Webinars are a cornerstone of tech marketing, but how do you keep them fresh, engaging, and effective for your audience? In this must-watch session, webinar expert Jess Steinbach reveals powerful techniques and strategies that have helped her moderate over 1,000 webinars.
Why should tech marketers watch this webinar?
- Unlock the Power of Interactive Webinars: Learn how to use gamification, interactive tools, and unexpected elements (like Bean Boozled jelly beans!) to captivate your audience and hold their attention.
- Webinar Formats That Work: Discover how to design webinar content that fits your brand and audience—from storytelling and case studies to real-time engagement tactics.
- Platform Optimization: Gain insights into the best webinar platforms and how to tailor features like live chats, polls, and Q&As for maximum impact.
- Nurture Leads Effectively: Go beyond the event—find out how to nurture and follow up with attendees in a way that builds long-term trust and conversions, rather than just handing leads directly to sales.
- Real-World Examples: Hear case studies and success stories from top tech companies, illustrating what works (and what doesn’t) in running high-volume, high-impact webinar programs.
This webinar is packed with actionable tips, entertaining moments, and expert advice. Whether you're just starting with webinars or looking to enhance your current strategy, Jess and the team deliver the insights you need to succeed.
Watch now and take your webinar game to the next level!
Update: Jess and Gianna did a follow up to this Webinar Masterclass - "Your Webinar's Over, Now What?" - check it out here.
Webinar Video
Slide Deck
Transcript
Gianna Whitver:
That's it. We're all Bye everyone. We're going to get on a plane. No, I'm just kidding. All right, we are. I think we're live. Give me one second to check. Oh, oops. I have it very loud. Okay, sorry. I had the Yukon joke going. So welcome everyone. Welcome, welcome. We are live on LinkedIn. We are live on the Zoom webinar as we typically are. Let me give a quick introduction. Why are you on this webinar? Of course you, you're on this webinar to learn about webinars, which is very meta and thank you for coming. Feel free to put your name, your company in the chat so that we can better serve you during this webinar. Say where you're from. We are the Cybersecurity Marketing Society. I am the co-founder and CEO. The Cybersecurity Marketing Society exists to help marketers in the cybersecurity industry. Hi, Joanna from Poland in the cybersecurity industry. Be successful however we can help you. And that includes with career services. We've helped hundreds of people find jobs or new direct reports, coworkers in our community through education, through networking, through curation of networking and mentorship. And we are a community based on Slack, but we're also now in person. So along with our virtual events such as this webinar, Amsterdam, oh my gosh, is everybody from Europe today? Holly from Alaska. So cool. Hi Holly and Ross from US. Ross that is very not specific, but I like it. Very not. That's very osint forward.
So basically we exist, the cybersecurity marketing Society exists to help all in person, full-time marketers be successful in marketing in the cybersecurity industry, which is a very complicated technical, somewhat difficult industry to market in. And we do things such as bring in education, help each other, share resources, share which vendors are good, which are bad or not ideal uses of your budget in our community. So feel free to join us@cybersecuritymarketingsociety.com. Our slack is free for anyone who is a full-time in-house marketer at a product and services company. And I'm also going to plug just once cyber marketing please come on out to cyber marketing. It is the only conference for marketers in cybersecurity, right? You go to a marketing conference and it's all this general stuff about marketing to salespeople and marketing to marketers and marketing to finance, and you're like, okay, that doesn't help at all with what I'm doing.
Well, guess what? We thought the same thing and I thought the same thing as head of marketing at a security company. So we started a conference all about marketing and cyber. We have brilliant speakers and tons of networking and fun. Samantha, I will ping me and also we have the chat saved. I'll follow up with you about how to gain access, okay, enough about the Cybersecurity marketing society and enough advertisements from wa. We are so excited. We have a brilliant, amazing marketer herself. We have Jess Steinbeck from future B2B, which is a that does as we learned if anyone was here early, a company that does two plus webinars a day and Jess is here to teach us. Thank you Jen. Jess is here to teach us how to keep it fresh because you know what I had to do? We did two webinars a month at my last company and it was so much, so much and sometimes it got a little stale.
So Jess, I'm going to hand over the mic. I'll be on the screen to bump in and ask you questions. And also friends, listeners, if you have questions, this is an interactive webinar. All of our webinars are interactive. Make sure you put your questions, your comments, your chat in the chat or in the q and a box. We'll deal with it as it comes in. I'll interrupt you, Jess, to ask you these questions. And then who, if anyone here got signed up for the special surprise mailing game gift, which Jess, I'll let you explain when we get to it. We will be doing a game to actually prove to you that it can be fun. You can make your webinars fun and they don't have to be boring. Alright, so much preamble. Jess, thank you so much for being on.
Jess Steinbach:
That was a fantastic preamble and yes, Chris, I see you. I know you've got, you're ready to play along. I'm going to actually, okay, now I've been screen sharing, but I want to ask you guys a question and I'm not sure I can see the reactions if I'm screen sharing. So I'm going to unshare and what I want to do a little poll. So we've got these little reactions in here and I'm just going to keep it simple. I want to ask you guys what brought you in today? So did you come in because you already have webinars and you want to make them a little bit better? In that case, let's do a heart emoji for that. I love webinars, but I want to make them a little better. If you don't have webinars and you're thinking about adding them, let's do applause. Yay for webinars. You're thinking about adding webinars and none of those things, but you're just always up for learning. Give me a celebration. So hearts are, I love webinars and I want to make them better. Applause or I want to add webinars, celebrations are, hey, new things are cool,
Gianna Whitver:
Jess. Okay, I have literally just learned my first thing. This is so cool. I've never used Zoom reactions as polling before. This is awesome.
Jess Steinbach:
We are big on emojis in our team, so this was great. I have to say I think that was almost entirely a blend. I think I saw the most of the webinars and I want to make them better and I want to learn new things. I didn't see as many people that are like, I've never considered it and this is brand new to me. So we won't spend as much time with me trying to convince you to do webinars. Although my hope is that by the time we kind of finish this conversation, you feel really excited about webinars because they are a really great tool and I say that they can also be a really terrible tool. It really depends on how you do it, just like any presentation and that's what we're going to dig into today. So I want to get my screen share back up and going
Gianna Whitver:
And we have the first question too, Jess, real quick, what's your preferred platform? Cody wants to know?
Jess Steinbach:
Well that's great. You're actually cutting right to where we were going to go next. So for me, we use a platform called Notify. It used to be called Intrado and it has recently been bought by Brand Live, so they have a couple different platforms there and platform is a really important thing and I'm going to dig into that a little bit more. Other platforms that I really enjoy on 24 is kind of similar to Notified Gold Cast is one that we've just kind started learning a little bit more about. Riverside is the recording studio that we use and they've just added webinar features. So I would say those are kind of the main ones. webinar.net is another really good one and there are different features that I'll kind of walk through in a little bit here that are worth asking about. I would recommend making your own kind of evaluation matrix and putting in what are the key features that we need.
It's like when you're buying a house, what are my must haves and cans stands? What do I absolutely have to have in order to run the webinars I want to run? And then go through each of those platforms and make sure they have them, make sure they have them before you start or if you already have a platform, make sure you have the features you need before you start planning an aggressive webinar platform or program. If you have a webinar program that you want to follow, make sure the platform is going to fit that. Those two things need to go together. If you plan your entire webinar program around being able to do breakout rooms and not all of them have it, then that's going to be an issue. So hopefully that helps. I love it. We're jumping in with questions right away. Let's keep things rolling.
So this is kind of what we're going to talk about today. My goal with this whole conversation as I said, is not to convince you that webinars are the end all and be all. And I want to be really frank with all of you. I am totally an in-person kind of gal. I love doing things in person, I love connecting with people and having those one-on-one conversations I would never have thought that I would spend, I would find my sort of life calling in virtual events. So I'm not here to evangelize virtual events because I think they're the end all and be all. I'm here to evangelize webinar events because I think they can be an incredible tool and we'll explore them a little bit together and I hope that by the time we walk away you feel excited about how to make your webinars go from that sort of static two dimensional, just that tick the box kind of thing that you're doing to something that actually really invigorates your brand story and connects with your community.
So here's kind of what we're going to cover. We're going to talk a little bit about the live versus virtual events and I'll talk to you about that. We're going to talk about some of those interactive techniques and I'm going to give you some hard examples of specific techniques that we've used. We're going to talk about some real world examples and some stories and then we're going to talk about some effective follow-up and I'm actually bringing on my wonderful colleague with us Ainsley, I will introduce him later and he's going to help us kind of talk about what a nurture cycle can look like for you. So let's talk about some stats before we jump in. And Gianna was giving us a little bit of an introduction before. So I work for a company that started as actual tech media. We've been around about 10, 12 years and when we first started we were doing so in 2016.
This is a couple years into existing, we were doing about 11 webinars in a year and as you can see we have upped that a little bit. So we went from about 11 webinars a year to about 62 webinars the next year and then about 120 by 2019. So just prior to Covid we were already at about 120 webinars a year and then just have kind of grown exponentially through that. We did all of that with a team of about seven people and in fact, and I think Natasha is here, we have one of the founders of our webinar team who sort of built this program, Natasha Rogers who I'll put in a plug for her since moved on and started other projects. She is a fantastic webinar program designer, so if you are looking for somebody to connect with about webinar programs, reach out to Natasha Rogers on LinkedIn, but she helped create this program with about at the start two or three people and then six or seven people running those 120 webinars a year.
