Building Pipeline With Webinars

Video Overview

10 — that’s the number of webinars we ran in the 3 months from March to May 2020.

8,672 — that’s the number of webinar registrants we had.

$1,283 — that’s the amount we spent on advertising. We stopped after a couple of weeks, it wasn’t worth it.

So how did we do it?

In this episode of the B2B Rebellion, Andy Culligan and Jonny Butler discuss what worked, and what didn’t, when Leadfeeder pivoted to webinars.

Learn:

• Why you don’t need to follow the typical rules
• How to promote using you and your speakers audiences
• How to come up with content that resonates

Speakers

Interview Transcript

Andy Culligan: Hi, guys. Welcome back to another episode of the B2B Rebellion. Today is a bit of a different episode. We're doing it... We're looking inwards this time. We're using some of our own knowledge here based on what's been asked of us on LinkedIn.

So we've been pushing out a lot of content recently around the success of our webinar series. So also this B2B Rebellion piece is spurred off the back of it. It actually came from a conversation that myself and my guest here Jonny spoke about. We did some brainstorming off the back of the webinar success and said, "Okay, well, how can we maybe do more. Similar content like, can we put some key takeaways to provide the audience, but shorter and snappier than the webinars?" And this is how this particular series was born.

Now, the webinars themselves have been really, really successful, so we've had close to 9,000 registrants since I think it was March 17th, when we launched the first invite to the first one, and we've spent just something like $1,200 across all of those. And the reason why we've spent so little actually is because we only did it for a couple, just to test it to see if it was worth doing it. And actually, we were driving more organic attendance than anything else.

But I think the reason why I wanted to have Jonny on today is, Jonny's been really behind the scenes, making sure that this has been happening and making sure that we've been driving attendees. Sort of like the Wizard of Oz when it comes to webinars for Leadfeeder. So Jonny, give yourself a quick introduction, mate, and let people know what you do here in Leadfeeder and then we can get into what you've been doing for the webinars.

Jonny Butler: Yeah, sure. So I've been at Leadfeeder for two years now. Started off doing a bit of everything from paid search to some organic stuff, and the last sort of six months or twelve months focusing a lot more on things like account-based marketing, lead generation. And as Andy mentioned, with the whole COVID-19 thing, we pivoted very quickly to webinars and that ties a lot in with lead generation, so I've been focusing a lot on that over the last three months.

AC: Yeah, absolutely, it's... And to be honest with you, whatever you're doing there, Jonny, it's working, mate. So the magic that you've been working behind the scenes, it's... Some of the webinars, I was surprised at how well they worked, you know. What do you think... What has been your process behind the scenes? I've got a fair idea what it was, but why don't you tell everybody who's watching, what's been your process, how do you make sure that things have been successful, what have you been doing, what's your typical cadence that you follow for setting one of these up?

JB: Yeah, I think one thing would probably be not following the typical rules. So, for example, I've read a few things where they sort of... People sort of saying set up a webinar one month before you do it and then have this super long process and cycle to promote it, and we've literally had a week each time. We were running a webinar a week, and just having a one-week cycle of pushing it.

You kind of mentioned we ran some ads, for example, paid ads to reach a new audience. They led to sign-ups at a good cost, but what really worked for us was utilizing... Well two things really, one, our own audience, and two, the audience of a speaker and a guest that has a good branded influence. And then pretty much, as I said, you get a speaker lined up for a webinar in a week, you confirm the topic. You can speak a lot more about how you go about getting the speakers, but in terms of the topic, the content's super important.

So, understanding our current customers and prospects, what their problems are and what content they're looking for. So we speak to customers about that, we even ran polls during webinars to figure out what their biggest problems are and how we should position our content. Getting speakers that are experts in that, and just letting them share their expertise, super important.

And then in terms of the actual promotion, getting the webinar page live a week before, sending an email and basically saying, "We've got a webinar in a week." We have a lead list of... Leads who've downloaded content for us previously, like ebooks, they've attended previous webinars, they signed up to a subscription list, and we also have an email list of our users of the Leadfeeder product, and that's kind of split into paying customers and trials and free subscriptions as well. Pushing to that audience works very well and we can segment that as well, and so we get really great engagement rates there.

The other thing would be using in-app messaging. So if you have a software product, you probably have some kind of in-app support system. We use Intercom, push to our customers and as I said the free users via there has been really important. And again, we can do really good segmentation there, where we're focusing just on our most active users who've been online in the app in the last 30 days, and we're segmenting by job title and job function and stuff like that. So we're only giving them really relevant content. And try to match when we're running it with the times when our app is most active, in terms of the most number of users, works really well.

