Prepare to be captivated as we delve into the transformative world of automated webinars with our distinguished guest, Melissa Kwan, the CEO and founder of eWebinar. We're taking you on a deep dive into the exciting realm of digital marketing, exploring how the power of webinars, both live and automated, can revolutionize your business strategy.
Ever wondered why webinars hold such a powerful sway in marketing? Our conversation with Melissa explores the psychology behind their effectiveness and unveils the game-changing potential of repurposing content to engage with diverse consumers. We talk about the art of maintaining customer-centricity even in automated webinars, and how auto-responders and chats can ensure seamless customer experiences.
From choosing the right platform to scripting for maximum engagement, we leave no stone unturned. Melissa shares insightful tips on promoting automated webinars, the dos and don'ts of creating them, and how they can be harnessed to generate leads and enhance your company's reach. Her tips on leveraging authenticity to create impactful webinars are worth their weight in gold. Brace yourselves to reimagine your digital marketing strategy and give your business the boost it needs.
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Prepare to be captivated as we delve into the transformative world of automated webinars with our distinguished guest, Melissa Kwan, the CEO and founder of eWebinar. We're taking you on a deep dive into the exciting realm of digital marketing, exploring how the power of webinars, both live and automated, can revolutionize your business strategy.
Ever wondered why webinars hold such a powerful sway in marketing? Our conversation with Melissa explores the psychology behind their effectiveness and unveils the game-changing potential of repurposing content to engage with diverse consumers. We talk about the art of maintaining customer-centricity even in automated webinars, and how auto-responders and chats can ensure seamless customer experiences.
From choosing the right platform to scripting for maximum engagement, we leave no stone unturned. Melissa shares insightful tips on promoting automated webinars, the dos and don'ts of creating them, and how they can be harnessed to generate leads and enhance your company's reach. Her tips on leveraging authenticity to create impactful webinars are worth their weight in gold. Brace yourselves to reimagine your digital marketing strategy and give your business the boost it needs.
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Learn More:
One of the best tried and tested ways of generating new leads is through webinars, but they take a lot of time and every time you do one, you need to basically do the same thing to another audience over and over and over again. Is there an easier way to scale our webinars? Well, today we're going to talk with someone who had that same problem and decided to create a product all around the automation of webinars. And guess what? By the end of this next episode, you're going to be wondering are live webinars really better than automated ones? Keep listening in for a very intriguing and educational episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Speaker 2:Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, talking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Shafer is your digital marketing coach.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, neil Shafer, here I am, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 341 of my podcast. As I continue writing my book, I am currently in the rewrite of the first draft, hoping to have the first draft of the complete manuscript done in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for that. I go over a topic that I covered earlier in this podcast the SCS framework, or search email social. That email plays such a critical role in a modern digital marketing strategy, and when you have email, well, you need to build up your list. A common way of doing that is through lead magnets, and a common lead magnet is a webinar At once. Instead of waiting for people to come to your website and opt in, you can at once do an event like a webinar, generate 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, a thousand new people to come into your various marketing automation flows, hopefully generate leads and generate new business. But webinars are time consuming, and if there was a way in which we could somehow automate these webinars, wouldn't that be awesome? Well, that is the promise of today's guest, melissa Kwan, who is also the founder of ewebinarcom.
Speaker 1:We are going to talk about in this episode, obviously, why webinars are still important today. We are not zoomed out. When there is a good topic and an audience, believe me, people are still attending. I can test this for my own experience, as well as seeing all the webinars that everybody in our industry is doing on a consistent basis. We're also going to talk about why you should consider automated webinars.
Speaker 1:A lot of what I teach in this podcast is about throwing away your preconceptions and keeping an open mind. I want you to do that here as well. And then, if you buy into this, what are the best practices for automated webinars? Now, melissa's platform, ewebinar, is a platform that was built just for automated webinars, but there are other ways of doing them as well. However, obviously, if you like what Melissa has to say, I think she has a really compelling argument, one of the most intelligent people that I've met in doing these podcast interviews. Obviously, you should definitely be reaching out to her and her company if you want to pursue that, but hey, before we get there, regardless of what you think about this, I really want you to give this an open mind and listen to what Melissa has to say.
Speaker 1:This has been a very, very popular episode on my YouTube channel, pintent. If you haven't been checking out the videos. This video, this podcast, I should say, was actually recorded via live stream video a few months ago. So if you were following my YouTube live tab, you would have already seen and gotten to know Melissa. But if you want to see us talk in person, definitely go to youtubecom, slash Neal Schaefer and do a search for this podcast episode to see me live, see me recorded on video. Anyway, let's just jump right in to this podcast episode and my interview with Melissa Kwan.