So the reason I bring that up is because you don't have to have this massive webinar team, you don't have to have a giant infrastructure. We currently have about 10 people working on webinars specifically in our team and we are running 450 plus webinars. And actually if you go across, so our team actual tech media got acquired by an organization called Future. So we're now future B2B and across all our verticals we are currently doing over a thousand webinars a year, which is absolutely wild and insane. I am not moderating a thousand webinars a year. That's not something I do.
Gianna Whitver:
No, you're just moderating like 500 webinars a year or something.
Jess Steinbach:
Just a casual 500. Yes, I'm doing in the two years two and a bit years 2022 to 2024, I've done about 900 webinars. I have spent over 1300 hours in webinars, so a lot.
Gianna Whitver:
Wow. Jess, I mean I'm not surprised because we invited you on because we saw these stats and actual takes a great support of the community, but you specifically have all of this time put in, right? 1300 hours of webinar time is a lot of hours. That's amazing.
Jess Steinbach:
It's a lot of hours and as I mentioned earlier, I do split that with, I want to point out we've got this wonderful crew that you see up on the screen here. So that's actually me in the lower corner, that's my superhero alter ego. That's what I look like on weekends, it's just out. So this is the Mod squad, these are the moderators that we had in the actual tech media team that now still work on most of our webinars. And so that's Mackenzie and the Green and that's Keith and the purple Scott down there in the blue and then myself. And we are all superheroes. I do have to give a quick shout out to this graphic design here. This is a great example of some of the custom content that Smart Brief and actual tech and future B2B can offer in addition to webinars.
So we actually have a little text layer comic that we do and so these are text layer characters and that's why we all got to be superheroes for our day. So anyways, those are just some stats. We do work with a lot of different organizations and I did just want to kind set the scene that we are mostly involved in the tech space. These are some of the cybersecurity teams that we work with that you can see up there. Obviously there's huge range and we love working with all these different teams and getting to kind of help tell their stories as they're releasing new products or just trying to reach new audiences. So this is a pretty cool community of people that we have, but let's get into it. Jana,
Gianna Whitver:
Sorry I couldn't unmute fast enough. Let's get into it.
Jess Steinbach:
I threw that at you.
Gianna Whitver:
No problem. I'm just watching the chat for questions. Amazing,
Jess Steinbach:
Amazing. Alright, so I mentioned to all of you that I would love to sort of create virtual event evangelists from all of you. I think that for me, I'll tell you and the reason I put on this slide, get your slippers on. I love conferences. I love the energy, I love the feel of it, but man, I am just wiped by the time you get to the end of it. I hate every shoe that I've brought. I am so uncomfortable if anyone's worn nylons, it's just nothing about conference where is comfortable. You have to travel, you have to get on a plane. We all know planes are nightmare right now. Travel budgets aren't really possible for everybody. Webinars can be this really cost effective and speaking of teams that might be a bit smaller, you might not be able to send everybody that you need to this conference, but you can reach people through these virtual platforms.
The accessibility for people that have different physical abilities or that struggle with different lighting or different sound, being able to reach folks like that, being able to reach people around the world is a huge thing. Not to mention expanding the reach that you have by creating on demand and asynchronous viewing. Everybody is busy these days and it is really hard to fit into somebody's schedule. Taking two days or a day out of your work life to go to a conference or attend an event could be very difficult. But turning on taking out your lunch break and putting your feet up and sitting there with a nice cup of coffee and listening to Gianna and I talk for an hour is hopefully a great use of your time. It's much more accessible emotionally and physically and I think that's huge in addition to it also is an opportunity to create a level of expertise and kind of build your brand by having members of your team be seen as these experts within the community there. So I still think that that live and face-to-face interactions have their place. I still think they're important. I'm certainly not suggesting that we burn conferences to the ground. Oh boy. Not even metaphorically or literally.
Gianna Whitver:
I mean hey, my conferences in five months, everybody come to Cyber Marketing Con, which has a virtual live stream. Exactly
Jess Steinbach:
Do that, but then also having a live stream available for that. Also, having an opportunity to follow up or to debrief or to take highlights from a live event. And that's something that I think is a really cool aspect. Jan, maybe there's, and I've talked to, we were talking to Salesforce about this recently about having, they do a lot of in-person things, but maybe they take recorded clips from their in-person events and then replay them with live discussion. So we would sit, you and I might be on a panel and we play a clip from your conference and then we discuss it after an add in commentary.
Gianna Whitver:
Jess, that is so B2C, which is why you're on here. Literally. So two things now that I've learned because on the first minute Jess is like everybody vote with the mote with the reactions. I was like, what? That's amazing. Let's do that in the future. And then yes, like Jen just put in the chat reaction videos on YouTube but for B two V, I love that. That's so different. That's amazing.
Jess Steinbach:
That's a great idea. I love doing, and this is what's so cool about virtual is not seeing it as either or necessarily, but seeing it as, you know how we're all talking these days about AI being like, I like the metaphor of it being like the Iron Man suit. It's like the cool thing you put on around the human rather than replacing the human. I think virtual events can be wrappers around a live event schedule. They can be wrappers around other content schedules that help you get more out of what you're already planning to do.
Gianna Whitver:
Jess, can I ping a hardball at you question? Yes. Okay. So some people think that virtual events are less effective because people are distracted when they're listening, right? They've got the coffee because you were saying sit back, drink a cup of coffee, right? Some people do that, but then there's people who are like, I dunno what they're doing but their dog is biting them because their dog hates them or something falls off. They have a poltergeist and stuff is falling off the walls. Just different reasons. People are pinging them on Slack, which is probably the most likely thing of the three things I've just suggested, but people are distracted. So how do we get around that or is there any way besides being engaging?
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, yes. I mean obviously an easy and maybe slightly like loophole answer is would be great and be engaging and I'm being a little tongue in cheek, but also, I mean that is part of it and that is what we're going to talk about later is how to pull their attention back to what you're doing. But I'll throw something back at you. The last time I was at an in-person conference, and again, I'm not knocking in person and everyone go to the live conferences, but I was just as distracted. I remember sitting in a session, I went to a collision a little bit ago and it was gigantic and in order to get into a session and please don't take this as me knocking collision, I think it's great, but in order to get into a session you had to wait in line because the rooms only had so much capacity. So if I wanted to go to a session, I needed to be thinking about what time was I getting in line for that next session while I was sitting in this session. I was just as distracted in the live event as I would have been in person and at least in person I'm wearing my pajama bottoms or virtual, hopefully not in person.
Gianna Whitver:
Sometimes I do in person too. Okay, good point. Good point. Everybody, not everybody who was at Black Hat put in the chat or do in a reaction or something if you were at Black Hat, black Hat. I tried to attend and take it slow and it was just wholeheartedly just a nonstop. That was last week. So I totally, I get what you're saying. Cassidy is making a great point. Two points. She was saying she loves how accessibility is a factor. I believe Cassidy is going to be playing our game, so I can't wait Cassidy for you to come up. Then also Cassidy is saying, my pet peeve is buy the virtual ticket to virtual event and it's recorded from a distance and doesn't have any interaction or moderation, so it's just replays. I wish people would differentiate replays from virtual tickets. I just wanted to say one thing because last year we did do a virtual live stream of art conference this year with the thought in mind that the virtual audience might also want to touch the speakers in the same way that the regular audience can touch the speakers, which is they can't, but they can interact and they can talk and everything to speakers is that we're going to do our best to make sure that the questions from the virtual attendees of Cyber Marketing Con can actually submit their questions and have them answered live to the live speakers at cyber marketing.
I'm sorry that was an advertisement, but I just wanted you to know Cassidy, that we always try to do better at cyber marketing. So Jess, back to you.
Jess Steinbach:
Actually Janet, that was exactly one of the points I was going to make, so this is perfect now you just made that for me. No, I think, and I have a whole section that I want to get to in a second here about recording versus live, and that is one of the key elements for me is that it doesn't necessarily have to be all one or the other. A hybrid model works really well and doing a recording with a live speaker on live chat, doing a recording where the presentation is recorded, but the q and a is live. There's lots of options that you can kind of play with and it's also up to you to decide how transparent you want to be about that. And we do a lot of play acting and now I'm just fourth wall broken everywhere. But we definitely will do things like say, Hey, I'm going to hand things over to the speaker and then I click over to a video and I don't see that necessarily as misrepresenting because I think we are creating a live experience for the audience.
We're allowing them to hear from a speaker that they might not have been able to hear from if we were stuck in a certain time zone or timeframe that we had to do. So I am going to make a plug for recorded events and I'm going to do that in a second before we get into that because I know that's a hot button issue recorded versus live and people have very strong opinions about it and I do want to hear from you and please do feel free to disagree with me on the recordings, but I do want to just make a quick plug here for planning ahead, for taking some time before you just jump in to a virtual event. And I do think that there is, webinars have now become somewhat ubiquitous in a marketing strategy. So for a lot of people it's like, okay, blog posts, social media posts, webinar, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
Yeah, exactly. You're just doing it and yeah, okay, you should have webinars as part of your strategy, but do it well, if you're going to take the time to do it, make sure that you're getting value out of it and that starts in the planning phase, not five minutes before the webinar or 10 minutes before the webinar, but ideally days or weeks, maybe even months before the webinar and you're thinking about is this a one-off webinar or is this a full ongoing program? Do we want to have a story arc to this? Do we want to take someone through a journey if they listen to every single one of ours or is this just a one-off? We have a product launch and we just need to get this out. Understanding what your purpose is. Who do we want in the room? Do we want to cast a wide net and we want to reach a bunch of different people, or we very specifically want to have a tiny little room with qualified leads that fit these kind of parameters and you get to decide that early on. This is what knowing what you want to get out of it, knowing what you want to what want the end. When you're standing on the backend side of your webinar and you're thinking to yourself like job well done, what is that product that you're proud of? Starting from that and then backtracking to your early days, that's going to save you a lot of hassle down the line.
