Top Marketers Reveal Post-Event Engagement Secrets!
In this insightful follow-up webinar, Jess Steinbach (of ActualTech), Gianna Whitver (of Cybersecurity Marketing Society), and Katie Mohr (of SmartBrief) discuss strategies to extend the value of your webinar content well beyond the live event.
Here’s why B2B marketers should tune in:
- Post-Webinar Content Ideas: Learn how to repurpose your webinar into infographics, social media snippets, eBooks, and even comic books for lasting impact.
- Engagement Strategies: Keep your audience engaged through follow-up emails, top takeaways, and Q&A summaries tailored to different buyer journey stages.
- Lead Nurturing Tips: Discover methods for segmenting your leads and delivering the right content at the right time to nurture and convert.
- Practical Examples: Hear creative examples from Jess and Katie on how they've successfully kept the buzz alive after webinars, including content for social sharing and on-demand viewership.
This session is a must-watch for B2B marketers looking to get the most out of their webinars by keeping their audience engaged long after the event ends.
Ready to take your post-webinar strategy to the next level? Watch the full webinar video below or read the transcript to discover actionable insights and creative ways to keep your audience engaged long after the event. Don’t let your hard work go to waste—extend your webinar’s reach today!
Webinar Video
Key Moments - Webinar Blueprint
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Webinar Transcript
Gianna Whitver:
How is everyone doing? Also, we want to know, we want to know what you are wearing today. Are you wearing a Halloween costume or are you dressed like a normal regular office worker? Like boring? Come on, tell us, are you in a Halloween costume? Please report from the field. Also, let us know where you're coming from, what company you're at, what role you're at, and we'll get started soon. So actually, I'm sorry, I can't do music. I have a new phone. I haven't installed music on it yet. I actually can't, so I'm so sorry. Hang on. Maybe I can help. Boring. Okay. Lindsay says boring. She's dressed boring in Missouri. You're dressed boring. Come on, Lindsay. Natasha says, okay, but why does it feel like Katie should always wear a cap and gown?
Jess Steinbach:
Because look how glamorous she is in that she Lifelong learner.
Gianna Whitver:
Lifelong learner. Yeah.
Jess Steinbach:
Okay, wait, I got it.
Katie Mohr:
All right, Jess,
Gianna Whitver:
I can't hear it. It's got a weird intro. I didn't know that. We can't even hear it. Can you put it right to the mic? There we go.
Jess Steinbach:
Piece came from the Humble Be from my electrode. This is we're going to do for the whole webinar. Is there a dance for the monster? You get the mashed potato for
Gianna Whitver:
Heavy Spa? I actually don't know. I
Jess Steinbach:
Don't know either. I sure wish everyone knows that. Please send me video clips of the actual monster mash dance. I need to
Gianna Whitver:
Know. Please, please do. And we are almost live. Everybody just give us one second. We try not to go live before going live because then it is weird for folks to see the behind the scenes. But we'll get started in just one second here.
Jess Steinbach:
You don't think people want to see our pregame dance party? I feel like,
Gianna Whitver:
I mean, that's true. That is very true. Highlight
Jess Steinbach:
Of the webinar.
Gianna Whitver:
Absolutely. All downhill from here. All downhill. Oh my gosh, I didn't say it. Alright folks, we are live. We are live on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for joining us on this fabulous Halloween. We are so excited for today's live stream live webinar where we have some amazing content planned for you. All themes around the topic of content as well. So welcome. You are watching live. This is turning Webinar Tricks into treats. We have of course the theme stuff to Halloween, how to build ongoing audience engagement even after your webinar ends. That's right. It is a webinar about webinars, which we love as marketers in cybersecurity. All right, and we are so excited. I'm going to get going. Housekeeping first, we always do housekeeping. Yes, this is Halloween, Halloween episode and we're all dressed up. This is not the regular work wear. Please feel free to post in the chat.
Where are you calling in from? Are you wearing a Halloween costume? And if so, what is it? And also please keep those questions and comments rolling. The Cybersecurity Marketing Society does loves interactive webinars. We love interactivity, we love to answer your questions. We bring experts to you so that they can answer your questions. So make sure to post, we have a Q and a box in Zoom webinar if you happen to be on Zoom. And we also have LinkedIn live, so I'll be watching those comments. Feel free to post and we will get to those questions and comments during regular intervals during this webinar. Usually we'll let 'em roll, but today we realized, hey, actually we never let our guests finish what their points are. We always bombard them with questions, so we'll be taking questions at specific points during the show. Alright, quickly, I am Gianna Whitver. I'm moderating today and helping showcase these two amazing guests. I'm going to start first. Well actually I'm going to tell you guys first. Can anyone guess what my Halloween costume is?
Jess Steinbach:
You got to do the thing. Oh, sorry.
Gianna Whitver:
Yeah, that's right.
Jess Steinbach:
The intro.
Gianna Whitver:
I am the CEO and Co-founder of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, but I'm also a moth today. So that is what, this is not a reindeer, which a lot of people have been guessing and not television antenna. TV antenna doesn't have I think as many feelers on it. So that's my holing costume. So I'm excited to introduce Jess Steinbeck, her, you've seen her on previous webinars. Jess Steinbeck is the senior webinar moderator at actual Tech Media and Smart Brief, which is part of media company future B2B. She has done over, when I say done, I mean hosted, moderated more than 900 webinars in the last three years. So think about that. How many days in a work week? Right? So that means she's done one webinar, you're getting claps for this. That means she's done one webinar a day except for the days when she's done more than one, which is just incredible.
She's been a guest on our show before. She's been on LinkedIn lives before with us sharing her engagement tips of which she has a ton and really interesting, really unique and creative stuff that can be added into webinars when you're producing webinars to engage the audience. And we're so excited to have her on today to talk about post webinar engagement. And if you do want to see our previous webinar with Jess, we have that available and we'll be sending it out as part of the recap. Jess, what do you dressed as? What's your Halloween costume?
Jess Steinbach:
I am the ghost of Olympics past, so I am wearing an actual 1988. This is the 88 Olympics here in Calgary, Alberta that I got it also has the real pins on it. And then I have a Pyeongchang torch and a Sochi flag. Oh, and Atlanta. I have the American glasses. These are the Olympic spirit.
Gianna Whitver:
I love it. That is incredible. It's above and beyond a regular just Olympic costume. It's like all the Olympics ever.
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah, we got all of 'em. And they're all from the Olympics too. We might have a problem here in this house. We have too much Olympic stuff.
Gianna Whitver:
Awesome. All right, we have Hi Faye. Faye from Boston Director of Marketing at Vigilant, which is a cyber startup. Thanks for joining us. For anyone who missed the very short, I see more people are rolling in. If you miss the housekeeping post your q and a questions in the q and a box or on the LinkedIn live. All right, next guest. I'm so excited to introduce Katie Moore. She is head of content custom solutions at Future b2b and she leads the development and execution of these comprehensive content marketing strategies at future B2B with a focus on high impact webinars and content assets that engage, educate, and drive business growth for clients. And this is fun before, during, and after those webinars occur. She's also worked at Wiley, which US cybersecurity are very familiar with. She worked at Wiley for over 16 years. And quick fun fact, she used to work on the four Dummies books, which is also really cool. Katie, thank you so much for being on. What is your Halloween costume?
