwhile.

Samir Mehta
46:14 - 48:07
Yeah. And I think that is the the analytics and attribution is such a challenging part to and it is cumbersome.
I mean, I have a little bit of a hot take here, which is sometimes I've seen some of our customers and clients, and other colleagues sort of say, I can't I can't start on this until I have a measurement framework in place. And I'm of the mindset, let's sort of build the flame while you fly it, which is you need to start doing derivative content.
Because part of part of what we're seeing is, as we know today, people are beginning their their buying journeys possibly in ChatGPT, Gemini, other tools. And when it what ends up happening is they they learn, maybe you get mentioned, but you don't control the narrative there.
You have like, there is no humanization of that content. It's it's the the robots here that are providing that.
And so when you hit on a social feed, whether it's a clip or not, you're starting to plant those seeds of communicating your brand and your product. And if and we all know how the the doom scroll works.
If you if you dwell on a post or interact with the post, you're gonna get more of it. And if you don't have enough derivative content from your own brand, your competitor's brand is gonna get put into into that space.
And so there is a little bit of, do I need to figure out the analytics? You have to have a general sense of it and kinda what you wanna track, but you also gotta realize that the the the ease of creating content is is is kinda becoming more ubiquitous with tools like Goldcast. And if you're not doing it and not thinking through sort of where you wanna go and how you wanna, distribute it and, Mark, I love your slide about sort of the the owned channels versus the paid channels and figuring out what works for your brand.
I I think you have to just get going, and then, you will start to see what metrics to really focus on as you get, content out in market.

Alex Jonathan Brown
48:07 - 48:55
Well, we could have version we could have this conversation for another hour. We could bring Steph and Mark back on and have their conversations for another hour.
Unfortunately, we don't have time. I already let this run long.
So for now, thank you to everybody who joined us, in the chat and watching. Sameer and Kelly, thank you both for kinda being part of the wrap up show.
Stephanie and Mark, I think you can still hear me. Thanks for for doing the work and let us see how that worked out.
Obviously, let's see if I can do Mark, do you wanna hop back on for a second and we'll let you do a plug? Sameer, I can do yours because it's the same one as mine. You can learn more about what we're doing at Iron Horse over at ironhorse.
io. Kelly, if people wanna learn more about Goldcast, where can they go?

Kelly Cheng
48:55 - 49:04
Check us out at goldcast. io.
We've always got, new up a cup upcoming events, new products that we're releasing, so check us out there and subscribe.

Alex Jonathan Brown
49:04 - 49:06
Awesome. And, Mark, what about Intercom?

Mark Iafrate
49:06 - 49:28
Well, yeah. First plus one to Goldcast, big fan.
Also, Vinehurst, but definitely Goldcast. Yeah.
Intercom, intercom. com.
Also, we have a amazing product called Fin. Check it out at fin.
ai. It's our AI agent for customer experience and customer service.
And, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I love doing this kind of stuff and talking with folks.
So I've already sent out some connection requests, but always love to talk shop and learn from folks.

Alex Jonathan Brown
49:28 - 49:37
Listen. Mark's doing two jobs at the same time right now.
Steph, welcome back. I did your plug.
Do you have anything else you wanna promote?

Stephanie Siemens
49:37 - 49:55
I'm sure Ellen, our, director of marketing, has something that she wants to promote. You can check out our docs tab on the right hand side.
We have a marketing blend tool on our website, so you can, click that link and, find out how strong your marketing blend is.

Alex Jonathan Brown
49:55 - 50:12
Awesome. Well, everybody, again, thanks so much.
And until we do this again, kitchen's closed. Everybody's closed again.
Right? I like that. Great.
I love it. Thank you, everybody.
Bye.

Kelly Cheng
50:12 - 50:12
Bye.