Gianna Whitver:
Awesome. We will talk. So we have a lot of questions coming in and also one more comment I want to make, but I think we have to keep moving forward. Jess, for a moment, just for the time here. Cassidy wants to point out ps. I do love that this webinar has great audio quality, so thank you Cassidy. Thank you so much. I spent a lot of my pre Yeah, get your face close to that mic. I spent some time before this webinar with Jess Ainsley talking about getting your face close to the mic and we're glad because audio matters, audio matters so much. If anyone is multitasking and they might be looking at something here and they can't hear what you and your moderators or your co-hosts or the people you're interviewing or the amazing special guests you have on, you can't hear what they're saying, they're never going to click back over. They're going to be like, there's background noise like being at a cafe. So all right, Jess, back to you.
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, I'm realizing that we are halfway through our time and I've done two slides, so I'm going to just start speeding it up a little. We can get to our game, which I know everyone's very excited about. Okay, let's just talk about foundation. So we talked about planning. So now you have your plan, you have your strategy, you have where you want to go, and now your initial building block is really going to boil down to your team, your people and your platform. We luckily have already talked about some of the platform things so we don't have to go too far down this road, but definitely start thinking about if you're signing on for a new platform, if you're going to host your own webinars and you can find companies to host your webinars, that's our whole jam. But if you're thinking you want to host your own webinars, then look for things like are there limitations about the number of webinars that I can host any year?
Are there limitations to the number of attendees I can have? Can I live chat with my audience and does the audience see everything that's chatted or can I curate that? We curate what gets published, which allows us to play a little bit with seated questions versus live questions, and that also helps with that recorded versus live experience is that nothing's going out except what we push out. Can you control the formatting the way that the webinar looks? Can you have a camera here with slides here and then you switch it so the slides are bigger and the cameras that sort of customization. Do you have a green room so that you can meet with If you have multiple speakers coming in, you're meeting with the speakers outside of the live feed and talking with them outside the live feed so that they're prepped and ready when they go in live. These are things that may or may not be important to your webinar, but until you've made that plan, you don't know. And then don't commit to a platform until you understand if it's going to meet those needs that you have there. I'm trying to kind of move quickly here. I said what did I do? I said platform. So should we do teams Max?
Gianna Whitver:
Yeah. Well quick question about platform. We have a couple platform questions. Someone wants to know your opinion on BrightTALK, so let's keep that really quick. Cool.
Jess Steinbach:
My opinion is great.
Gianna Whitver:
Cool. Available
Jess Steinbach:
Content. The more the merrier.
Gianna Whitver:
If you want to learn more about other marketers in cyber's opinions on BrightTALK, feel free to join the Slack community. We have a very active discussion. BrightTALK kind of comes up a lot, someone a lot in discussions. They got acquired by Target TechTarget maybe two years ago. My last experience with them was in 2020, so feel free to ask in the Slack community as well. Vendor recommendations channel. But yeah, let's keep going Jess.
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, I love it. So teams, this to me is the most important thing. You can have the best platform in the world, you can have the best story in the world, and if you don't have the right people behind the scenes as well as in front of the scenes, then you're going to fall flat. So as I said, I'm a people person, so this is my biggest thing I do want to hit on and we're going to talk a little bit about moderators and speakers as we go through this session today. And obviously as a moderator, I'm a little biased towards how important both the moderator and the speaker are, but I have to make my biggest plug for having great coordinators. I don't just mean the people, the coordination stuff in prep is great. We have a team of coordinators who are emailing speakers and emailing the points of contact and making sure we have all the info and everything set up, but it's the coordinator who's there at the live webinar.
So it's like having a wedding coordinator. If you are having this wild and crazy wedding, who's the first person that they ask? It's the bride and the bride's mom. If something goes wrong, if the flowers are wilting and the cake doesn't have a place to go in the refrigerator or whatever else has gone wrong, the photographer hasn't shown up, they go to the bride and they go to the bride's mom. So what you need is a wedding coordinator to stand in front of that and say, ah, yes, I will solve that. I will call the photographer. I've never had a wedding, so I have no idea how chaotic it is. They seem like chaos, but that's the coordinator's job. Our coordinators stand in the background of the webinar and when things are hitting the fan, when things go wrong, which they inevitably do in live events, I have a little, I'm on camera with the speaker going, yeah, great, we're going to get this fine, and then I'm slacking my coordinators and going, oh my God, everything's on fire.
Please fix it. And then they fix it in the background. So having somebody who's in the back end of your webinar, who's entire job is to make sure that the tech performs the way that it should allows you to just get married. It allows you to just have your webinar and not have to think about the logistics. So 10 out of 10 recommend good coordinators on staff, and if you don't have coordinators, just tag somebody in who's going to sit in the back of the, sometimes our moderators double up on it, having that extra person.
Gianna Whitver:
That's smart. We have a question from Barrel. What's your view on and barrel? I know you had another question, we'll get to that later. What's your view on a dry run for internal audiences?
Jess Steinbach:
I'm so glad you asked this. I forgot to put it in my notes. Okay, so dry run. Yes, full dress rehearsal. No, this is my personal opinion. Take it. Take it as you will. To me, I love meeting with my speakers ahead of time, especially if they want an interactive conversation. If they want a fireside chat, I want to meet them ahead of time because I want to build the rapport. I want to make sure that we like each other. I like to find if they have little inside jokes. We had a guy in a webinar who had a storm trooper helmet. He had 3D printed and it was like 40 feet behind him in the background, but we saw it and noticed it in the pre-call and then I brought it up in the webinar and if anyone can find the Easter egg and his thing and ended up blowing up our chat, everyone was so excited trying to find the storm trooper helmet and then we got to talk about it.
So you find these little things that can help humanize the speakers. So pre-call a hundred percent, yes. Another really important thing is getting the speakers comfortable with the platform. Do you guys remember that feeling when you walked in the first day of school and you, I don't know why I always hold a backpack when I talk about the first, but you're like, you're walking in and you know that you need to find homeroom and you don't know where it is. You don't know where your locker is and you just feel vaguely uncomfortable. And we want to avoid that feeling of the speaker walking in when they already have enough to worry about with managing their content of feeling like a kid on the first day of school. So explain the platform, make sure they feel comfortable in platform. Make sure that they are ready to rock so that all they have to worry about is that content. So dry run in the sense of meet with them, connect with them, go through the platform. A hundred percent, yes. High level run of show. A hundred percent yes. Full dress rehearsal. No, because you get all the best stuff off the cuff in the dress rehearsal and then they're trying to remember it when they come on live and they end up giving you half of the cool story they told and not all of it. And it doesn't feel anywhere near as authentic.
Gianna Whitver:
Exactly. So I'm going to jump in just to say, so Jess sometimes our podcast guests, so this is just human nature. Sometimes our podcast guests, we do a 15 minute pre podcast call a couple of weeks in advance. We say, okay, here's the tech, you've never used a computer before. Here's how it works and here is the content. Let's talk high level about the content we're going to go through. It's a podcast, it's not scripted, and a lot of the times the guests will try to tell us the whole podcast and we're like, no, no, no. Wait, stop. Don't tell us this. Because the way they tell it the first time when it's awesome, the second time they tell it, which is actually when we're recording, it's not as good. Yeah, yeah,
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah.
Gianna Whitver:
Pizzazz. Yeah. It's like I already told you the story. We already know the story and we know the story was not told as good as the first time. Yes,
Jess Steinbach:
Yes, yes, yes. That's my plug for the non-res rehearsal. I do want to hit on, I mentioned that I would talk a little bit about a good speaker and a good moderator. People ask me all the time, what do I think makes a good moderator? And I'm going to answer this with what I understand is a bit of a frustrating answer because it's hard to teach this, but to me it's EQ more so than anything else I have been asked. We get asked all the time, we want a moderator who has extreme subject matter expert, like niche level subject matter expertise. We get asked for, I've been asked for specific genders, I've been asked for specific accents of moderators. And so people get very specific and don't get me wrong, I understand if you have a branded idea and you really need to have a specific look accent or level of expertise, I'm not fighting you on that. You know your product. What I will make a plug for though is to allow the moderator to be an expert in moderation. Not in moderation, but in moderation. Capital M, because what we do, what I am an expert in, is helping you story tell what I am and I feel weird calling myself an expert. I prefer enthusiastic amateur,
Gianna Whitver:
You are an expert, Jess, we all saw the numbers. Then we could do something for 1300 hours and not be an expert. Can you calm down? Okay, you're great.