Katie Mohr:
Thank you for having me. My costume, I don't think I can beat either of yours, but I'm a lifelong learner and I love educational and engaging content.
Gianna Whitver:
We love it
Katie Mohr:
In the spirit of the webinar,
Gianna Whitver:
I love that we got a Halloween costume, but it also matches the content of the webinar. That's how we know that you're a top tier content strategist there that
Jess Steinbach:
Just
Gianna Whitver:
Layers
Jess Steinbach:
To this
Gianna Whitver:
All. Jess, I'm passing the mic over to you.
Jess Steinbach:
Alright, perfect. So I did see some Halloween costume are people writing in. I want to know first and foremost we're going to test out and make sure everyone's got their emojis working. Can you give me a thumbs up if you are wearing a costume at any point today? Give us Oh no, I left my reactions on that was so exciting. We're getting thumbs up. Thumbs up. Amazing. Okay, great. So we have a couple of Halloween costumes out there. Please post in the chat and let us know if you have any great ideas for last minute Halloween costumes because we were having this discussion today and we have a few people that need a last minute idea. So if you have something brilliant that you've put together from what's in your closet, we want to hear, we're going to shamelessly steal your ideas. My second question for all of you is we're going to get into our conversation today and where we're kind of starting out. As Janna mentioned, we were here a couple of months ago, weeks ago. Oh my gosh, time has no meaning anymore. Time
Gianna Whitver:
Flies.
Jess Steinbach:
Time flies. We were here a while back and we were talking about webinar engagement and creating an engaging program within your webinar. And today we're going to talk about how we can stretch that out and turn that from just a webinar into a program, which is really exciting. Oh, Bert, the chimney Sweep from Mary Poppins. That's brilliant. Okay, that's great idea, David nailing it. Now I'm getting distracted by Halloween. So bringing it back to our webinar, when we met last time, as Jenna said, we played some games, we had some fun and we talked a lot about creating an experience, something that in a noisy sort of virtual space, we've got lots of screens and there's lots happening. You're sort of pulling the audience member back to the experience of being here that they walk away feeling even if they don't remember every word that was said, they remember that they connected with a piece of information because they had sort of a human moment with a speaker.
And that is what to me creates the most engaging webinars. So I do want to just kind of take a quick ask here and I'm going to ask you to use the emojis again. If you're already using webinars and you're here to kind of get some ideas about how to do more with what you're doing, give me a thumbs up if you're not doing webinars and you're here to see if you want to do a heart. So let's see if you're currently using webinars, thumbs up if you are brand new to Webinars A Heart. Alright, so I think mostly thumbs up Jenna, is that kind of what you're
Gianna Whitver:
Getting? I think it's all, I don't know if I even saw a heart, I might've been distracted because a couple people are also raising their hands. I can thumbs up.
Jess Steinbach:
Amazing. Okay, perfect. So it sounds like for the most part everyone here is sort of sold on the idea of webinars. You've worked with webinars and maybe you're just looking to get a little bit more out of them, which is a great place to start. And that is what hopefully we're going to recap briefly at the start and kind of explore a little bit of what we covered last time in terms of creating that engaging webinar experience. And then Katie's going to take us a little bit further in what you can do after the fact. Gianna already kind of gave you all of my stats, so I'm not going to tell you anything more about myself. The only thing that I do want to say is that I absolutely love webinars if that was not clear before. I'm big on storytelling. I'm big on connecting with people, I'm big on helping other people get to create the story around what the content that they need to get across.
And for me webinars are an incredibly impactful way to do that. So I am coming in with a huge bias towards doing this, but I'm also coming in with a huge bias towards doing webinars. I think that a webinar that just because you put a video camera on a person does not mean that you have created a positive webinar experience. I do want to emphasize that and we're going to come back to that a few times. If webinars do not feel like something you can do authentically and the way you want to do them, don't do them just to check that box. So that's my number one Before we jump in point,
Gianna Whitver:
I love it. So can we recap maybe Jess, some of the other key points that you mentioned on the last webinar? And of course we're going to resend that out to everybody here, but what other things were the highest key points from producing a webinar? First and foremost, much less creating engagement after the fact.
Jess Steinbach:
I think two key prepping points for it. One is just in general if you're needing to make an argument about why have virtual events I should say, I do think that there's value in in-person events. I absolutely love conferences. I know you guys have some conferences coming up. I know
Gianna Whitver:
We have a conference and actual tech is going to be there. Actually media of future B2B will be at our conference. Sorry, I have to always do a plug. Go ahead, keep going.
Jess Steinbach:
So go to that. Yes, obviously go to that. But I think we all know that there's some downsides with in-person events in terms of having to wear uncomfortable shoes and travel and pay for hotels for everybody and being away from your family. And there's a lot of value to being able to be home for the individuals that are involved in terms of your audience also being able to reach an audience across a global spread, the accessibility options, having different languages that you can add in for a webinar instantly, it really is incredible. So I really do think that virtual events have a place and what I would encourage, and we kind of touched on this in the last one, I'd encourage people to think about a combination effect. So have your virtual events and then maybe do a wrap party where you take highlights from the in-person event and you explore them virtually with adding some content on.
Have somebody like Gianna come and sit down with somebody like Katie and watch a recording from one of your in-person events and then debrief it and discuss it and pull out some of those key highlights before or after. This is what you should look for, this is what you should have gotten from it, this is a way that you can do more with the existing content and kind of hit that one two punch. So virtual events I think are really important, but as I said before, don't just do it because somebody said to you, we need to have webinars. If you're going to have a webinar, make sure you're putting in that time and planning for what are we trying to get out of this? Is this a one-off or is this a program? Who are we trying to reach? Who do we want to be in the room?
Who's important to us? Would we rather have a small audience of exactly who we're looking for or do we want to cast this huge wide net and hit a lot of brand recognition? So thinking about that because there's an opportunity for you to create a sense of thought leadership within your organization, really putting your brand out there, making sure that you are front and center in people's minds and maybe you want to do a big wide net with that, but there's also an opportunity for you to have these one-on-one conversations with people that you maybe wouldn't have gotten in a big vibrant in-person setting that you can get to in a small table, small round table kind of conversation. So I think those are my pre-planning webinar sides.
Gianna Whitver:
Love it. And I think one thing that also, so this is the cybersecurity marketing society and the audience here is largely marketers in cyber. I think some other challenge that we occasionally come across is that we have a brilliant SME and they're not really that great at speaking yet, yet I'm going to say yet because I believe in the potential of everybody, but they're not really that great at speaking or they're not enthused or maybe the webinar doesn't have a moderator, there's no one guiding the conversation what can make or help or what helps make a speaker good or a moderator Good. Jess,
Jess Steinbach:
It's such a great question. It's hard to give a concise answer for me. I think it's eq and we did I think get to this a little bit last time that we hear all the time that you need to have subject matter expertise and yes, there are absolutely times and places and specific roles where you need to have a very, very expert speaker and a niche expert, maybe a moderator kind of matching them on that. And so in your perfect world you have somebody who's both in the blue sky magic world where I'm an Olympic skier, we have both, but since I am certainly not and that's not the world we live in, often you have somebody who's an expert and that deep subject matter expert and then the moderator with that level of eq, with that interest in storytelling can help pull those slightly more authentic moments from somebody who is an expert speaker.