Speaker 2:You're listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. This is Neal Schaefer.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, welcome to another special live stream episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today we're going to talk about webinars. Now I know we all went through the pandemic and we all got a little zoomed out, but I will tell you from experience, from working with clients, that if you are a B2B company, webinars are still one of the most impactful ways of lead generation. Obviously, webinars can do more than just generate leads develop relationships, increase sales, do a lot of different things. The webinars are still a critical component, especially even though we now do have in-person conferences. It's still not the same as it was before COVID and more and more of us are used to joining conferences virtually remotely. So actually, this environment for webinars is even stronger than it used to be.
Speaker 1:But is there a better way to do webinars? And it's like the hamster wheel of content. Oh, we got to do a webinar this week and then next week and then next month. That's a lot right. Well, I was really intrigued when someone reached out to me saying Neil, automated webinars are actually better than live webinars, and it's someone that's gone through the pain of having to do one live webinar after another after another. So if webinars are part of what you do in marketing, or if you think, wow, that's the dream record.
Speaker 1:Once and every week, have an automated webinar. It sounds amazing. Believe me, I'm thinking the same thing. That's why I'm really excited to bring on today's guest, who is none other than Melissa Kwan, who is the CEO and founder of eWebinar, and I think we're going to hear more about this tool. But more importantly, melissa, welcome, and I would love for you to just, you know, obviously, introduce yourself. I know that you are coming to us from, I'm assuming, Amsterdam, although there's other great cities in the Netherlands, but you know what is it that you do and how did you start doing it? Because I think your story, your personal experience of doing webinars, really helped you craft this amazing product, so I'll let you take it from here.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for that intro, neil, and thanks for having me. Wow, it was like really high energy, so I love that. Yeah, so how I got into this eWebinar is my third company. I had two other companies before this, both in real estate technology and because we were always bootstrapped. I was the person that was doing all those webinars, whether it was, you know, repetitive sales demos for different prospects or customer interviews that I wanted to use as like marketing and lead gen or, after somebody buys, training and onboarding, like all of those webinars I would be doing myself because our team was very small. I was everything except for code, so you can imagine a single person like how difficult that would be.
Speaker 3:I remember my peak. I did eight back to back training like just like onboardings for new customers back to back in a single day, and after you do that there isn't much mindshare that you have for other parts of your business. So I always envisioned this perfect product that would do my job for me while I could go and just live my life, because it it was. That was what it was really doing. It was infringing on the way I wanted to live my life and I was also digital nomadding at the time. So I could do not. I would go to a new city. The first thing I would do is test the wifi in the hotel lobby and in my room and if it wasn't fast enough, I would go get a local SIM card so that I could tether my computer and do that webinar at like four in the morning. So that was my life for for five years straight, and after that last company was acquired, I decided this was the problem that I wanted to solve.
Speaker 3:And for any marketing person that's hearing this, you know you might be saying hey, I've heard of automated webinars or evergreen webinars before. Yeah, of course, like they, they have existed before us and I tried everything under the sun and not a single solution delivered the experience that I wanted that was as professional, as beautiful and also have like a chat component. So this was just something that always bubbled up and I really couldn't believe that it hadn't been solved. Yet, while all this money was being dumped into live broadcasts, as you mentioned zoom, instagram, stream, yard, re stream.
Speaker 3:All these guys are like YouTube. All these guys are throwing money billions of dollars into live broadcast, but nobody was solving the one problem that comes with live broadcasts. How do I scale the piece of content that works for me? If this works for me, why do I want to do it once a month or once a week? Why can't I do it five times a day? So that's the problem that we want to solve, and I started this company two months after I sold my previous one, not because I have the startup bug, but because I didn't sell my previous one for retirement level money.
Speaker 3:So I needed to do another one again fairly quickly. So that was four years ago now.
Speaker 1:So, melissa, let me ask you when you were talking about? Obviously, this is being broadcast live as well. So I'm curious. I suppose there's two different approaches to this. One approach is record live and repurpose, and this is something I think a lot of us marketers do. The other approach is the automation approach that you chose. I'm curious if you look or thought about, you know, maybe repurposing is the way to do it, maybe there's a tool I can create for that, or what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3:I mean. The thing is, it doesn't matter, right? The key is you do it right, because some people will take, you know, a replay recording. Everybody has one of those and, you know, upload it into our platform and market it as a replay. But the reason why you'd want to do that is because, within a platform like ours, you can retain the interactivity, have the asynchronous chat, whereas when you just put it on a YouTube, for example, it's just a different distribution, right, like people might comment, but they can't chat directly with you, so it's just a different consumption experience.
Speaker 3:Of course, if you have a video that is designed for, you know, evergreen use, right, like my demo, for example, you scripted differently, right, like you're not talking to people that you know may have a question, so it's much tighter content, it's more rehearsed, but it's still authentic, right. It just means that you have the opportunity to put the best version of what you want out there. So instead of 30 minutes, it might be 15. But I think it's just two different approaches. It's not like one is better than the other, but I think the point here is you don't have to limit your business to just your time, your schedule, and you can clone yourself right If you think more creatively.