Jess Steinbach:
Take it down a notch. But I think there's, there's always more to learn as any good expert hopefully would acknowledge. And I think that what we can bring, what a good moderator can bring is storytelling. We can read the energy of the speaker, we can react to the energy of the speaker. We can bring the speaker out of themselves and help them become more conversational and more enthusiastic. So if I'm picking a speaker, yes, subject matter expertise, but confidence or storytelling, that ability to kind of craft a narrative, those are really important. If you can't find that combination in your speaker, if you can't find the subject matter expertise and the storytelling ability that you're looking for, that's where a moderator can help bring that out. I'm not saying that we're magical, we can't pinocchio all wooden boys, but what we can do is help create a conversation and play the role of the audience by asking questions that an audience member might ask. We can be that voice of the audience in the conversation and that can kind of help bring a more natural conversation to even the most wooden of speakers.
Gianna Whitver:
Jess, you just go to the next slide and while you do that, I want to say use Pinocchio as a verb and I appreciate that. That's great. Oh, here's a question from Jen. Have you or anyone on the call experienced a lean speaker bureau? How can you still keep it fresh or engaging? Okay, so Jen, if you want to come up and chat about this too, feel free to raise your hand, we'll bring you on. But it seems like Jen is saying, Jennifer is saying, okay, we have some speakers and maybe some moderators who are good and this is like three, right? Oh, you raised your hand. You want to come up? Let's bring Jennifer. Yeah, come on Jen. All right, I'll do that. It takes one second. Sorry everyone.
Jess Steinbach:
Well you get Jen on the next bit. We're going to talk about prerecorded versus live, and we've already kind of touched on it, but you can all get your angry pitchforks ready if you're going to hate me for saying that. I like pre-recording. I do, I do. Pre-recording.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay. I'm a pro. I'm pro live. Honestly, this is live. I'm pro live would be great. But I do understand, okay, Jennifer, you're being promoted to panelists. Please accept the invite. I do understand where you're coming from with international audiences, guests that are in other time zones that you actually might want to prerecord something or very, very, very, very nervous SMEs who potentially you must, they have a hard line and you're like, alright, you're the best person about this and we're alright. I get it. We have
Jess Steinbach:
To be recorded. Yeah. Well let's hear Jennifer, I want to hear from you.
Jennifer:
Hi there. Thanks. This is awesome by the way. Nice to meet everybody. So in some of the experiences I've had in a startup environment, it's very lean. You want to get the content out there, you want to make it relevant. Every initiative is a priority, but you have a lean speaker bureau and so you also want to position some of these folks, for example, that may be a director of sales engineering, however, really can speak to that executive c-suite audience. But when you start to see the same faces,
It becomes like, are you really a thought leader here or are you just what I'm saying? Does that make sense? And so with startup organizations, that's very common. I will say conversely, one of the things I do is I reach out from a cybersecurity standpoint to the cloud security alliance or your industry partners within the community. I was just curious if you or anyone has experienced that and you got to keep it fresh. So I think I'm kind of excited about the iveness and the games or something like that, but it's also I think very much dependent upon that audience on Totally agree.
Jess Steinbach:
Jennifer and my heart and background was in the startup community for about a decade working in small business. So I get the limitations, although I hate even using that word because I think small business is where it's at. You can get so much done.
Jennifer:
I agree. I agree. Yeah. S-M-B-S-M-B,
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah, it is amazing how agile and effective you can be. I think you hit the nail on the head already. I do think some of it is gamification is kind of changing up the format and pulling in. That's where potentially having a moderator and possibly working with a third party, and again, I know in a small team, small budgets, this isn't always possible, but something like we run multi-vendor for example. So in a multi-vendor webinar, we have 25 minute presentations from multiple different vendors or clients within a field. So we would run say a megacast on the top tools that you need for cyber or for hardening your defensive in 2024, and then you can join in that conversation and represent thought leadership in a slightly different capacity rather than just having your own webinars.
Jennifer:
I love that. Yeah, that's great. Thank you.
Gianna Whitver:
And I'll just add a counterpoint too. It's like, okay, you're using the same sales engineer over and over again. It's like, are you guys even like a company? Right? You're so small, which I understand because
Jennifer:
Before, but it's not just at the company I'm at now. It's just in general. No, I
Gianna Whitver:
Know in general, sorry, I'm not dissing your company. I'm literally, I am thinking you're trying to look big, right? You're trying to look like it's not just you and Tom over here who work at this company.
Jennifer:
You nailed it right there. That's it. How do you make yourself look bigger when your resources are extremely lean and I am a fan of webinars live recorded. They're the gift that keeps on giving actually.
Gianna Whitver:
Yes. So working. So one, distributing your team to new audiences via third parties or via partners. So working with companies that have new audiences that don't know you. So it doesn't matter that it's still calm because they've never heard of him and it's new to them. Or even just flipping. If you have very few resources, you have one person who does these webinars and you're like, make it their brand. Make it be a show like Jess was saying earlier, right? It's a program. It's Tom's webinar on malware
Jennifer:
Theories. Here's a quarterly series or whatever. Okay. That's great. Thank
Gianna Whitver:
You. All right. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jennifer. We're going to put you back into the
Jennifer:
Please
Gianna Whitver:
Do into the audience. Thank you for coming up.
Jennifer:
Thank you. We
Gianna Whitver:
Don't get people to come up that often. So Jess, well, I put Jennifer back. We have 18 minutes left. We're having so much fun. I'm willing to go a half hour early, but a lot of people here are going to have to leave, take off and stop having fun or have,
Jess Steinbach:
They're going to have no fun. None will.
Gianna Whitver:
Should we skip to our game?
Jess Steinbach:
I know, I'm kind of thinking that. Hey, I tell you what, I'm going to zip through my next points and then we'll play the game and then we can come back because part of the game will be coming back to some of these points so we can come back to, actually we could even play the game with the slides.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay.
Jess Steinbach:
Do you want to do that?
Gianna Whitver:
Yeah. Who here got a game package in the mail? I did. I know Cassidy did. Who else? Who got a game package in the mail? Oh, Chris got a game pack. I'm going to bring you guys up as panelists. Anyone who raised their hand is going to come up. Jess, you can keep going.
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah. While you're doing that, let me just explain what we're going to do. Okay, so this is really quick. I just want to show this. I love this. I have to tell you guys, I screenshot clients or when audience members say really great things in a webinar because sometimes I look back on it, it just makes me really happy when I'm having a tough day. I go back and I'm like, oh, this is So, yeah, we do the best webinars. So that's my little boost for all of you guys.
Gianna Whitver:
Heap a kudos file. I absolutely agrees. I have the same thing. I have a Google sheet, like save stuff.
Jess Steinbach:
We are going to come back to all of these. Ainsley I'm going to call you on for this as well, even though you haven't actually been introduced and started speaking yet. But we're going to play our game and then we're going to come back to everything. Okay? So here's what we're going to do. The story behind this is that a wonderful company called Keeper Security wanted to actually to what we were just talking about, wanted to shake things up. They wanted to do things a little differently than we normally do. I'm going to, you know what, I'll show the little clip reel and then I will stop screen sharing. I want all our beautiful faces to show up. So what we brainstormed, we sat down and we came up with a bunch of ideas and what we ended up starting out with, and we did a bunch of fun things after this, was this being Boozed game, if that, there we go. Which if you're not familiar, this is a bag of Jelly Bellies that has a set number of flavors and colors. One of each color is safe and half of the same color is more creative. So for example, if it's pink, it's either pomegranate very excited or it's old bandage. Okay? The peach one is either peach or barf. Yeah.
Gianna Whitver:
So what
Jess Steinbach:
We're going to do,
Gianna Whitver:
Hi Chris. We're so sorry. If you don't want to play, you don't have to, but we hope you do.
Jess Steinbach:
I sent a message to Chris this morning and said, thanks for participating. I'm sorry. Now you know why. So what we will all do, those of us who have agreed to participate, we are going to select our color together. And then we were going to have Gianna ask me some questions. But I think maybe what I'll try to do is try to go back through my slides and we'll do that together a little bit. But I just want to show you guys, this is from the original. Are you able to hear sound if I'm sharing my whole screen in Zoom? Did you
Gianna Whitver:
Screen it? Take it down and then reshare it with the button that says share Sound clicked. It should be on the bottom. I think left.
Jess Steinbach:
So now, oh wait, stop sharing. Stop share.
Gianna Whitver:
Reshare.
Jess Steinbach:
Now when I go to share, I'm going to go to this and I'm going to say share sound.
Gianna Whitver:
Yes. You see the share sound button?
Jess Steinbach:
Yes. It's not letting me select it.
Gianna Whitver:
That's horrifying. Okay, hold on.
Jess Steinbach:
That's all right. You know what? We'll get the live experience of it. So you'll all get to see, I'll play a little bit of this just so that you can see.
Gianna Whitver:
I'll be able to do it actually, sorry, let me do that real fast. Hold on. Hold on everybody. We're going to play our game, but first we have tech issues which happen on every single webinar. Welcome
Jess Steinbach:
To live events.
Gianna Whitver:
Welcome, welcome. Alright,
Jess Steinbach:
I'm going to get my Jelly Bellies ready. And
Gianna Whitver:
We have a very, are you ready for us to open the package?
Jess Steinbach:
Yes, you can open your package now. Wow, you guys waited so patiently.
Gianna Whitver:
Everyone here is really good. They're out there. Some of you have
Jess Steinbach:
Boxes. This might be different from the US and Canada too. Ainsley and I are in Canada.
Gianna Whitver:
Hey, I can't share sound either.
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, great. So you won't get to watch the highlight reel. You don't get to see it. Also, I can't open this scissors I need.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay, so everyone can open their boxes.