I think from a moderator perspective, emotional intelligence, storytelling energy and that I don't necessarily always mean being on. I know that I'm a bit of a energy person that doesn't fit every speaker. So that's where again, that EQ comes into place at Run to play is sort of adjusting so that I'm not overwhelming somebody that isn't interested in playing at that level, but speaking to them in the way that makes them feel the most comfortable. And that is a real argument for, we talked a bit about prerecording and I asked last time I was making a pitch kind of convince people to pre-record. So I'm curious if you came last time and you got to see it all or if you're coming in fresh, I'd like to ask you guys how you feel about pre-recording. Can I get a thumbs up? If you're a pro pre-recording and I think there's a rocket ship, can you give me a rocket ship if you are anti pre-recording? I don't know why I just like
Gianna Whitver:
Rocket. I don't think there is a rocket shoot there.
Jess Steinbach:
Maybe
Gianna Whitver:
Let's do the little, the old
Jess Steinbach:
Face.
Gianna Whitver:
Yeah, the the surprise
Jess Steinbach:
Face. If you don't like pre-recording,
Gianna Whitver:
Thumbs up
Jess Steinbach:
If you do. Oh, my reactions are on. Okay. I'm seeing a solid mix. There was a lot more o's than I would love to see. Do we have time, do we have the ability to ask if anyone wants to come off mic and tell me why they don't like pre-recording?
Gianna Whitver:
Okay. Does anyone want to come off on mic? And you get bonus points if you all saw running a Halloween costume. So feel free, we're going to keep the convo going, but let me know, I'm watching this chat.
Jess Steinbach:
If anyone wants to come out, I'd love to hear or if you want to post in the chat, that's fine. The argument that I will make for pre-recording is I think often this is the same thing that we talked about with webinars. The reason people think they don't like it is they don't like it when it's done poorly. And one of the things that I think happens when you're pre-recording is people tend have this tendency to try to be perfect and so they read exactly what's on the script and you get these sorts of, if I am accessing my left hand side or it's the stewardess thing, or sorry, flight attendant thing of on the right hand side of the webinar kind of thing, and it's too perfect, it's too polished and so it feels inauthentic. You're not getting that human connection. There are a lot of ways to do prerecording that doesn't feel that you're disconnected from the audience.
And that often comes from not to say like, ah, it's all me, but from a moderator, a video editing team from working with a team that can put the speaker at ease. The other benefit to that is if you have multiple speakers, I saw someone say I have a hard time wrangling speakers for recordings, wrangling multiple speakers in a panel for a live event is very hard. A recording gives you a lot. I've done recordings at 7:00 AM I mean I hate it, but I've done it. I've done recordings at 5:00 PM but the webinars are going, when you were saying I am in multiple webinars a day, sometimes I'm in multiple places at once because I'm prerecorded, so I've recorded the webinar and now I can run that at a different time. So prerecording flexibility, a lot of opportunities for play, a lot of opportunities to get more creative in terms of the format of the webinar. Some of the games that we were talking about in our last webinar are really only possible with pre-recording and you get the ability to stop and start. So if you have a speaker that's really nervous, pre-recording can sometimes make them feel a little more comfortable. So that's my pre-recording pitch. Did anyone give us a reason I didn't see as to why
Gianna Whitver:
People love the energy of being live? People like this sort of on spontaneity, authenticity, conversationalist, Hey, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to do conversational for this one. Sometimes we do slides today, it's like a living podcast too, and Natasha's saying it's about the quality of the recording. You can have all these things in a recording. That's so true. That's so true.
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah. This is
Gianna Whitver:
Live by the way, if anyone's wondering, this is live. We are
Jess Steinbach:
Live.
Gianna Whitver:
We're live. We're answering you live.
Jess Steinbach:
We're absolutely live. But I guarantee you I have done recorded conversations with round table conversations that we could play in this webinar that would feel the same. And a lot of it also comes down to the speaker. And so this is maybe one of the points. And I know Gianna, we had some other things we were going to cover, but maybe we can transition a little bit more into Katie coming up soon. But I'm thinking about game playing for me and having authentic moments with the speakers. I've mentioned that a lot. The reason that I like to do something that's more a round table or as simple as a round table is the easiest way to do it. But things like the jelly belly game, which if you were not here last time, you eat those, they're kind of like birdie bots, every flavor of beans and it's a jelly belly thing and you have two different beans and they're the same color and one color is pomegranate and the same color, but another bean will be barf and that is toothpaste and barf and old bandage and they're terrible.
And so what we did last time was we got a couple people to come on with us and we asked each other questions and you try to answer while the speaker and the moderator are eating these terrible beans. And it's kind of like that show hot ones. And what it does is it makes you physically uncomfortable, it makes you forget that you're presenting and it makes you focus on being a human. So as a speaker that helps kind of creating those authentic and more relaxed moments from an audience perspective, again, it's pulling them back from, they've started checking their emails, they're listening off the side of their desk and then they're like, hang on, what are they doing there? And then they pull themselves back over to the screen and pay attention to what you're doing. So it hooks the audience back. All of these kinds of ideas. And I've made guacamole, I've done laundry folding versus backup my data. We've done what are some other hot sauce eating things? You suffer a lot for the craft in moderating is what I'm taking away from those. All of these were ideas that sort of again, bring in the audience, create a human experience for the speaker. And not every speaker works for that. So
If you have a speaker that is uncomfortable being on camera, you have a speaker that's uncomfortable recording or uncomfortable being live, you have a speaker that does not want to be playful, don't make them do it. Don't force that. This is again, part of that planning phase. What's the most important thing? If early days in that planning phase you decide we want to have a fun and exciting webinar, then you find a speaker who matches that. If early days you decide we want this speaker to be able to say this content, then you work with that speaker to create the experience that's going to get their content across the best.
Gianna Whitver:
Amazing. So Jess, I'm hoping that maybe we transition now over to Katie just because watching the time, and I do, Jess did this incredible. Jess also Ainsley Miller was on, did this very incredible how to create an engaging webinar during the webinar, how to make sure all the pre-planning of picking the speakers, picking the topic, inviting the right audience, and then doing interesting, fun things that we don't actually usually get to do in cybersecurity. Sometimes we're a little too serious, but we definitely want to make sure we get to the post webinar content engagement strategy. So Jess, I'll pass that mic over.