Speaker 1:Yes. So let's get deeper into that in a second. But I think it's really interesting because you're hinting at something that if everybody listening wants to do these automated webinars, we'll get into that. That you have to think a little bit differently about that first webinar that you create and that you are going to automate, and I think it's very similar to repurposing.
Speaker 1:My approach to YouTube videos is you know, I'm doing my keyword research, looking at my data and I'm realizing that, and most recently I did a video about Pinterest SEO. But I realized that in video about Pinterest SEO, I'm able to respond to questions a lot of people ask about what are rich pins, how to do keyword research for Pinterest. So if you plan out the script in advance, you can actually repurpose that longer 30 minute video and have additional four or five short little videos that answer those questions. And this is exactly my YouTube strategy and I'm assuming with automated webinars it's a similar approach. You need to think about it differently because it is evergreen and I'd say writing a book is the same. I do not. I try not to mention any years in my book so that a few years later people go oh, this is from 2019. So, before we get into the automated webinar.
Speaker 1:I want to ask you, because you run a webinar company, our webinars I. You know you heard my introduction. I still think they're they're as impactful, they're as important today as they've ever been. You know, you agree with that. What role do you see webinars today having in modern marketing?
Speaker 3:I mean, a webinar is nothing but a video, right, whether it's live or not, it's just a video. So I think we are really just at the beginning of what video marketing can do. I think we're going to go more in the direction of more interactive video, more engaging video rather than just, you know, a YouTube video, for example. And as far as, like, our webinar is still impactful or you know, our webinars dead, like I love how people love saying like, oh, is this dead? Like chatGPT came out for a week and people were like, oh, chatgpt is dead. It's like, well, it just came out.
Speaker 3:But you know it's like clickbait right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:But I think, like, if you are not using a webinar and we're using the word webinar in this context as, like quite a broad set of definitions Right, like, let's say, a webinar is what we're doing now like just video, one-on-one conversation or one-to-many or just a one-on-one demo, like, how else are you going to get in front of your prospects or your customers If not through this? Right and when I lived in New York and this was, you know, seven years ago I lived in the same city as my customers, but they still didn't want to meet. Right, like, people just have their own schedules. Like their time, their like in real life. Time is really is valuable now more than ever before. Like it, you know, people have their own schedules. They want to spend their time with their friends and family, or maybe go to a conference or a networking event.
Speaker 3:It's so rare, especially at low price point products and services, that you know your client wants to meet you. So I think it's as impactful as like it is literally the only way to get in front of all your customers, all your prospects, without them hopping on a plane or you hopping on a plane. So I think, from a you know, from a perspective of like. Is this effective? Like, how else are you going to do it? Of course it's going to be effective and I think close to 60% of B2B marketers are saying webinars are their most effective channel that they leverage.
Speaker 1:Wow, I guess one thing that comes to mind is you say webinars part of video, and I think we can all agree that video is the most impactful way, most effective type of marketing that we can do. So I've never really thought about a webinar as being an extension of that video. But let me ask you this then we can just send a video to a customer and say, hey, check this out. Or we can send an invite to a webinar, whether it's live or automated. Is there something psychologically that we that makes the webinar approach more effective than just sending a video or saying here's a link to a video?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I think number one is like exactly what you said is like the psychology of oh, this is an event I can attend, there's a time I sign up for and there's an invite that I get in my inbox that blocks time on my calendar. So I think mentally they're committing that half an hour, an hour to actually consuming that video, whereas when you send a YouTube video, there can be like oh, I can just watch it later. And then, even when they press play, they're like oh, I can just watch it later, I'll get back to it later, but there isn't anything to pull them back at that point when they close that tab, right? So I also think that, like, just because you have a video on YouTube doesn't mean you can't also have it in a platform like ours, and it doesn't mean you can't cut it up and put it on tech talk or Instagram, right, it's. I mean, we're in the world of repurposing, so it's not one or the other.
Speaker 3:Everybody learns differently, right?
Speaker 3:There's a lot of videos that we put on the webinar, that we also put on YouTube for views, and then in the comment area we say for the full experience, go here.
Speaker 3:And then it drives them back to the webinar where, where we deliver a much more interactive and rich experience, where they have a chat component, because I think, fundamentally, what makes a video different than a webinar is the ability to connect with the host, right. The ability to ask you a question, where live streaming here right now in StreamYard, somebody can ask us a question right now, but you can't do that, like you can post a comment on YouTube, but it's just not how people communicate. So I think it's just a different method of delivering the information in a way that people like to consume when they are learning. You know your product or your service, right. If it's a video, it might be. You know a short form, right, maybe they'll watch that. I think if it's like anything to do with like demoing or learning or getting really deep into something, like going to a webinar is still the preferred way that people learn.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as you were going through and saying that people consume content differently, I just want to give a shout out to Amy Woods, who is the queen of content repurposing and often gives this analogy of there might be 10 people in a room or 10 target customers of yours that go to a breakfast buffet. Some may go where the rice porridge is, some may go to the salad, some may go for the yogurt, some may go for the bagels. We all consume differently, so we need to have different types of content. I think what you say makes a lot of sense. I love those ideas about repurposing. In fact, you talk about engagement and right here we've already gotten some comments and I want you to. I'd love to get your feedback on this.