Jess Steinbach:
Here we go. Okay, so open your bag and I would suggest you dump them out in front of you. Just really get ready for some good times here. Okay, so the idea that we had with this speaker was that kind of like hot ones. He and I would each eat a bean and then I would ask him a question about cybersecurity and he would answer. And what's fun about this is it immediately puts all of us in a state of, it's like hot ones. Have you guys watched hot ones? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he gets these super real reactions from celebrities where they're actually answering in real time because they're physically uncomfortable. I realize I'm getting you all very excited about this. Oh,
Gianna Whitver:
I feel awful. This is great.
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah, you should. Yeah. But because we're about to be physically uncomfortable, we will have authentic reactions to what we're experiencing and we can have authentic reactions to each other. And so trying to think about the strategic things we're saying, we immediately get off book. So if you have a speaker that's a great subject matter expert and is willing to play because they aren't all, you can do something like this, and we have in the highlight reel that apparently we can't show you as well. I've done spicy chip challenges. I've done one that was super fun was I had to fold my laundry faster than they were able to recover data. And so we did, that was a cool one. I had to make guacamole during one where they were talking about Apache guac and I made guac on camera and then they went through that. I've done hockey, digital hockey games where every time I score a goal, the audience gets $10 added to a gift card that they can win if they sign up for a demo. So there's all kinds of fun games that you can do. This one is my least favorite. This is my least favorite game, which is of course
Gianna Whitver:
Why I do it. You did. That shows up for the cybersecurity marketing side. This
Jess Steinbach:
Was my idea. There's no one to blame.
Gianna Whitver:
No, I know. I'm just kidding. We're all excited here, except for other people.
Jess Steinbach:
Let's vote. I'm going to give two. Oh no, I don't even want to do this. Okay, the colors are brown, red, yellow, blue, orange, green sparkles, something in orange post in the chat. Let's narrow it down to two post in the chat. What do you want us to try? Yeah. Point to a color green. I saw green. Okay, fantastic. Casey Green is either juicy pear or booger.
Gianna Whitver:
Oh,
Jess Steinbach:
Yep. So I would love if you all want to unmute and come out, pick one of your green ones.
Gianna Whitver:
So did, nobody did. Okay. I got a green. Does everyone have a green?
Jess Steinbach:
Okay.
Gianna Whitver:
Ross, how are you feeling?
Ross:
Ambivalent at the moment. Choice.
Jess Steinbach:
Cassidy, you got to pick one. Okay, ready? Okay, let's go. And you have to actually chew. Don't just follow it. I've got juicy pair. That's yummy.
Gianna Whitver:
Oh, I can't tell. I don't think I like it.
Jess Steinbach:
You all got R. Cassidy and Chris all got booger.
Cassidy:
It smelled like juicy pear.
Ross:
That's not right.
Gianna Whitver:
Every right here gets a diamond. If you guys are in the society and the cybersecurity marketing society, you know our meta? You all get diamonds for being brave? Diamonds.
Jess Steinbach:
Diamonds for everyone.
Gianna Whitver:
Our little badge.
Jess Steinbach:
That was great for me.
Gianna Whitver:
Oh, joy. Joy. You can opt off. You can opt out. Joy, you don't have to. Don't have
Jess Steinbach:
Opt out.
Gianna Whitver:
Don't worry. Give that to someone you hate. It's fine. Okay,
Jess Steinbach:
I'm going to give it since you guys got the boogers. Chris, I'm going to let you choose our next color.
Chris:
Blue.
Jess Steinbach:
Blue. Ooh. A safety call. Blue is either berry, blue or toothpaste. So we get a nice palette cleanser and in this one I'm going to try to tell you about something. What we do. Whoopsie. What can I tell you? Tell us
Gianna Whitver:
About teeth hygiene. No, I'm just kidding. Tell us something about webinars.
Jess Steinbach:
Oh, I got berry blue again. This is bad news. I'm all, my bad luck is coming with barf and old bandage.
Gianna Whitver:
This really tastes like toothpaste. It's not terrible
Jess Steinbach:
Toothpaste.
Gianna Whitver:
No, it's not bad. Toothpaste. I think I'm going to eat this one. What did you guys get?
Ross:
Toothpaste. Toothpaste. Tooth blue is good. Okay.
Gianna Whitver:
I not going to eat it.
Jess Steinbach:
It's not bad. Okay.
Chris:
Super winter green gum.
Jess Steinbach:
So for the quick interlude, informative interlude. Actually let's do one more and then I'll do an informative interlude as I eat my next jelly belly. Okay, Ross, you haven't picked one. What's next?
Ross:
These orange ones with the little red flex.
Jess Steinbach:
The one that's barf, the one that's dead fish.
Chris:
Really? Those are the optimum
Jess Steinbach:
Why do you hate
Ross:
This frost? I apologize. I didn't know those were the options. Is it
Gianna Whitver:
Kind of
Ross:
Clear or solid? I wanted, there's a bar for Peach one, I think.
Jess Steinbach:
Yes. We're going with the bar or peach. These are,
Ross:
You
Cassidy:
Looked it up to your camera. Really, really close. Because some of 'em look really similar.
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah. Okay. I
Cassidy:
Think kind of clearish.
Ross:
Think it's kind of It is, yeah. There's also also these more pastel ones.
Jess Steinbach:
Not that one.
Ross:
I was going for this one.
Jess Steinbach:
You are going. Yeah, we're going for this one. The clear
Ross:
One. Yeah. Not the big one. Yeah, the
Gianna Whitver:
Clear one. All right, everyone
Jess Steinbach:
Ready?
Gianna Whitver:
Set. Go. What are this flavor? You'll know soon.
Jess Steinbach:
I got bar
Gianna Whitver:
God. Oh my god. I got orange or something. Peach maybe, or I don't know.
Jess Steinbach:
Lemme make an argument. Oh my God. Oh,
Gianna Whitver:
It's so bad. This is a B2B webinar. If it makes you feel better, I got the wrong one
Jess Steinbach:
So
Gianna Whitver:
While
Jess Steinbach:
I'm digesting that barf bean, here's an argument for recorded versus live. Live events. Obviously I love this. This is so much fun. I would love to do live all the time. Not every speaker can meet on the right time. Not every speaker. I had a speaker who was in Israel, obviously time zone and just also general life was very difficult for him to be on at a specific time. So recording made more sense made. You don't have to worry about, you can also do, so all of the games, when we do something really intense like this, often we do this prerecorded because it allows us to edit if we need to and get at the points that we want. And as I said, I think there's a really good argument for hybrid. I think doing elements recorded and then having live chat or having a speaker come on for a live q and a, what we'll often do is the recorded video is on camera and then the q and a is audio only, and you just put up a CTA slide and say like, Hey, focus on the CTA slide while we talk about some questions.
And then we transition into a live audio q and a. That A allows maximum flexibility and it gives the speaker time to just focus on q and a and not have to worry about their content and their presentation. So that's my pitch for recorded. I think it allows a lot of freedom, a lot of flexibility, and if you have a great video editor, which we do, they can create magic. And then you have all these wonderful high definition recordings that you can cut and slice up afterwards and use again and again. Okay. It's time for another Bean Cassidy. I believe it is your turn. I have the bark bean stuck in my teeth and I'm really unhappy about it.
Gianna Whitver:
It's not Okay.
Chris:
You got to go with the old bandage or pomegranate.
Gianna Whitver:
Oh god.
Chris:
I really hope that it's pomegranate. It's the
Gianna Whitver:
Red one. The old band?
Chris:
Yeah, the red one. Just to
Jess Steinbach:
Make your whole mouth feel like it's dry. Good luck. All best wishes.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay. Down the gutter. Oh my gosh. Good one. No,
Chris:
That's definitely not pomegranate.
Jess Steinbach:
It just suck all the joy out of your mouth? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how they managed to do that, but they got Ainsley. How you doing?
Gianna Whitver:
I may actually throw up off camera, please. Well,
Jess Steinbach:
This brings me to my next point, which was to play games. As I said, I think playing a game with a speaker gets them out of themselves and it brings the audience back. So Janet, you asked me earlier, how do you keep someone from getting distracted by all the tabs? If this was happening on your webinar screen and all of a sudden you just heard insane laughter and people talking about barf and boogers, you'd be like, I'm sorry, what? And you would come back to this screen. So if you've lost people to the other screens on their monitors, their many monitors, having something like this pulls them back in. So this is a great way to play this. So the authenticity, the energy and the attention grab of it, I would suggest things like even something you can scale it back a little bit. Jeopardy.
True false. Think about the games you used to play in elementary school, right? There's a reason teachers used them so you can use those games over again. Memory, you could do something like that. We've done one where we got a magic eight ball and we fact check the magic eight ball. So we would ask it questions about security and then we would fact check it with or then we'd see what the answer would be and then we'd say, well, I disagree or agree with the eight ball. And then at the end we gave it a rating to see how accurate the oracle was. So you could have fun things like that. Yeah, I see Kahoot, that's a great, yeah, playing lots of games I think is something that we forget. I think we sort of feel like that. Again, the things that we did, adults are basically still just kindergartners in a lot of ways and our attention wanders like kindergartners did. So go with the Sesame Street style and just have new things kind of happening.
Gianna Whitver:
I love that. And like you said before, Jess making the guacamole, making you fold your laundry, not making it, but the stuff, making the audience. If we were feeling less generous, we could have had the audience pick the bean colors on this today and been like, yeah, it's going to be bar for fish. So there's all sorts of ways to be interactive and fun. It doesn't always just have to be a slide presentation with someone talking for 45 minutes with an allotted 15 minutes of q and a.