Jess Steinbach:
Okay. I'm really excited that I get to, I know I'm stepping back into my moderator role here. I was speaking and now I'm moderating. I needed different hats for this. I'm excited about this to be honest and very truly because as I said, I spent all of my time in webinars and so I'm very much involved in the delivery and the live moments and then the webinars, once I'm done, I kind of walk out the door and they continue on and have this incredible life after I've left that I don't get to be a part of. And Katie gets to help make sure that these webinars that we've given life to then get to evolve and grow beyond that. So Katie, I'm really excited today to get to ask you a couple of questions about what happens to all these wonderful creatures that we're creating in our creature lab. Well thank you Katie, you're ready to jump in?
Katie Mohr:
Yep, I'm excited to talk about it.
Jess Steinbach:
Let's start with the beginning. Let's start with the first step. So I walk out of my webinar, I hand things over what happens first.
Katie Mohr:
Okay, well first I want to thank you and the team because you guys create amazing events for our audience and that's where it all starts. That's where the magic begins. However, once it's over, it's not over. And I think that one of the most important rules is just to continue engaging with your audience and continue the conversations, keep the buzz going. And there are a lot of different ways to do that and I kind of like to call it extending your spend because once you've created this amazing content piece, there are so many things that you can do to take it one step further or several steps further to continue the buzz and the conversation with your audience and your customers
Jess Steinbach:
Well, and you clearly do an excellent job of that. We always have a lot of continuing conversations after the webinar, so I am wondering maybe we could get into some specifics of what that buzz actually looks like and what content should be created. And actually Katie, I'm going to put you on the spot. I'd like to know what is the coolest content piece that you've seen? What are you as a human most excited about?
Katie Mohr:
Okay, well all of it. I love content. I love all things content, but I think that we have such short attention spans now and I think that I'm seeing more trends with things that are quick hits of information. So infographics are great for that where you can take the content, the most engaging pieces from the webinar with timestamps to direct your audience in and out of where there's specific information that they can hop in and out of through the infographic without having to watch the entire event for 45 or 60 minutes, however long it is. Social snippets are great short videos that can be posted, social graphics with some testimonials or quotes that came out of the webinar that are super engaging and important little nuggets of information. And then you can also take it a little bit further and do longer videos, explainers that are five or 10 minutes long that you can pull from that webinar.
And then you can even create eBooks, white papers, short or long articles, thought leadership pieces. One of the things that you asked about what I'm most excited about, I love creating comic books and those can be done, believe it or not, from the content that comes from a webinar. We've done it and it's really cool. It involves a lot of creativity, storytelling, which I love a good story. So those I get excited about. The other things that I want to mention too are things that are super easy to do with your webinar content and they're just nurture assets where you quickly have top takeaways, the top five to 10 things that came from the webinar, and then you can create even an infographic with those top q and a. What were the questions that people had straight from the audience, what do they want to know and how did you answer, how did we answer? And then just a quick summary of the entire webinar. We call that a webinar wrap up. Basically just taking all of the information that was presented and putting it in a nice summary that's two or three pages long so that people don't feel like they have too much to go wade through. And then the CTA can just speak to go watch the full webinar if they're interested.
Gianna Whitver:
I think we should do that for this webinar. I think we should do some of these assets for this one and then share it with everyone who's attended so they could see, obviously we don't have to make a comic book like Moth Woman versus Olympic Woman versus Education Woman like the Godzilla Battle. But I love that and I love what you said also the video infographic, boom, mind blown, something that takes you right to clips, mind blown. And then top q and a mind blown, the first time that Jess went on our webinar and did an emoji poll, which she did today, mind was blown. And now even more amazing content ideas are coming out of this. So sorry for interrupting, I had to say it.
Katie Mohr:
Oh no, this is great. One thing I want to mention that I didn't say too is feedback survey your audience. What did they like, what didn't they, what were they left wondering about and what do they want more of so that you can even create a series based on that or a next webinar. I think it's really important to get that information from your audience.
Jess Steinbach:
Absolutely. I'm trying to see if I have a text layer. I had one next to my desk, we're just breaking the fourth wall all over the place now. I don't have it, but I had a text layer I wanted to show
Gianna Whitver:
Text layer for anyone listening is the comic book that they create.
Jess Steinbach:
It's somewhere on my bookshelf, which is too chaotic right now, so I can't show you all, but you'll have to believe me, they're amazing. And yes, there should be a moth learning Olympic crossover episode coming. Oh my gosh, that's coming in full. Well. Okay, so those are some great ideas and some things to do, some kind of, and I'm hoping everyone's writing these down as things and follow-ups. What should we not do, Katie? What's the don't of content?
Katie Mohr:
I think just don't leave your audience hanging. Don't forget about the people who couldn't make it, whether they had something else going on. Or make sure that you provide an on-demand version. Make sure that you're sending people an email that says, Hey, if you couldn't make it, here's where you can find this information. And then also including those nurture assets, the top questions or the quick takeaways or the infographics so that they can go and if they're busy, all of us are, and they don't have time to watch the entire thing, they can hop in and out of it. And I think that that's the most important thing is do not forget about your audience because they were there and they still need more information and they're still hungry for that content that you can provide from that base webinar.
Gianna Whitver:
I just want to do a quick reminder to the audience too that keep those q and a coming. We're going to get to them soon. Don't worry. Go ahead Jack.
Jess Steinbach:
And there's some really great questions coming in and also we should see if we can find a link to some text layers and post that there. Ainsley, you're here post. Post links, Ainsley. Okay, so the do's and the don'ts, great things. But Katie, if we haven't convinced anyone, because I do think sometimes resources are short and to the same point that we were talking about earlier, that people here create a webinar program, check webinar and then, alright, well we need content. Okay, we'll we will write a blog post after we wrap. Hey, that's better than nothing and that's it. If you were making an argument to somebody here that they need to take to their team for why content should be an important part of a webinar program, what would that be?
Katie Mohr:
I just think that it's tragic not to take the webinar and create more things from it. I guess if we are looking at moving past Halloween, let's talk about Thanksgiving. You have your main course, you have your Turkey and you're slicing it up and serving it out, but there's leftovers and this is the perfect opportunity to slice and dice that my mom was a professional at this, take it down to the carcass and then create new dishes that are disguised so that people don't know that it's leftovers in some cases and create something completely new. And I think that to me, the webinar is just the beginning. It is the base piece of content that you can then evolve and strategize from. And so I think that that's just something that I would say that it's a starting point.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay. That was really interesting what you said, Katie, if you don't mind if I double click or quadruple click on that. You said, so you did the analogy to the Turkey, which is great, turning it into something you don't even recognize that it was in the first place. So not even just like this was our webinar and here's content from the webinar, but literally taking it and being like, this is new content. How do you do that?