Speaker 1:So there's obviously many ways to record a presentation which then you can upload and automate in your platform, as you said, and you can also splice and dice. That Interesting comment here from Casey. I know a lot of millennials and Gen Zs that don't use PowerPoint. They use Canva to create their presentations and you can actually, just like you can, do a recording within PowerPoint. Casey is saying that Canva's presentation recordings. You could do this with or without video and blend a presentation into an automated webinar and I'm sure, melissa, there's tons of tools that can help you do this as well. But I guess, if you're already a Canva, is that something you have experience with. Where do you find your clients or creating? Are they basically recording over Zoom PowerPoint? What's been your experience just from a preparing those presentations for automation?
Speaker 3:I'm definitely going to go check out Canva for that, because I didn't know that was a feature. So thank you for letting me know, in case the engagement, yes, engagement, that's what you gave us.
Speaker 1:That, thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it just depends right. So there's different ways to record. If it's a conversation, right, like what we're doing right now, some people do it live and repurpose it. I think Zoom is what people know, so a lot of people use that. But Riverside is something that does really high quality, you know, multi-person interviews style recordings. Anytime somebody does a multiple person recording that requires screen share, I think Zoom is still the best product for that. It's the most consumer friendly product for that.
Speaker 3:There are software out there that's much more complicated. But it's really kind of for the experts. But for myself, like if I'm just recording me and my screen, it's either Lume or Descript, right Like it's just the easiest. And then maybe I'll edit it, usually through Descript, because I'm not very good with a video editing software. But if I need help then somebody on my team will use something like Camtasia. But we really only use that for demos where we have multiple different moving parts. We want to cut in the piece of software. We have a slide deck in the back. But I think the easier the better.
Speaker 3:It doesn't have to be complicated and that's the beautiful thing about webinars is like an automated webinar video is almost a cross between a live webinar that you do that's fully unscripted, and an educational video which is fully produced. The reason why people like webinars is because it's authentic, right. It's not produced by you know some agency or somewhat something, right. It's not that scripted, right, but because it's automated, it's kind of scripted. So I think that's the beauty of like recording something for an automated webinar is it doesn't have to be perfect, and I make sure that mine isn't, because I want other people to know that you don't have. It doesn't have to be perfect before you get started and you can think about, like in a live webinar, when people screw up, they just say things over again. So it's perfectly normal for people to have their ums and ahs and not have the resolution be as high as possible. So I think, from a recording perspective, like, just do what's easiest for you. But you know, riverside Zoom, loom and Descript are like the common ones that I see.
Speaker 1:And Descript is an awesome app originally started for podcasters. They, you know you can use video editing. They have added really, really cool AI functionality, so one of the top AI tools actually for podcast and video marketing. And I just want to give a shout out this is being recorded using StreamYard and actually I'm now recording my solo videos where I go through, you know, screen shares and what have you for my YouTube videos in StreamYard. And they have also added another competitor for you because they've also added a webinar functionality as well, at the dollar a month price point. But anyway, hey, pick a tool interesting about Canva.
Speaker 1:And now my friend, anton Anton good friend, formerly influencer marketing director over at Sumrush, now Duda I think it's Duda. I hope I got that right and he actually has a great lead in to the next question, because, as we were preparing and when Melissa found out that this is being livestreamed, she's like I hate live. Now, obviously, if you're the creator of the automated webinar platform, you want to put so you know, anton makes a good, good point. Hey, live webinars are fantastic, but you need to have an audience right, and I think you know this is a great lead into how automated webinars can ensure that you have an audience over time.
Speaker 1:But you said live is not better, automated is better when it comes to webinars, and I think this is a really intriguing concept and I think most marketers are saying, ok, convince me, I would love to buy that because we can all save a lot of time, as you have. So I'm going to hand the mic over to you. Why are automated webinars better? And I know that there is a whole process of how to best create them and I want to go into that for the final part of our interview here. But let's talk about automated versus live and why live sucks in automated rules. Go Melissa.