Jess Steinbach:
I agree. And God, I'm just speaking of time. I know we're so close to the end of time. Do we have time to go a little bit longer?
Gianna Whitver:
Yes, we can. Thank you audience. Sorry. Thank you participants. I hope you enjoy the rest of your beans. I hope you can give them to your boss when you see them next. Oh, I got to plate of beans and jelly beans. Who wants to try them? Put 'em in the office desk stuff. So I'll downgrade you all. Thank you Chris. Thank you Ross, and thank you Cassidy for playing. We're going to make you the audience again. Thank you so much. All right,
Jess Steinbach:
I will. If the audience feels it's important, I will continue to eat these terrible beans as will Gianna. I
Gianna Whitver:
Think you're good, Jess. I think you've suffered enough. You happen to have a lot of the not good ones,
Jess Steinbach:
The absolute worst. I do want to zip through. Natasha wants me to eat them all. Thanks Tash. Alright, I do zip through just a few other little points and then I'm actually going to hand things over to Ainsley because I want to make sure that we do talk a little bit about lead follow up and nurture cycles before we sort of run away. I do think it's important to bring in real world examples, case studies, stories from the trenches. I think really sharing your own personal experience can be really valid. I think one other way that sometimes if people aren't feeling as interested or gamified, you can do this with a fireside chat. So just getting conversational, having like John, if you and I were just sitting around having coffee together, how would we converse? And I think that's a great way to kind of connect with content.
And I often prep the speakers and say, look, this is the flow that you're going to go through if you go down a rabbit hole because it gets you excited, by all means do that. I would rather we go a little late or cut the q and a little short, but have you go down the rabbit hole that makes you happy and excited because if they're passionate and excited, the audience will come along with you. So those sorts of fireside chats I think are really great. But the most important thing with all of this honestly, is to be authentic to you. I was working on a webinar recently where I said we had this great idea we were super excited about. It was going to be this interactive dungeons and dragon style game where you went into a room and then you could do one of two things like cybersecurity, kind of playing a tabletop exercise.
I was so pumped about it and one of the speakers was all in and then we asked the other speaker and he hated it, did not want to play at all. So we pivoted. We did a slightly different version, a little bit toned down, a little bit less play acting, but the one who was in, he and I did a little bit more metaphor and game kind of style. And then the other speaker just did demos and honestly we had a great time, it was a great webinar and everybody was playing to their strengths. I would always advise that somebody be on camera for example, but if you get scared on camera, better for you to be off camera and give a better presentation. Whatever makes the speaker feel the most at home is what's going to result in the best webinar on the other side.
So all of these are wonderful and creative ideas. If I do say so myself, all of my ideas are fantastic, but if they don't fit you, if they don't fit your branding and your story, actually the laundry idea was an example of one where I pitched them some crazy wild outside the box stuff and they were like, how about you just do fold your laundry? And I was like, but it actually was really fun and the guacamole one I thought was going to be really kind of low key. And then people loved because apparently people have strong feelings about how I made the guacamole and were very upset with me for not putting in the ingredients they thought should be there. So you never know what's going to connect and so you just do what feels right for you and you'll play with the audience along with it. I think that's kind of it for tools. I did want to talk a little bit about polls and incentives and things like that. We might have to save that for another one because I really want to get Ainsley out here.
Gianna Whitver:
Ainsley
Jess Steinbach:
About nurture cycles.
Gianna Whitver:
I summoned him. Ainsley, did you wash out your mouth? Are you ready to talk about nurture?
Ainsley Muller:
It is repeating. I'm not going to lie.
Jess Steinbach:
Old bandage. It's one of the worst.
Ainsley Muller:
That was absolutely terrible. Yeah, so I realize we're at time and we could do probably a whole series of webinars just on the subject of nurturing. So I don't want to go too deep into this and if anyone wants to continue the conversation, I'd be happy to have that reach out by LinkedIn email. But I want to give you six best practices and feel free to jump in with questions as we go along. This number one, and I think Barrel asked this question upfront, sales wants those leads. Worst thing you can do is give after a webinar, give you the list of leads to your sales and then they start dialing for dollars. That is not a nurturing strategy. That is a quick way to get rid of everybody on your list. So avoid doing that. That cuts things down pretty quickly. Jess, you mentioned before, this is number two.
Have a plan before you start your webinar because this can inform how you run polls, what kind of questions you ask, and also if you're talking with your webinar moderator like Jess, who would work with you to be able to work some of the things you want to know from the audience into the presentation by asking polls, running the things that we discussed over there. Here's a really important one. We all want to think that every single webinar attendee is one step away from conversion. I mean we all want to think that right in the best case scenario, but last year we ran in conjunction with the Cybersecurity Marketing Society. We ran a cyber cybersecurity buyer's report. If you haven't got it, it's going to be linked in this and you should read it. So here's one of the things that really jumped out at a lot of people.
This question. How far in advance do you start your budgeting process for cybersecurity solutions? 55% we're six to 12 months out. 15% we're longer than that and that's just budgeting. What about the actual sales cycle? Well, this is even more shocking. 44% were three to six months. 17% were six to 12 and 5% were longer. Your sales cycles are two years long. In many instances. Your leads that you get where they're fitting in, if they're coming in through a webinar, they're often not right at the bottom of the funnel. It's probably right at the top. So you've got to ask yourself questions about how do we move them through this funnel? What do they know about us? What can we give them that'll help them to move them into the next step of the process? The other big one, I really wanted to, and again, I'll leave it at this, have a lot of nurture paths.
Don't assume this is probably not anything that anybody doesn't know, but don't assume that they fit into one path. When we run webinars, we do run polls and do run certain things where we have hand raisers. So those are red hot leads and we give you that as a report at the end. Of course, hand raisers and red hot leads, those should be handled differently. Somebody that says, I want to run a trial, I want to have an opportunity to test your product. Well that's somebody that should be handled differently to somebody that has no idea who you are and what you do. And again, we could spend hours on any one of these different topics with a number of different suggestions, but really wanted to just give a few, that's what, three minutes. A quick rundown. I took
Jess Steinbach:
60 minutes and I gave you three Ainsley,
Ainsley Muller:
Right?
Gianna Whitver:
Holly? Holly put a question in the chat. Can you link to the webinars where you've done the chip laundry, jelly belly games? Yes. We will follow up with everybody after this call with links and videos and there we go. All the resources from the call. And Ainsley, thank you for sharing about the nurtures and the follow-up. Oh,
Ainsley Muller:
Could I share one other question? You just skipped the slide. So I mentioned the cybersecurity buyer report. Yes, yes. So we are running another one again with Gianna and team with the Cybersecurity Marketing Society for this year. But we want to know what questions you have for our audience for that same or stat audience and a larger audience that we're working with to put this report together. We've got a single question survey. Please let us know what kind of questions you would have for our audience of cybersecurity buyers that would help inform your marketing efforts.
Gianna Whitver:
Yes, we had an amazing survey. It is available on the Slack if anyone needs access to last year's report, which was, it was like a Verizon DBIR report. It was like a big report with a lot of data in it. Feel free to reach out to Ainsley to reach out to Jess or to reach out to me. I also have the link to it, so feel free to reach out and we'll share it with you. It was the one that was printed. If you attended cyber marketing last year, you got a printed copy of the report and I had a lot of great insights in it.
Jess Steinbach:
Sorry Jeff. I like it. I like the plugs. Oh
Gianna Whitver:
Yeah, today I'm the plug. So
Jess Steinbach:
I am leaving these up for just a second longer, but I think Gianna share, do you want to share some of these slides? I can send you the slides or you have 'em.
Gianna Whitver:
Yes, I have the slides. We will share the slides or you guys will share the slides. Someone will share the slides. We'll
Jess Steinbach:
Share the slides. Someone will share it. Yeah,
Gianna Whitver:
Everyone will get it. Another quick thing on nurture and follow up, so something that is very simple, but Ross, I'll get back to you. I'm sorry about that. We have about a 600 person backlog on applicants for the society, so we're getting through it. Oh, another tip for follow-up is sending the follow-up from the person who gave the webinar. Hi, thanks for coming to my event or thanks for watching me speak. I'd love to talk with you more. I'm happy to share more insight. Here's a copy of the replay. Here you go. That's another, just a very simple thing requires maybe some orchestration, especially if they're not usually a person who sends emails and they're just a person who speaks or sells things. That's just another tip too, because someone just watched your speaker speak for 60 minutes, so they should know them. They
Jess Steinbach:
Already have the trust and connection and yeah, I think that's a great, that comes back to that planning. If you plan ahead, as Ainsley said, if you're starting with planning ahead, then you can plan for that. And this was Ainsley. We were talking about the difference between creating a point in time, creating a one webinar and creating a program, especially when it comes to that marketing side of it and everything that you can do with taking a webinar and expanding out. And you had some thoughts on that.
Ainsley Muller:
Yeah, Ross, anybody who knows Ross Simmons, he's B2B SEO guru. Anyway, he always says create once and distribute forever. And he's absolutely right. So what a great opportunity with a webinar. You could cut it up or use it on social, you can turn it into or post it on YouTube, you can host it on your website, you can turn it into a blog post, you can turn them into infographics. There's so many things you can do with the information you're sharing in a webinar, but can you just leverage that same piece over and over and over again. Somebody asked about BrightTALK Bright Talk's, a great place to be able to repost webinars that you've hosted or held somewhere else and then just get an on demand audience to be continuing to sign up for that. And speaking of on demand, you could be gating that content. So there's so many things you can do with that one single piece of content that you put so much effort into creating and get a lot of leverage out of it.