Katie Mohr:
Yeah, I mean you have to have really great writers who can absorb the information, watch the webinar, make sure that they're familiar with the transcript, the topic and all of that good stuff. They're an SME and then they can create something, a thought leadership piece. They can create articles, multiple articles. There's a lot of native content that can come from that starting point, taking the main points and turning 'em into something valuable for people to an education piece or something that helps them make a buying decision, whatever the case may be. I think that a lot of times, even just watching the webinar can spark ideas, oh, this is something else that we could do. So I think definitely you can create net new content and you can also take the content, like I said, and nurture the actual webinar with that content with the q and a and the top takeaways and things like that
Jess Steinbach:
With the idea of the, and I saw a couple of people, somebody called out and I love this, take it down to the carcass. That's your pull quote from Jen. That's amazing. And I think a great takeaway from Katie, she's full of nuggets like this. Yeah, wise, wise human. But Katie, I think on that note, so one of the greatest things about that analogy is you're not buying a new Turkey every time you told me your mom did Turkey quesadillas, which was not a hit
Katie Mohr:
Secret. She would even go so far as to boil the carcass to make the broth. So you're taking it one step further,
Jess Steinbach:
A whole lot of stuff, but but she's not buying a Turkey every time she wants to have Turkey broth or make Turkey quesadillas. She's repurposing what she already has. So if we're approaching this from the perspective of getting the most value out of our existing webinar budget, it sounds like that's kind of what we're talking about here,
Katie Mohr:
Right? Definitely. I mean obviously we're seeing where resources are squeezed. It's really important to think about this as just a one size fits all. It's an opportunity to get every penny out of your content and I think it's also a great opportunity to get really creative and to think out of the box. I mean, I know Jess, you're big on that. Let's get creative, let's engage, let's find ways to really draw people in and let's also listen to our customers find out what they want and what they need and what they're looking for. And I think that's, like I said, that's important throughout either the actual webinar but also as a follow up with a survey too.
Jess Steinbach:
Yeah, and when you say the customers, I think what's cool about that is there's two sides of that is finding out what our clients, the vendors who come onto our webinar want, but also checking in with our audience and what our audience wants exactly. Both of those being very important. Katie, can I ask you a charged question? What's that?
She nervous she got you on? Okay. I want to talk a little bit about chat GPT. So okay, my question is if we're talking about maximizing budgets and we're talking about doing more with less, there's an argument for content partners and I want to talk to you about that and best practices around that. But I do think with content creation now there's a big discussion around how involved chat GPT should be in your content creation. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that and if you have any sort of ideas around how that should or should not be used?
Katie Mohr:
A loaded question.
Yeah, no, I think this is a great question and it's very relevant. I do think that chat GPT or ai, it's a great tool. It should be part of the tool chest that we all use as content creators. I don't rely on it though. I think that that's a little bit of a slippery slope. I feel like content should be something that's created with the human element in mind, the human experience. I think that's the best way to write really good solid engaging content for your audience. And I also feel like you impact search if you're just depending solely on AI generated content. I think that content that comes from AI lacks a lot of nuance and even in tech publishing or especially in the tech space, you need that, you need that, you need the strategy, the critical thinking, the brand personality, all those things that come from the human side of creating content.
Again, I don't think that it's not worth using as part of even a starting point or when you're looking at creating something that is just simple, even a top takeaways from a webinar, you can create that using chat GPT with a transcript, but then you need to go back and smooth it over and revise it and rewrite it. I don't think that it's something that can just be relied upon as your single generator of your content. I would be careful about that. And coming from the professional or from the publishing side of things, I also sometimes get a little bit nervous about it because you could be quoting someone's life work without ever even giving them credit. And that to me can be again, a slippery slope. That's a great
Gianna Whitver:
Point. That's a great point. You're getting some claps here. And then I think David Schreiber who posted some comments and also we'll get to your questions soon. David mentioned, doesn't everyone use AI to create drafts? I feel like that's a great use case for ai and I agree with you Katie, because we use chat GT at the society. I use a fathom note taker for my calls to transcribe and we do always have to check when something's written. We have to human verify and human it because sometimes it just sounds absolutely weird even nowadays with all the advancements. So totally agree.
Jess Steinbach:
It's that balance. We talked in a recording sense and everybody sort of said the people who didn't like recordings, they liked having that authentic connection with the human, they liked interacting with the human. And an example might be something like sometimes we do a fully prerecorded webinar, but we have all the speakers come on live and they live chat behind the scenes. So the audience is still getting an interactive experience, but the presentation itself is sort of done. I think the rough draft gives you the bones and the structure and cuts out some of the initial planning that you need to do, and then you make sure that you've got your, for lack of a better word, your spirit is in it and your humanity is in it. I know that sounds a bit dramatic, but you do need to put a little human in that robot.
Katie Mohr:
Yeah, definitely. AI can replicate the human piece of any content. So I think it's really important. Again, great tool, everyone should use it for what they need it for, but I would not rely on it for just on its own.
Jess Steinbach:
Well, I think probably transitioning pretty quick here into a little bit more of an AMA with the audience, but Katie, I'm wondering as sort of a final wrap on our conversation, do you feel, I'm trying to think of the best way to put this because I want to make it negative. What is the downside if there's folks in the audience that aren't taking advantage of this content or if we're flipping that to the positive, what's the incentive? What do they get out of and they're not kind of leaving things behind if they're engaging with this content after we wrap our webinar?
Katie Mohr:
I just think, I mean, you're leaving so much on the Thanksgiving table if you're not taking this and this content and extending it, I mean you can't put a price on great content that's informative, engaging, educational. You can't put a price on the audience who is ready to consume that content. So I can't stress that enough. I think that webinars are a really great starting point. They're a wonderful opportunity to literally create anything from there, a lot of different content pieces and it's also a really great place to start creating additional opportunities and reach. Like I said, you're listening to your audience and maybe there's something you hadn't thought of. So it's a great place to spark new ideas. And as far as once that content is created, there are so many things that you can do to get it out there. Distribution is obviously key.
Why create all this content without putting it out there through social platforms and YouTube and email and newsletters, articles on websites, transcripts and videos posted, like I mentioned, the infographics, the comic books. Comic books are great for conferences. I have to put a plug for that because people will come to the booth just because they want to collect the comic. They love a good comic book, a good story with a superhero. And I mean we've even seen some of our clients actually dress up like superheroes, like these superheroes in the comic book and pass them out at the booth. It's a great way to bring people in to talk to you and to learn more about what you have to offer them in terms of products and services and then also even podcasts. You can take the audio from a webinar and create content for a podcast and you can translate all of these things for global reach or you can create print assets. Like I said, the comic books, creating print content that's based on a webinar is a great thing as well to hand out in live events.
Gianna Whitver:
So I love this when you were saying, okay, so we do this printed, but we do a webinar and then we turn it into a comic book and then the comic book goes to the booth. Events are content too, so you have to think about this whole thing holistically. It's like a whole stream. How do you string that thread across every single touchpoint and asset If you're going to, like you said, put budget and especially time into creating amazing webinar, how can you make it go further? It's something that we think about at the society. It's something I thought about at my last cyber job and it's just something that I think in these days and ages helps fill your production calendar and drive more value. When you actually have invested in doing some big content webinar with an influencer or you paid to have a webinar program, how do you get that to go further? I absolutely agree with you, Katie. I just wanted to highlight that.