Speaker 3:So I definitely want to say that we're not here to replace live, because there's certain things that just can't be replaced, right, the conversation we're having right now cannot be replaced, but I want to say that there's space for both. Where I say live sucks is all the repetitive stuff that you feel robotic about, and I always say, if you feel robotic about it, let a robot do it. Right. If you're repeating the same thing over and over, you don't need to do it. Like to have a person, let alone an executive or founder of the company, to do it is just a waste of your time. It's a waste of their time. So that's where I want to make that distinction. But I think the place where automated is better is things like you're top of funnel demo, like when you come to our site, there's a demo on our site. I don't do any demos like live and, to give you an idea of scale, I don't have a sales team, it's just me. Last year, in 2022, I did quote, unquote 3,000 demos and I didn't do a single one live. 20% of those people signed up a trial on their own. Wow, so that's close to 300 demos a month. How many people would you have to hire to do 300 demos a month. But, more importantly, if you required people to book a time with you to do a demo, they're not going to book a time with you. I might get 10% of those demos. So by automating it, you're actually widening your funnel and allowing people who might not want to talk to a salesperson right now to still get a demo and get into your funnel. So I think that's the most valuable part of it is you're allowing more people to get educated and get that information in a scenario where they otherwise wouldn't, and also for training and onboarding all the same stuff that you're doing all the time. All your feature releases that right now you're just announcing through a newsletter. What if you could just walk someone through, not just once at the launch, but every single day? What if you could build that webinar into your platform? Hey, we have a new set of features Join this webinar and ask questions whenever you want. And because you're removing that person, you're allowing so many more people to actually get that content.
Speaker 3:How many people who have done webinars have had 500 signups? 50 people show up at the end of your webinar. 20 people are still left and you're still delivering it. It's a bit soul crushing, right. You're like, well, I was like kind of hype for this and now, like, not many people showed up.
Speaker 3:And actually, to Anton's point, live webinars are amazing. If you have an audience, If you have an influencer, and this is the way you launch your products, if this is the way that you engage with your audience, you should absolutely do it. But most people are not influencers. So you put so much effort into marketing that one live event, not many people show up and you can't reuse it again, right, you can't market that same thing again to the same audience, right? And we actually had customers that told us I was scared to do a webinar before you guys because I was afraid nobody would show up.
Speaker 3:But if I automate it, it actually doesn't matter, because I'm not there and nobody really knows who's there, and I can even deliver an experience that anybody, any time zone, can hop into and the quality is the same. That's. Another thing is, if I go to a live webinar and the energy is high and everyone's there, that's awesome. But when I watch a replay, the quality is a bit lower. People are asking questions not in real time. It's now impacting my viewing experience. So that doesn't happen with an automated webinar, because it doesn't matter if you watch it today, tomorrow, next week the experience is actually still the same.
Speaker 3:So I think those are all things to consider and if you're thinking well, what's better for live and what's better for automated? Well, anything that's timely, right, any sort of maybe it's a book launch, maybe you're an influencer and you want to speak to your audience, right? Maybe it's New Year's Eve, like whatever it might be. Anything that's timely that requires you to be live. Special guests, for example, absolutely, do those things live because those are better. But anything that you feel like you're robotic about, anything you wish you could be doing more, but you don't have the bandwidth. That's where automated is better, and if you automate that, you can actually clear your own schedule to do more things that actually requires your unique attention. Whether it be another live webinar or just binging on all the seasons of Full House, right now that you have all this time, you could do whatever you want.
Speaker 1:So everything you say makes total sense and I think everybody listening is probably bought in. But immediately two things come up and I know we're going to get to sort of well, how do we go about doing this in your platform? What have you? But the two things are number one do you let people know that it's automated? Do you say this is a recording or do you try to sell it or broadcast it as live? It's question number one. And question number two you mentioned this interactive capabilities.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious. I'm assuming then you're not saying it's recorded, so it looks like it's live and you have a chat functionality, but does this require you to be on standby live? Because if that's the case, it might defeat the purpose, although it is still helpful because you don't need to talk for an hour, you're just there managing the chat. So I'd love to hear your opinion on and I'm sure like your product has a solution for this, but I'd love to hear your experience and try to convince the skeptical marketers out there how to overcome these two things or how to respond to that really.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that you asked that. So any marketer that has seen automated webinars or ever-growing webinar solutions before and have not adopted them probably didn't adopt them because maybe they're a bit scammy, right. Like maybe they were tricking people, like that is like I just feel that that is so dirty, like those tricks. Like people know you're not live at 3 am in the morning with 500 people, like they just know, and I can't actually like I can't believe that you would align your own brand with that. So we are advocates of like don't lie to people that say this is live when it's not. They're gonna know and you're gonna lose that reputation, credibility so quickly. Like we actually take that further to actively not build features in our platform that help people trick consumers.
Speaker 3:So we don't have a fake chat, right. All of our chat is one-on-one, private between the moderator and the attendee. We don't have a fake counter. We don't have fake sales notifications, none of that stuff. And while I know that other solutions that were before us had those, like that's just not a marketing practice that I can get behind. So that's number one. So whether I tell somebody it's live or not, I don't say it's live, I don't say it's recorded because it's not necessary. I just say welcome to my demo, welcome to this training, so I don't really need to call that out. I know that some people actively say, oh, this is live. And then they pretend that there's people there. I don't stop them from doing it, I just make it harder for them, within our platform, to trick people. So that's my position on that.