Gianna Whitver:
We have a question from the chat, Ainsley from Angela. What do you suggest doing instead of avoid handling over the list to sales immediately? So I think you touched on that about nurturing, but maybe just give a few seconds on other things that you do or how do you view that list or how do you organize it, et cetera?
Ainsley Muller:
Yeah, so Jess mentioned earlier about having somebody like a wedding coordinator that helps you need to be able to have a plan for after your webinar. So when you want to separate your red hot leads and hand raisers, those who say, I want to learn more, of course that's a great one to hand to sales, but the rest you've got to kind of determine, ask questions, what do they know about your company? What was the webinar topic about? Are you trying to do this as a top of funnel informational webinar? Can you share with them resources, tools, other things that will help them to inform them? Because a lot of the time we like to think that everybody's got a commercial intent and the other one of course is research. And then I created this third concept of stumbler. Somebody who knows, who doesn't know who you are or what you do, but they know that they need your service. So you got to think about how do you get somebody that doesn't know who you are and what you do, but they have that need to move from, Hey, I've just found out about you at a webinar to asking the right questions. Sometimes you have to ask those questions for them. And so a lot of research-based content is a way to bridge that gap. But like I said, I mean we could talk about this for hours, so I'm trying to give the cliff notes version here.
Jess Steinbach:
We will come back and I think that's
The next webinar. I mean I think this will be Ainsley and maybe the wonderful Katie or other members of our team coming to talk to you guys more a little bit about content because I think those content wrappers that can go around a webinar or something that we're not even touching on in this webinar and my focus is really on the product delivery and on catching the attention and the eyeballs once they've walked into the room and there's a whole school of thought of how to get them in a room and there's a whole school of thought of what room to send them to next. And a few things that happened during the webinar that I want to mention that we I think will expand on a little bit more in our next webinar. Things like registration questions, having a specific question at registration that helps you kind of make sure who's in the room and how you're talking to them and how you follow up with them really getting, we have a headlines and highlights kind of document that we send out afterwards that gives you sort of the highlights of the webinar, top questions, frequently asked questions from the webinar.
All of these are content pieces that you can use to beef up the webinar and reach out to these people. And one thing that I've seen recently that I do find really interesting is incentivizing. We had, like I said, there was the hockey one, but F five did one over Christmas where they had an ugly Christmas sweater and if you booked and completed a meeting with them after the webinar, they would send you an ugly Christmas sweater and they got huge uptake on that. Everybody wanted an F five. Honestly, I was a little sad I didn't get an F five Christmas sweater. So they're really, really, really fun and that's a great way to make sure that you're building those connections moving forward outside of the webinar.
Gianna Whitver:
Awesome. We have until the bottom of the hour. If anyone is going to have to drop soon and has a burning question, feel free to repost it. And I love that, Jess, I love that. I love that it's a follow of, Hey, you watched our webinar about our thing and also we're fun and we want to talk to you and will you watch a demo and we'll give you an awesome ugly sweater and then hey, we're going to have a sweater party online or something or at Miami and you're invited to come on our ugly sweater boat and it's going to be at RSA also. I don't know, there's all sorts of things you can do, so we have some questions also. Phil, how's a question gating recorded? This is so it's been spicy for years, gating recorded webinars versus not just posting them on YouTube. What do you guys think?
Jess Steinbach:
Ainsley, do you want to go first?
Ainsley Muller:
Sure.
Gianna Whitver:
Just was like, nah. It's like I make the cool webinars, Ainsley deals with the revenue part, the lead gen
Ainsley Muller:
Throw me under the bus. Yeah, very good. What's your goal? If you have a goal of this is purely lead gen, of course you're going to try to gate it and if you're going to syndicate that content, we will actually do quite a bit of content syndication of existing assets like that. But I would also like to play devil's advocate for a second and say you might actually have a really good even more value out of it from an SEO perspective. Again, going back to that buyer's report on how long these buying cycles and budgeting cycles are there are a lot longer than, Hey, I attended a webinar, I'm ready to sign up. You've got two years to work with these people. So you can nurture that lead by going the SEO route. So if you post it on YouTube and you're embedding that in your site and you're embedding closed captions or citations or sorry, exactly what happened in the webinar, you could probably get a lot more SEO legs and I kind of always go to my SEO favorite topic on a lot of these things, but you actually can get a tremendous amount of value out of that from a much longer term in nurturing that setting yourself up as an authority.
Yeah, so there's your goal. That's the question you want to ask.
Gianna Whitver:
Oh, so sorry, Ansley, finish what you're saying. Okay. I was going to say there are always folks who are not going to watch your webinar and you can turn that into a, if you have good enough audio, you could turn it into a podcast or you could do the clips right in the chat. Cassidy and Joanna are asking about content produced from a webinar. I want to add to Ansley you saying, okay, we can make it SEO, we can have it on YouTube. Search is a huge thing on YouTube. It's something that a lot of us here don't even think about, which is YouTube search and YouTube SEO. But another thing you could do along with the SEO value of YouTube is the SEO value of recap, blogs of content that lives forever with many videos just highlighting the points that you want to make of taken from the video and put into the blog. That's something that we hear at the society do a lot when someone says something really cool and we want to make sure that people see that one thing, at least we take clips and insert them. So Jess, do you have an example of content produced from a webinar that you could share?
Jess Steinbach:
Well, let's see. An email campaign or a social media clip type thing
Gianna Whitver:
That was asked in the chat. So I'll ask to ask her to elaborate. Well,
Jess Steinbach:
What I can tell you is actually when you get the slide deck, the bean booed video is a social media clip that we use. So a lot of times because what we do is create content that our clients can then repurpose so we don't get to control as much we are giving it to them. So we could definitely point you towards some of the content that our wonderful clients are using on the backside of a webinar. For me personally, and actually I'll speak to the bamboozled one that I know, I followed up with them because if I was going to suffer that much, I wanted to know that it had value and the gentleman that I was working with at Keeper Security told me it was one of their most successful email campaigns that they've ever run. And I still two years later have clients who ask me about that one when they or audience members, when they come online, when I say something like, we're going to do something fun, they'll say like, are you eating Jelly Bellies today? And it like, no, stop suggesting that. So I have to answer anecdotally on that one, but I think that is really valuable. Just the word of mouth around it has been pretty valuable. Ainsley, I know we've got some case studies up here, but are there any other specific content examples that you would direct people towards?
Ainsley Muller:
Yeah, we do something called trail maps, which is a pretty popular one. So in other words, at the end of the webinar, doing a suggestion like Gianna had with different key points that we summarize it into, which could be used as an infographic and then links to those specific parts of those videos or of the webinar, and that's very useful as well. It's a nice way to be able to just brainlessly copy and paste, put that in your blog post. So that's one of the things we do quite a bit of. And then yeah, white papers is a big one, but that's a little bit of a heavier lift and probably takes a little bit more coordination. The trail maps are pretty fun to work with and they're also
Jess Steinbach:
Ansley, if somebody was looking for specific, if the gentleman, I'm sorry, I can't see the chat so I don't know who asked that, but if smart individual who just asked that question wanted to see specific examples of it, maybe they can reach out to us over LinkedIn and then we could share.
Gianna Whitver:
I am dropping, oh my gosh, yes, we're on the same wavelength. I'm literally dropping your LinkedIn in here. I know you can't even see the chat, but literally as you said that I dropped your LinkedIn, I'm dropping ainsley's LinkedIn so people can connect with you too both and ask you guys any questions they have or for extra information in case they can't wait until they get the email or the email sometimes goes to spam. So there was a question about seed questions. We covered it earlier, but do you ever do plants? Oh, here's interesting people who pose q and a in case no one shows up.
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, so this is a great thing about our platform. Our platform, as I said, doesn't show what questions have been asked so we don't have to fake it in the chat, which I really appreciate. Not every platform allows you to do that. What I would suggest is if you have that ability to hide what the questions are coming in, then you can play act a little bit. I almost always start with a seated question because it primes the pump, it gets things kind of rolling, it gets people, oh, this is question time, so I'll start with a seated question. I also highly encourage speakers to think about seated questions as a way to disseminate information outside of the presentation style. It feels like Gianna and I have just been kind of winging it back and forth. We had notes and we immediately went off book and we just go where it takes you and seated questions can do that and make it feel like you're having a conversation even though we know behind the scenes that it's actually, so it's our job as moderators and people leading it as hosts to make it feel like this is a live question coming in from the audience.
Alternatively, if you don't have the ability to hide the chat, I would not fake it. That's my personal preference. I would say something like, so when we do sessions in Zoom, I will say things like either I hear this question a lot and I think it'd be great, or I personally was wondering about this, or I'll say something like we did because this is true, we usually do this. We did a little pre-registration survey. We had some questions submitted from the audience ahead of time. Here's some questions I'd like to ask you. So I find a way to bring it to them. I personally don't like plants because there's no way that that doesn't feel, it very often feels obvious.