Jess Steinbach:
Well, Jenna, that's perfect. I think that's all the questions that I kind of had for Katie and I do have to say before we transition into the q and a, I appreciate that, Katie, because I really do mean it. I love what we create and you love what you create, which is a really cool thing about the way that we get to work together. But I think that it's that age old thing of it's better because each piece is working and I can create the most engaging webinars in the world, which let's just assume that's happening. But then if that's it, that's all that ever happens with them, that's a huge loss and you can create the best content in the world, but you need me to be operating on my side to give you something to work with. So I think the two sides of this coin are really important, and I know we're kind of fitting a lot into this conversation, but I hope we've given some people some good ideas and now we want to hear from them.
Gianna Whitver:
Absolutely. And just because I know people we're doing q and a now, so don't leave because we're going to do interactive q and a and we're going to go probably even 10 minutes over if y'all have more questions to cover. But if anyone wants to reach out to Katie or to Jess, how do people reach you, David? Let's get to that soon. We will. Okay. Sorry, Jess. LinkedIn for me. That'll
Katie Mohr:
Work.
Gianna Whitver:
LinkedIn,
Katie Mohr:
Yeah, LinkedIn is fine for me as well.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay, awesome. All right. So I have a question to start. So in terms of post webinar engagement, post webinar, content distribution, you could do like 50,000 things is what it sounds like. You can make videos, you could take it if everyone had a good mic, you could take it and make it a podcast. Everyone has to have a good mic. You could turn it into a comic book, you could turn it into an eBook, you could turn it into other types of assets. And then there is that question, which is kind of combo asked by a few people here in this chat. One, the creation of content takes time. Two, pacing. What is a good sort of pacing or distribution calendar post event so that you're not maybe drowning your audience and these content assets that you just created from this one piece of content?
Katie Mohr:
Do you want me to answer Jess? Yes, I do. Yeah, no, I think for one, it just depends on what your strategy is and what all you want to create. But I would say yes, you don't want to overwhelm people, you don't want to bombard them with everything all at once. And I think that the other key element to this is if you are creating all of this content from the webinar, you want to stretch it out. So I would say typically clients like to sort of share something like every week or every three or four business days. I think that that's kind of key. Another thing too is that at some point you have to realize, okay, this content is a little stale. Maybe it's time to kind of re-up and do another webinar or create an eBook that then we can pull and extend content from that. So there's a lot of different starting points, but I think at a certain point you have to know when you have exhausted your strategy and your campaign and all of these different assets.
Gianna Whitver:
Exactly. If you tie your webinar into a campaign
Katie Mohr:
And
Gianna Whitver:
All those assets feed the campaign, and then you internally decide, okay, we've been running, we had a campaign schedule, we're doing all this content around healthcare, cyber, healthcare, right? We're targeting a vertical. So we did this great webinar with some healthcare security practitioners and now how long are we running it? And there'll be evergreen stuff that lives on the website forever and maybe is gated or maybe isn't, and there'll be social content and it's just how from a playbook perspective, for example, I used to do three months would be a good amount, then I could do kind of four things throughout the year preplanned in chunks if you did themes right for campaigns. That's a great point. I
Jess Steinbach:
Think, sorry, go ahead
Gianna Whitver:
Katie.
Katie Mohr:
No, I was just going to say I think that even just from the strategic planning perspective, I always like to start with an integrated campaign. I feel like you need to look at the central piece, whether it's the webinar or whatever as that, that then you can create all these different things and then set your cadence based on that. And I do agree that three months is usually about the sweet spot for most of our clients as well.
Gianna Whitver:
I would love, I don't know if we can get this, but I'd love to after this webinar, or it might take us a minute, but would love to send a recommended sort of cadence out to everybody who is on here. Maybe like, okay, you do your webinar and then let's do social post social post social post email, email, email, eBook, eBook, and then see kind of do a draft. I think it'd be a fun blog post for us to put together and share with everybody. It's
Jess Steinbach:
Also important, and this is, and Katie you said strategy and planning. And I think just kind of tying back to that and what I was going to mention is I think when we talked about the webinar planning phase, the webinar planning is obviously my lens is going to be very focused on planning for the webinar itself. What speakers, who do you want in the room, all of that kind of stuff we talked about earlier. But the plan is the full campaign. And so what you're looking at is what is that cadence that we want and that content that you're prepping that so that you can take fast action for the things that are going to happen fast and that you can plan for and know what that cadence is going to be. And there's an internal element of that as well because ideally all of this we're doing in some sense for brand awareness, but let's assume we also want to monetize this in some capacity as well.
So if you're looking at the sales side of it, what you're also planning for, and Ainsley talked about this in our last session quite a bit, was planning early on for how you're going to hand this off to your sales team so that you can actually monetize that as well. So part of that story and arc, and I love the idea of having a cadence, I do also think that cadence is going to vary a little bit by industry and also depending on the buying cycle that you're working with in your industry, there might be some urgency you might be looking at. You need to do a little more content as you approach X holiday or X deadline or X budgetary renewal timeline. That tends to be the case or compliance change that's happening. So there's greater context than it's not a one size fits all when you're, I mean there's best practices and absolutely, but it's not a one size fits all when it comes to your content arc and your sales handoff arc.
Gianna Whitver:
I think this needs to be the topic of our next webinar, a full arc in planning topic. I would love that. Sorry. And folks, if anyone else, we're still getting through questions, if anyone else has ideas for our next webinar, what else you would like to hear about this? Haley is raising her hand. Hailey, if you have a post in the chat, then make sure to post here as well. We are going to do what, we're going to eat our own dog food and we're going to create contents off of this webinar and track what the questions are and create things based off of that, which I love doing. It's so fun. Lots of people are talking about lead handoff, which is something that we talked about in the last webinar we did with actual tech media. But Jess, maybe can you talk a little bit about lead handoff from webinars and maybe, well, I have a thought, but I'm let you talk first.
Jess Steinbach:
Can we could put Ainsley on Mike.
Gianna Whitver:
Ainsley hates being in the audience here We are just like, come on up, right?
Jess Steinbach:
Ainsley, get on camera right now.
It is something that I think is, we've talked about, I think kind of echoing where we went earlier. It's not a one size fits all. So you need to know what your particular sales team looks like. Do you have a giant team? Do you have a small team? How are you going to maximize that? But I think what would probably be the most important thing that I would say is, I'm going to echo Katie, I'm going to plagiarize you shamelessly Katie, is just not making them wait striking while the iron's hot is that big important handoff. So your sales team ideally knows that a webinar is happening, knows ahead of time that a webinar is happening. You're going to know who's in the room when you're registering people. And in our platform, we're tracking information about them in terms of the company that they're in, the state that they're in, the size of the company.
And you can get very specific with registration questions if you want, but the sales team is going to know how they're following up, what is their initial step, and then actually do it. You have these people that have taken time out of their day, they've come to attend. And if you've got those red hot leads, the people who asked a question, the people who clicked on a poll, the people who participated in, they clicked on a handout. If you have a handout in your console, they clicked on that link. Track all of that and have a group of people that are following up with those red hot leads. But then make sure you're following up with everyone that's there. So I think that's probably about as specific as I'm qualified to give an answer to. And Ainsley, if you have anything else you want to add in the chat, I will read your answer word for word and plagiarize you shamelessly.