Speaker 1:So you're basically not saying it's live, you're not saying it's recorded, you're basically saying hey, welcome to the demo, welcome to this presentation. And I'm really curious, though, about you do enable the chat, which I think makes a lot of sense. They may have a question at a particular point. How are you saying please give 24 hours to respond? Or how do you handle the responses to make it seem more real?
Speaker 3:So I think there's this notion of like I need to make it feel live, or make it like I need to make it seem live, like why I don't need to make it seem live. People can know it's automated. I mean, they're also coming to my platform, that's. You know I'm in a special position because when people come over, they know that we're an automated platform. So the most important thing to a consumer, to your customer, is you set expectations for what's to come. If you say, hey, this is live and you're not, they get angry. If you say this is live and they chat with you and you're not there, they're frustrated.
Speaker 3:But what I say how I script all of my webinar video recordings is hey, if you have a question, type it in the chat box. If I'm here, I'll respond to you immediately, but if I'm not, then you'll hear back from me through email. And this way of asynchronous communication is no different than going to any website. And then you see a little chat bubble that pops up and says hey, neil, can I help you today? You know that if you don't get an immediate response, you're going to get an email response. So that's exactly what we do. We didn't invent anything. We just took how people already communicate in other channels and we stuck it in. So we've got auto responders that you can set. Oh, if I don't respond in two minutes, then this auto responder comes up and sometimes I am there. So if I'm there, if I'm working on my laptop and a little message pops up, I will hop into respond, and people are always delighted because they're like shocked that someone actually gets back to them.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:But if I'm sleeping because sometimes I do that then I wake up and there's eight different threads that I have to respond to. Then it just goes through an email. So it's really no different than any customer support this chat that you're already used to. So that's kind of how we set. The expectation for communication is if I don't respond in two minutes, you will get an auto responder.
Speaker 1:And I love this comment from Joel Don, a dear friend and PR guru schedule time for a webinar.
Speaker 1:When I showed up to discover this recording and it wasn't I suppose then, joel, that it was sort of set up to be live, or you were led to believe it was live, and once you found it was recording, damage the brand offer, lost business. Disclosure and this is spoken by a true PR pro disclosure is the transparency and authenticity that is the original promise of social media, and what you're saying is you are creating a platform and you're basically trying to align as much as possible with this. Let them know you're not there, let them know it's recorded, but also let them know that you're facilitating it in a way that allows them to consume the same content and you will respond. And as long as you respond and what you're saying also is, with all these chatbots, hey, if you're not there, we'll get back to you customer support that more and more consumers really use to this type of communication. So it's both transparent and it's not, and it's also meeting the expectations of consumers today.
Speaker 3:I can't tell you how cringy it is when I see even my own customers like and and I look at their videos how they're tricking people into like, saying this is live and they'll, you know, they'll pop up a poll and then they'll pretend that someone answers something and they'll answer that question like I'm like, come on, dude, like this is not what we built the platform for. But I also can't control. You know how they use it right. I can only not help them, I can only not enable that behavior by not having the, the fake chat conversation, the fake counters and all those things.
Speaker 1:Okay. So let's get to sort of like the heart of you know what we're going to talk about today, which is, I think that there's probably some people listening, myself included, that are like okay, melissa, I'm bought in, you know, I'm going to go and all. At the end I'll give you a chance to sort of introduce your platform, the website and where people can go to connect with you. I'm assuming, for lack of better description, it's ewebinarscom. I'm going to go and I'm going to start this. So three things to cover here.
Speaker 1:Number one you mentioned that there are some types of webinars that are better live and there are some that are better automated, so I want to get into what are those types that people listening should be considering for automated. Number two is how to go about creating a webinar for automation. Just like I read, I talked about recording videos for the objective of content repurposing. If you're going to record something for automated, I'm assuming you're going to do it a little bit differently. And then, third, and maybe most important, and getting back to Anton's comments, you need to have an audience is the promotion, because I'm assuming because it's evergreen that the way you promote these is going to be very different than a one time thing. So let's tackle those one at a time. Live versus automated which? What should we be doing? If we're already doing webinars? What are the things we should be doing? Automated, outside of? Just understood the general robotic things, but any other advice you can give to our listeners as to what they should start an automated webinar for?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think the easiest place to start is just to think, within kind of the content that you already deliver, what is something that you wish you could be doing more of. I'll give you an example. There's a company that said we do a Spanish training once a year because we can only hire this person once a year and we wish we could be doing it more. So now, with us, right, like, instead of doing it once a year, it's just available. And then maybe there are some things that are hard to do, live that you want to be doing more of. So another customer that said oh, we have one webinar, one training, that's really hard to coordinate because it requires, you know, mirroring of a phone and also a screen, so there's not always someone available to do this for us. So, things like that, right, things that you wish you could be doing more of, that you wish you could be more robotic about right. And then, of course, the things that I had already mentioned that you know that you are already doing over and over and you're kind of sick of doing it.