Gianna Whitver:
You got to get non-obvious plants. By the way, there's this really cool toy manufacturer called Obvious Plant and they make fake toys that are like, sorry, this is way off topic. I'll put a link in the chat. You guys will find it funny. We have another question from the audience. Cassidy said, oh, you love obvious plan. I knew it. Obvious plan is very popular, so I'm not weird. So we have a question, what are the KPIs you guys find most relevant or you educate your clients on? You have people, cybersecurity companies coming and doing webinars with y'all and they're like, okay, how do we know a webinar is successful? How do you know?
Jess Steinbach:
I'll speak to the stats I use because what I'm talking about is engagement. So Ainsley probably would have some more marketing specific one I'm going to steal from Ainsley because we were talking about the other day, and I love it that our average client comes back for five webinars. Did we say ley? So we usually get at least minimum so we get a lot of return, which is great, which speaks highly of how the webinars are going. For me, the stats that I'm looking at are engagement stats. So I understand that a webinar is somewhat, it's how engaged with an audience is somewhat intrinsic or intangible, that's the word I'm looking for. It is a little tough to kind of gauge sometimes. So what I'm looking at are things like how many people showed up of who registered, then once they're in the door, how many people asked a question or even submitted a hi and hello, if they said hi or hello, I count that as an engagement score.
If they clicked on a handout. So if they clicked on one of the speaker handouts, I'll take that. And if they clicked on a poll, we do use polls. We sometimes have them have the speaker add them in. I want to know this specific thing that I'm going to tailor my presentation towards. Sometimes we ask on multi-vendor, we ask more general, what additional information would you like? And one of the answers by the way, is always nothing at this time. So we absolutely give people the chance to opt out and we respect that, but those anyone who clicks on a poll, clicks on a handout, asked a question and stayed throughout the webinar, that's your hot leads. That's when Ansy was talking about the red hot leads. For me, those are the engagement because that's what I'm focusing on is who's engaged with what we're saying. And so I can look at that as an overall engagement score an do you have any other KPIs that you'd add to that?
Ainsley Muller:
I'm not sure it's necessarily KPI as much as a major benefit of webinars. You touched on multi-vendor and I think that's something we haven't really discussed in this is how great is it to be able to put a, I know we mentioned earlier a little bit about startups and how difficult it is to get things going, but webinars and multi-vendor webinars especially give you the opportunity to present side by side with some of the really big players in the industry. So from a perspective of, again, authority and being able to be positioned alongside some of these large companies is in itself a great way to measure success is who are you presenting with? Maybe a bit of an alternative metric, but I don't know how you would quantify that one.
Gianna Whitver:
I like that it's like, hey, we're playing. It's in that realm of looking bigger, right? We're doing this stuff, we're looking bigger. We are in the ecosystem. We exist as a company. My background is early stage startups series A ish, and it's tough to break through that noise, right? Cassie's saying the reach of combined audiences versus your own barrel saying people joining fitting ICP persona, that's a great metric, right? Okay. Was it everyone who showed up as a student? I hope not or great depending on what your goal is. But yeah, maybe you're
Jess Steinbach:
Selling stuff to students.
Gianna Whitver:
Yeah, maybe have a really long sales cycle. Really long. We have another question from Joanna. What sort of questions are best for polls? Just a quick thing also on the polls I have found in my past life, and you've said this before, right? Reach out whoever wants to hand raisers, right? But at the end of webinars or even in the middle, literal, Hey, are you interested in hearing from our speaker later about our product? Like you said, yes, no, yes. Not right now, right? That sort of thing. It gives you a hot lead list right away. So what other sort of questions are best for polls?
Jess Steinbach:
One thing I would say about polls if you're considering them is don't polls like demos are something that can be very effective. Don't use them just for the sake of using them. So don't just put in a poll because you think you should have a poll and don't just put in a demo because you think you should have a demo. Polls, I think in particular two ways that you can use them. One is, and you know what? Sometimes it's a little bit of a sneaky two, there's an underlay to it, there's meta messaging to it. So you ask somebody, you say, Hey, our speaker is going to adjust to your needs. So are you looking for, do you need to make a change right away or what's your timeline for making a change? You have an urgent need or you're thinking long-term. Or you ask people what obstacles have you faced?
Or what do you think the top obstacle is for teams that are trying do this, what solutions have you found are really effective? Or what do you think is the top solution? So hit those kind of things and always give them an option to enter in their, if you have more, you want to say, enter it in the chat and then you can kind of read that out. What's nice about our poll system is it shows the results by percentage, not the number of people clicked. So if you do have a slightly disengaged audience, you get like 50% instead of two people clicked. And that's really helpful. So also understand if you're going to show the results, what that looks like, what the audience sees. You could do informal polls like we did today. Do thumbs up, thumbs down, do emoji signs. And that's kind of nice. I think asking timeline questions, asking most pressing needs, most pressing problems or fears that you're trying to address or solve. And then a positive side of that too, best thing you've seen, thing you're most excited about, thing most curious about that kind of thing is a good way to go as well. Oh, I forgot my reactions are on.
Gianna Whitver:
I know we love reactions. I have all these, I dunno who has reactions set up on their computer, but
Jess Steinbach:
This is how you can tell that it's live now. It's going to throw in a bunch
Gianna Whitver:
Okay, so we got that question. We have time for two more. Angela, you asked another question. What if your audience is existing customers? I don't understand what that's referring to. Please clarify and we'll get to it. And then I have a question for you Jess. I want to know is you've slept for a webinar, it's done. Obviously this won't happen for actual text slash future bureau debate. This is what you guys do. But for folks in the audience who do the prep, set everything up, they're ready to have, they show that boom, go live, press the big red button, nobody's there, zero people. It has happened. It has happened to me. What do you suggest? Do you just do it? Do you keep going and pretend or you do well?
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, I will tell you a personal story of this from an internal perspective. We did a training webinar that we ran on something on Google Sheets or something and we threw it together last minute. It was a time no one could go and two people showed up and it was just so, and then I think because the way our platform works, we can't actually see each other. So they just came and left at one point. So at one point I realized I was doing this whole thing to myself. And here's the thing. The way that I was viewing it at that moment was, okay, nobody was able to come to this live. Nobody's able to be at this live webinar that we've put together, but I know that this is recorded and I know that this content is valuable and so I'm going to give it my all.
I'm going to knock it out of the park and create a bunch of kick butt. I'm trying not to swear a bunch of kick butt contents that can be used after the fact that can be cut up. And now we have that training thing in particular is now available to any employee anytime they want to look at it. And it's super high quality and it's really well done. And I wasn't the only speaker, so I'm not just complimenting myself, it was somebody else doing it and that's there. So I would say treat it as an opportunity to make content to Ainsley's point that lives on beyond that time. Love
Gianna Whitver:
It. I love it. Angela clarified, we're going to do two lightning. Alright, QR codes, yes or no?
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, look, I like it for on demand. I know that cybersecurity people have their feelings about QR codes. I'm into it for videos and for on demand. A link is really hard to click on and it's hard to copy over from a video. So if you're thinking on demand QR code or send them to a resource center, send them to a very easy to remember, easy to access portal that will get to the places that you want them to go.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay, great. Great feedback. Ainsley, this is from Angela Ainsley regarding what you suggested about doing instead of avoid handing over to sales, what have your audience is your existing customers.
Ainsley Muller:
So you've got great opportunities to nurture those relationships. And if you've got a interactive ability, if your audience, I mean, again, if we were talking about single vendor versus multi-vendor, if this is a single vendor webinar where you are hosting and you've got mostly your audience, well then polls are going to be your best friend here and try to be flexible on how you're actually going to deliver that information. If they're existing customers, can you use them as opportunities to maybe even get some case study information from them? Ask them questions, let them speak. Could they join like you just did today in the
Gianna Whitver:
Museum, right? We could just pull people up. We're just like, Jessica, come on up. Or Jennifer, come on up. Why don't you come on up.
Ainsley Muller:
That's one idea. Anyway,
Gianna Whitver:
That's great. Ainsley, thank you so much. Sorry I keep interrupting. Ainsley. I feel specifically and I feel, I'm sorry, Ainsley, you ate the barf bean and I keep interrupting you. Yeah, well thank you both Jess and Ainsley for being on, for sharing your knowledge. You guys have both done a million bajillion webinars. Thank you audience for staying on half an hour over. Really appreciate you. This will be recorded and sent to everybody. Jess, can you send it to people? Is that cool? Can you send that? Yeah,
Jess Steinbach:
I can send it to people between Ainsley and I, you'll hear from us. We'll send you slide decks and follow ups and make sure you have all
Gianna Whitver:
That perfect. You'll get the videos, you'll get the deck, you'll get the links, you'll get everything. Take the survey so that we can make another amazing report, the Cybersecurity Buyers Report 2024 edition and join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society. I hope to see all of you at Cyber Marketing Con in Philadelphia. Jess and Ansley, aren't you guys going to be there? Or at least some people from your team?
Ainsley Muller:
I'm hoping to go again. I was last. It was amazing. So yes, I would literally love to be there, but yes,
Jess Steinbach:
We'll find out. I'll be watching the live stream.
Gianna Whitver:
Oh, Jess, let's all make a petition to ship Jess out. But actually Jess being on the live stream will be extra interactive too. We're going to have have virtual meetups and virtual opportunities to connect as well. So thank you everyone. Thank you. Future B2B and actual tech media. Everyone have a wonderful day. Yes, Cassidy, I'll send you screenshot
Jess Steinbach:
And thank you for being brave. Thank you to our brave game players.
Gianna Whitver:
Bye bye everybody. Bye.