Then third would be social. We push stuff on our social channels and we create graphics and we create some text to share. Particularly LinkedIn works well, but what works really well is just giving that to the team at Leadfeeder. Because the team at Leadfeeder actually have really engaged social audiences themselves, and actually get way better engagement and reach than the Leadfeeder brand accounts get. So giving them content to share and saying, "Here's two or three versions of some text, here's two or three graphics you can share," and it's getting them to push it to their social channels, has worked very well for us. And it's probably more important than us sharing our brand channels. So in terms of our own channels, that's what's worked best for us. And then, in addition to that, as I said, it's about the speakers' audience, right?

Finding speakers who have quite a big LinkedIn audience, so already they'll get tons of engagement on LinkedIn, is a good indicator they create great content. So it's likely they'll be really good at webinars. Two, they have a good reach. So again, if we can give them content to share on their LinkedIn profile, they're gonna get a lot of shares, a lot of clicks, a lot of reach there, and that's gonna bring in a new audience for us, which is really important. And then also if they're maybe a software company that's similar to ours, giving them our email content and graphics so they can push out to their lists, is the number one way for us to reach new audiences as well.

AC: For sure, for sure. The one bit... A couple of bits there just around getting people internally to start sharing it. It's been sort of a nice way as well to get aligned with the rest of the organization, with the marketing team, make people a little bit excited about what's happening and what's coming from marketing. 'Cause what we were doing throughout the entire thing was saying, "Oh, look at this. 600 people have signed up in the past day," which was blowing the things out of the water to what we did prior to COVID-19.

It's like after the first session or the second session, we were like... Remember that one with Aaron Ross? I think it was the second webinar that we got, we got nearly 2000 registrations in four days or something. And we just kept on promoting that internally to the sales organization and to everybody else and they were like, "Holy shit, this is unbelievable." And then people got really behind it, got really excited, and more energy.

JB: Yeah, and the other really good thing about these, which we didn't mention, is after we've created content, giving it back to the sales teams, especially outbound sales teams, and it's content they can then share with the prospects they're reaching out to, and that's also really great for them as well.

AC: Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think... Look, I think, you mentioned one thing around moving pretty quickly on these things. Ideally, in an ideal world, I wouldn't like to be moving that quick, I think you'd probably agree with me there. But it's actually been probably an advantage actually. It's added to it.

JB: Definitely at the moment because, particularly, obviously with COVID-19, stuff's moving so quickly that being able to turn around a piece of content within a week is great. And if you're going in trying to create content like an e-book, it takes a lot of time to write and design and etcetera, etcetera. With the webinar, we can utilize content we have already, make a small slide deck, we can have a discussion, we can do that within a few days or a week. And so you get to turn content around very quickly.

AC: For sure, for sure. And just so people know, when we're talking about creating new content, when we're thinking about the next webinar, it would typically be like you and myself having a chat for 20, 25 minutes or something, brainstorming a couple of ideas. You do quite a lot of work, or we both do quite a lot of work anyway with the sales organization, so letting that influence us in terms of what topics could be of interest. And we both know that sales topics are super, super topical at the moment, so we're just gonna keep on focusing on sales topics.

To touch on a point that you asked me about before, about getting people on board to actually do it, it's a slog; it reminds me of being an SDR a little bit. There was... At the start, it was easy enough because I had people in my network that I could tap into, but that was, what, like three months ago now. And we've been trying to run these things nearly every week, so there's only a certain amount of people I have in my network that I can tap into that can drive a crowd. So it's been doing this cold outreach to sales celebrities... Let's call them celebs, I don't know, influencers. And really like getting them to add the value, but they also drive an audience.

Well, that's it from my side, Jonny, is there anything else that you wanna add?

JB: Not really. I feel, particularly with COVID-19, a lot of people after a couple of weeks were saying, "Everyone's webinared out," and, "Stop doing them, everyone's bored." But like I said, we were doing our 10th one the other week and the feedback was amazing. I think the lesson is if you create that great content, however, you put that content out there, in whatever form you put it, if it's really valuable and you're giving people really tangible takeaways and actions so they can implement and improve their job, they're gonna appreciate it.

So just create that content. And webinars are, as I said, comparative to an e-book, such an easy way to get started in that kind of content.

AC: For sure. Cheers, Jonny, I need to send you in the details of the one for next week now.

JB: Cool, yeah. I'll keep an eye on the inbox.

AC: All right. Take it easy, bud.

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