Gianna Whitver:
Another tip I'll just throw in, it's just something that I've done in the past because we're talking about SDRs. I think touching the medium leads and maybe the cold leads, depending on what your own strategy is. Hot leads can even be outreach to by your speaker, right? So say you have a sales engineer speaking or even a dev on your company hot leads, people who have really great questions that you think that you maybe can't address during the webinar, but also maybe make you think that they're interested in solutions or could be interested in solutions or services. Reach out via the speaker, not like a random salesperson. The salesperson could be CC'd, but reach out via the speaker. And a lot of times speakers are busy, so you do have to plan ahead and maybe even facilitate that a little. But that's another tip. SDR handoff, I mean, go ahead.
Jess Steinbach:
No, I was just going to say, Jenna, I love that and I think personalizing as much as you possible. I know that's easy to say and there are elements where AI can help with this as well and personalization and some opportunities, some platforms that do that for you. But if you reach out to them to not reach out with the cold sales, cut and paste email, even if it's coming from the speaker, but to reference the question they asked, if they raised their hands and asked a question, Hey, you asked a great question about this. And even if you're not answering that question, I really appreciated that as a speaker. I'm passionate about that. Whatever it is, give them something. Even if you have somebody else writing these emails for the speaker, but the speaker sends it, having that personal touch and not immediately feeling like I've put you in a sales funnel is a huge, I needed to turn my reactions off. I've got all of them. See if I can get the heart one to go. There
Gianna Whitver:
We go. I think you're resonating also, Jess, because yeah. Okay. Ainsley, you're resonating because we're getting lots of claps as well. Ainsley is saying having a mechanism to differentiate leads from hot leads and hand raisers is key, right? Not just being like, Hey, ready to buy to someone who just showed up for 20 minutes. Let's calculate what sort of attention span and interest each person has
And then having content ready for different levels in the funnel. Yes, levels in the funnel before the webinar. Webinar helps also know how you are going to distribute your content after is important. The groundwork for some of the tools Katie mentioned during the webinar so that they expect to hear from you because inbox Hades is, oh, like inbox H, he double hockey sticks is a real thing. That's true. If you say, I'm going to follow up with you on this webinar, which I have said multiple times, so pre block me in your inbox, I'm just kidding. So keep an eye out is something I think that matters. And there was a bit of a talk about the funnel as well in your comment. Ansley, Katie, maybe you have an idea on this. Content assets tied to funnel is there, I know that a content, an infographic can be about anything, so it could be like buy our thing and then it could be like what is cyber on the far end, TOFU, MOFU or BOFU? Is there any sort of strategy for sending content to maybe more of the hot leads? What sort of content maybe ties more to the hot leads as opposed to the middle, the medium leads? Is there anything you've seen in your career?
Katie Mohr:
Yeah, I mean I definitely think the content that is more specific and it's not as high level, it drills down more into what people really want to know, especially if they're making, like you mentioned, a buying decision or if there's been a product launch and somebody really wants to know what are the updates and how is that going to impact my business and what's different and what makes this better or sets it apart from other things that are out there. I think that those are the pieces that are definitely going to be better for the hot leads. And I think too, Jess made a great point as well for those leads. You do want to have more of those, I guess authentic conversations, whether it's with an SME or a speaker or someone who isn't going to just give a high level sales pitch. It's somebody who really wants to get in there and have a conversation about the technology or the specific product or service.
Gianna Whitver:
We have one, David, before you drop, we have one more thing. There was a question, someone was curious to know how many folks on this call have found the effort of breaking long form webinars into short videos? Truly useful. I know some folks have to drop. Can we do a very fast emoji poll? If you have actually broken your webinar into short form content and distributed it, has that been useful to you? Has that resulted in good results for you? Can some folks do some emoji reacts? If that sounds like you,
Jess Steinbach:
What do you want? Like a heart if we have,
Gianna Whitver:
I think a heart.
Jess Steinbach:
Heart, if we have
Gianna Whitver:
Heart, I mean personally I have the society has, so for us, we take our podcast since we do our, oh, look at all the hearts. So since we do our podcast on video, it's almost like its own content. It's almost like a webinar but not live. And then we'll put it on YouTube slowly. It takes us a long time. We'll put it on YouTube. What we do quickly is we clip it into very short form social media posts. And when you're doing a webinar and because it's involving humans, what you can use is the distribution channel of each of those humans as well. So if you're doing a webinar with a couple of folks, Jess, you've got a CISO and you've got an SME and you've got a product company on all of those people have their own audience post webinar, offline in their own circles. So if they can share content about themselves from the webinar, that just expands the engagement in the reach beyond, beyond, sorry, I feel like I give speeches and I'm not trying to, I'm really not.
Jess Steinbach:
It's hard not to get on a excited soapbox about some of this stuff because it is truly exciting. I am such a hand talker, I never realized how much I talk with my hands until I turn my reactions on. But it is, it's so exciting. And some of these things I think that really speak to passion points within us. So that's why we're all getting on our speech mode today.
Gianna Whitver:
Another short form content too, if you did a webinar and you have a short clip video, people can comment with those in LinkedIn. I think a lot of the social platforms are getting very video heavy, even LinkedIn, I don't know here if anyone here has LinkedIn talk ability to do LinkedIn. TikTok would love to hear what you guys have experienced about that, but there's all this short form content that can be used even on social platforms beyond just posting on your own. You know what I mean? That too.
Jess Steinbach:
I did a TikTok dance, Jenna, it was great.
Gianna Whitver:
Did you? Oh, I didn't even notice the highlight of the
Jess Steinbach:
Webinar. Oh geez. I don't know what TikTok dance is. I legitimately don't. I want to call out because Olivia made a comment about the webinar she'd like to see come being a discussion on promoting webinars and Katie and I had talked about this too. I feel like we're going to throw our colleague under the bus, but I want to hear audience. I want to hear our team come in and talk about how to get your audience in the room, how to promote the webinar. So I hope that's the one that we do next.
Gianna Whitver:
Okay, cool. We'll have to do a poll or something
Jess Steinbach:
Plus one to Olivia's from me. Ainsley, write that down.
Gianna Whitver:
We have more questions from the audience. Can y'all stay on a little late, like 10 after? That's what I said it earlier, but okay, we'll keep going. I can do a few more and we're going to turn this into a big q and a and we're going to turn it into an FAQ and we're going to turn it into a LinkedIn, like an Instagram video and a reel and send it to you guys. So here's an awe anonymous ask. Can you share tips for finding the right cadence? A how many webinars per month slash quarter? All right, more cadence questions. People have lots of cadence questions. We're a small startup and don't want to overburden our SMEs. I have been there, I've been there and my SMEs has got to either love me or hate me based on how you approach this. Don't want to overburden our SMEs but also want to make sure that webinars are freaking enough to make an impact. So what are your thoughts, Jess? Katie,
Jess Steinbach:
One quick thought that pops to mind is that I will say this could potentially be an argument for pre-recording. There is a little bit of magic of cinema you can do with your SME like changing your shirt. So you could get together for a three hour webinar or a recording session or two hour recording session and you have them bring three different shirts and they record three different 20 minute sessions and then you use them throughout the month. So if that feels easier for the SME, sometimes that's too much, but especially if it's an arc, then they can kind of reference back to each one while it's all still really fresh, arc being the key and you can knock them all out. That is one possibility. I do think that you can overextend your audience. So certainly as much as I love webinars, I do not advocate for more is more.