Speaker 3:But also, like, I want to challenge people to think more about the you know their, whatever the demo means, I guess in your line of work, right, For me it's a straight up product demo, but for a lot of consultants, for example, or, you know, marketing agencies, their demo could be their interview with a customer on how they benefited from working with them. Right, and these are the things that we see a lot of agencies have on their website, on their homepage, as a demo. You know, it's not like us just talking about our agency and how we can help you, but like this is a customer story, a featured customer story that you know really is kind of lead gen anyway, but these are the things that you know are best for automation, because it allows you to sell in your sleep, right onboard in your sleep, get customers more, more accustomed to your software, to your service while you're sleeping, right. These are all the things that I think could help your business grow.
Speaker 1:So you got me thinking about my own as a fractional CMO marketing consultant. Obviously, people can schedule time for me they can see YouTube video I created. But hey, here is a webinar on what it's like to work with a fractional CMO, where you get an understanding of how I work and get to ask me questions before scheduling a call to make sure that we're the right fit. So that almost seems like a perfect use case scenario from what you just said. Another way of qualifying leads as well, right?
Speaker 3:I think the most important thing about having this kind of on demand demo is the ability for leads to disqualify themselves, and I hear this over and over and over again with our customers is like I don't want to talk to every lead, but now we realize like there's a lot of resistance, right when you want to bring something into the sales team, that takes leads away from them Because they're like well, I need to talk to every person. Like a I can say this because I am a sales person is are very, very territorial. But what if, instead of you know doing demos for 100 people, you can do demos without being there for 1000 people and you only talk to the top 100 people that opt in? Right, because your CTA doesn't have to be? You know, sign up on your own. Your CTA could be like here's my calendar book of time.
Speaker 3:If this resonated with you. So lead like if you let people self educate, the better leads you know, the ones that that ones that actually already know what your offer is, where your price point is, are more likely to close and their intent is higher because they've already spent 20 minutes with you. But you know, without you actually being there. So being able to just like allow people to say, oh, I actually don't want to work with you, you've just saved yourself an hour.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I want to give a shout out for those of you hopefully watched the previous week's live stream, which was with the co authors of content fortress and this idea of creating content to keep the customers you don't want to work without, and this is just another way of doing that in a more interactive way. But, but, yeah, I love the idea. It makes a lot of sense, so, okay, so that's really really great advice as to what videos we could automate. Now, how do we go about creating a webinar for the purpose of automation? What are the best practices there versus just a general webinar that we prepare for?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I think you mentioned one of the most important things is like don't say anything, that's you know time sensitive, right, no dates, or you know world events or mentions of those things. But I also think because you have an opportunity to script it like use a script when you can Like not everybody is so great at you know riffing, or just like not everyone's a great public speaker or presenter, right, Like scripting is really your best friend when you want to come up with something that is that is tight. One of the cool things about an automated, automated webinar is, you know, within our platform as a feature, is you allow somebody to watch it and fast forward. I like I watch everything in 1.5 to two times speed and I listen to every podcast in like 1.75. If it's too fast, and also a tell.
Speaker 1:I am the exact same. I'm 1.5,. But I hear you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but people have like no attention span, right. So the tighter you can keep your content, the more valuable you can make it, the better it's going to be. So I think that's going to be your best friend. But I think, because you have the opportunity to script it, you can script it for engagement and setting expectation, which is exactly what I said about the chat and how I set up the chat. When I introduce myself in the beginning of every single automated webinar, I always say if you have a question, type it in the chat box If I'm not here. So you're telling them hey, you might not be here, if I'm not here, you will hear back from me through email, but I'll try to respond as quickly as I can. And that does two things Number one is setting expectation, but number two is drawing their attention to the chat because you want them to engage with you. You want every single customer and every single prospect to ask you a question, if they have it, because that is an opportunity to build a relationship with them. So then they're more likely to buy, less likely to go somewhere else, right? So the other thing that I would suggest is understand the platform's capability. So, whether you're using a webinar or something else, understand the engagement features that are within it for the sole purpose of drawing attention to it in your script. So, for example, we have 20 different interactions like polls, quizzes, contact forms, sales notifications, hotspots that you can layer on top of your webinar. So it feels more like a two way participatory experience, not just like me talking at you, but it helps so much in at least the first, like three or four interactions, to say something like hey, how did you hear about us? Let me pop up a poll right now. I'll give you a couple seconds to answer that.
Speaker 3:So if you are training the attendee from the beginning for interactivity, now they're looking out for it. Now you're inviting them to participate and I find that when you do that, they will sit through the end, engage with as many interactions as they can. So now you're also collecting data. It's not, you're not just popping these things up for fun.
Speaker 3:You're also collecting a lot of data which you can then feed into your CRM. You might put, you know, put them in a different you know email sequence or whatnot, so and you want people to stay until the end so you can deliver your CTA. All of this prep is useless unless they stay till the point where you're delivering your CTA or finishing your training. So those are all things that I would I would really think about is script it. Make sure your content is tight, valuable. Make sure you script in the beginning for beginning, for chat, to invite them to chat with you, but also set their expectation that you might not be there all the time, and then, at least for the first few interactions that you're going to show, draw their attention to it so that they're more likely to complete the rest of them.
Speaker 1:Fantastic advice. Final point promotion with a single webinar. You know, because it's like this, this one trick pony, you know, every month you're, you're, you're putting all your resources, putting all your eggs into one basket, just promoting the heck out of this one webinar. But when you have automated webinar and I would assume a lot of your clients are doing automated webinars once they see the power, they can sort of diversify the content. How do you go about other than just creating a webinars page on your website where you always have webinars to choose from? What are some other best practices in promoting automated webinars?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think the beautiful part about this is you don't have to nail it the first time, like when you're putting all your eggs in this live, like one live event basket, like all of your resource should be going through that, right, of course.
Speaker 3:But the cool thing about automated is it's just always there. So for us, we've got a variety of different widgets that you can install on landing pages, home pages, your blog, so, whether it's a little pop up that comes up, a little button, a banner that you can put in your articles, so that's something that we offer. But things that I don't think people think a lot about is like your if it's a demo, for example, or your workshop, your, your keynote you should be putting it in your email signature, for example, where you are always sending communication out. So maybe your monthly newsletter, right, the thing that you want people to go to the most should always be visible, right. So maybe that maybe make that required on your whole team's email signature, or maybe that's in the footnote of every single one of your newsletters. And the cool thing is you can do really kind of growth hacky things, right, you can answer questions on Quora and the answer to that question could be a link to one of the webinars that you want to drive.
Speaker 1:I see what you're doing there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and to your point. And then it's evergreen, so it's always. You know it's. It's always there. And to your point, like, a lot of our customers will have webinar libraries where it's just one page on their site and every single workshop, every single webinar that they have is on there and it's really just widgets that that they can install. It's just copy and paste code. We actually have an article on our blog about, like, the 25 ways to promote an evergreen webinar that you may not have thought about, but it's just. It's just whatever works, right. But anywhere where you are constantly posting, creating content on your LinkedIn profile, right, that should be one of the featured articles. Whatever you want to drive people to just put it on there because it's always going to live, it never gets outdated.
Speaker 1:And if you have creator mode, you can use that as your strategic link See one of my free webinars here makes a lot of sense, melissa, this has really been fantastic. I think it's gotten. You know, when you first reached out to me automated, automated webinars I'm like, eh, like you know how much market respond, but you've really, you've really intrigued me and, I think, intrigued a lot of our listeners. So where can people go to find out more about e-webinars and also maybe even connect with yourself?
Speaker 3:Yeah, If you want to connect with me, the best place is LinkedIn. My last name is Spokwon KWAN. I post daily about my experience bootstrapping three companies, and if you want to check out e-webinars how it can help you, your business or your team just go to ewebinarcom. It's exactly as it sounds Just ewebinarcom.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, that is singular, not plural. I might have made mistake earlier.
Speaker 3:Singular, so yes ewebinarcom. But now I want to buy the plural because I feel like there's people typing like typing in typos.
Speaker 1:I would do it now before one of our savvy marketing listeners.
Speaker 3:It's probably already taken.
Speaker 1:All right, so that's a wrap for today, melissa. Thank you so much for sharing all of your expertise and experience with us.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:All right. This episode was really an eye-opener for those that attended the live stream, from people that watched that video afterwards, and I'd love to hear from you if you enjoyed this episode. In fact, let's take our relationship one step further. I am on a mission. Don't know if I'm going to reach it or not, but somehow this podcast this is episode number 341. We are still stuck at 59 reviews on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1:I'd really be honored if you thought this episode was interesting, informative, educational, or even if you didn't, I would love to hear from you. You can obviously reach out to me, but the best way to do so is to spend a minute and just go up there on Apple Podcasts and just drop in a sentence review of what impact this podcast has had for you. I would really really appreciate it. Send me a screenshot, let me know it was you so I can give you a shout out here on the podcast. But I want to thank you in advance for your loyalty for hitting that subscribe button, for you know joining my newsletter, neilshapercom slash events so that we can keep in touch, and I look forward to delivering more and more, especially as I am putting all this knowledge from all these interviews and all of my podcast episodes into this next book. I really can't wait to share more information with you. You're going to have to wait a little bit longer for that, but I'm genuinely excited.
Speaker 1:But let's end here. I'll be dropping another episode in the next few days. We are at a little accelerated schedule because I got backed up going to VidSummit and then Adobe Max. My previous episode, 340, was all about VidSummit. Episode number 342 is going to be all about Adobe Max. You want to make sure you hit the subscribe button if you haven't, and I look forward to serving you again in the next episode. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.
Speaker 2:For the digital first group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.