I think I wish I could give you, you shouldn't be doing more than three a month. I think that you have to gauge what is the story that you're trying to tell. If you have a key sales cycle that you're trying to hit, that might be a shorter timeline and you might need to do more in a month. What I would consider you to do if you're thinking about your organization is to look at the year and think about two things. What do you want to tell and what does your audience want to hear? And that sounds like a really basic thing, but when is your audience making key purchasing decisions? When is your audience making decisions for their business and make sure you're hitting those and then does that line up with the stories that you need to tell and then base your cadence off of those things. And that would be a starting place. That's a little vague. I apologize. It's hard to get more specific without getting into specific industries. But Katie, do you have anything that you'd want to add to
Katie Mohr:
That? I was just going to say that you can do your own strategy based on how you want to present your webinars and the cadence for your webinars. But I also think too, you can plug into existing multi-client or multi-vendor webinars and that is a great way to still have that exposure, still get your messaging out there, still get your leads and I think that you may be sitting beside some of your competitors, but that's great. That gives you an opportunity. So I think that there's also, there's two different ways to go about it. There's your own custom webinar that you're doing and then tying into the multi-vendor model where you're in an ecosystem with others
Jess Steinbach:
And actually both of those could be on external. If you're doing stuff internally that's amazing, but you could also double your value by working with external partners like us. We do this where you could send us that content, you could send us the subject matter expert and we can hit our audience and we can hit our platform. And now you're using a more vendor agnostic neutral platform to reach the audience, which kind of separates out from your audience a little bit and hits in a different way. The multi-vendor thing I just have to hit on really quickly. We did not talk about this at the start. We do single vendor and multi-vendor when we say vendor, vendor client webinar. So a single vendor would be like us here today. We would, Katie and I would be the single vendor if that. We were looking at it that way
In a multi-vendor, it would be more like a conference, a tiny little conference. And the way we do it is about 25 minute presentations from each vendor. And so that light, that lift is very light. We also have a way that we do it called an expert series where you are basically, you get a little sponsored clip at the start that we read out for the sponsor and we provide the expert speaker so it's more like a radio ad that you're placing at the front of somebody else's expertise. So there's ways that you can put yourself into the webinar game that are a little different than just I will create webinar, I will publish webinar done.
Gianna Whitver:
Love it. Mix up your audience, find new audiences. Don't burn out your audience. Priyanka has, sorry, we just have very little time left. Priyanka wants to know Mike. Recommendations. I'm going to pass it over to you, Jess to send that or actual tech team to send some mic recommendations after. Also, I dunno if you have them right off the top of your head, but
Jess Steinbach:
We use an El Gado. I really like
Gianna Whitver:
It. There we go.
Jess Steinbach:
But my biggest recommendation for setup two things. One, lighting. I have key lights. I'm sure you can see them in my big reflective mirrors I'm wearing today, but I have key lights on either side of me. I would make sure you have some kind of diffused light. I do have a window. It's shut all the time. Don't use natural light. It also makes it really hard when you're recording because your light will change. So key lights, good microphone, good camera is key. I'm not even using my best camera today or production director is going to kill me later. But having a nice camera and then I stand when I'm doing webinars now that's a comfort thing for me. Not everyone is comfortable with that, but for me, I find that it allows me to project and it allows, as I've said a couple times today, I'm a hand talker. It allows me to hand gesture. So for me, standing is really great, but lighting sound and obviously a good camera.
Gianna Whitver:
I have literally broke everything except for standing. I am standing on today and I got to learn from you, Jess, you're like the pro and I need to level up this background here. I'm sure everybody's sick of it out of the neon sign and that's it so far. That's the only change in the background.
Jess Steinbach:
I love the neon. I love the neon. Thank you. Everybody
Gianna Whitver:
Get a neon
Jess Steinbach:
Sign. I can give a recommendation. Our production director has a neon sign and then he has a dark background. It's not quite as hacker-ish as it sounds, but it looks super cool because he has lighting on him and the neon is like this nice pop in the back. It's good.
Gianna Whitver:
Awesome. We have two minutes. I know Jess is a hard stop. Olivia, Deborah, thank you so much for your suggestions. We are going to keep doing these, so keep an eye out on your email and the society is launching a better and improved sort of webinar experience and virtual content experience starting in 2025 after our conference. Of course our experience is going to be amazing at our conference and we do a pretty good job here too already, but it's going to be even better next year. Any last? There is a few more questions, but I don't think we're going to, there's quite a few more questions. I don't think we're going to get to them. Jess, we'll follow up with you. Question askers. Jess. Katie, thank you so much for being on today. Any last closing thoughts?
Jess Steinbach:
I'll let Katie be the grand finale, which she'll hate me for
Katie Mohr:
Later. I just want to appreciate, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate you having me here today. This has been really fun and I've enjoyed it a lot and I'm excited to see the questions and create some additional content based on this webinar.
Jess Steinbach:
I love it. I love it. Jenna, I want to say thank you to you for having us back. I know last time and the reason that I was even involved in this one today at all was A, because as we said, Katie and I are two sides of the same coin here, but B, because we had so much to cover in the last one. And so for anyone that has been to both of these, thank you. I'm so glad that you were here for those sessions and I really hope that we've hit on, I think it's really easy to get focused on the wrapper around the webinar and it's super important that I'm not discounting any bit of it, but I really want to make a plug for that planning phase, including the webinar itself and including the follow-up and including the sales and really putting that time in at the start.
Because I promise you if you put that time in ahead of time, time, like 15 times, if you put that time ahead of time into the planning, it will help you get the most out of the time you're putting into the webinar and what you're putting into the content and what you're putting into the sales. And then people wonder why their webinars aren't working. And it's often comes back to 15 steps earlier when you just said, oh, we booked a calendar or we put a webinar on the calendar. So we're doing that and that's happening. And then that was as far as, okay, now we have a speaker and now we're going to go live. And that's it. So if I could have everyone walk away with one thought, it's please walk away from this session and look at your own webinar program and make sure that you understand why you're doing it, why you're doing it, when you're doing it, who you're inviting into the room and what you're doing with it afterwards.
Gianna Whitver:
Love it. Thank you so much Jess. Thank you everyone for attending. We'll do more of these and we'll answer all of the questions that were posted in the chat and in the q and a. Expect follow-ups and like I said, see if we're going to eat our own dog food, let's make some assets from this. We're going to send it to you. You tell us. I like that short asset or not, we'll try. Thanks so much Jess. Thanks so much Katie. Thank you again. Actual tech media, a future B2B company for being a partner of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society. We could not do it without you and we appreciate you. Talk to everyone soon.
Katie Mohr:
Thank you. Thank you. Bye.
