Nov 12, 2018
Looking for a simple and easy way to re-engage cold prospects?
This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Todd Earwood of MoneyPath and Webinar Works shares his playbook for using webinars to activate leads that have gone cold and convert them into paying customers.
So many marketers are already using webinars as part of their marketing mix, but Todd's playbook has some interesting twists that with minimal additional effort bring big returns.
Listen to the podcast to learn exactly how Todd is using webinars to deliver big marketing ROI for clients across a variety of industries.
Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast.My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week, my guest is Todd Earwood, who is the CEO of MoneyPath. Welcome, Todd.
Todd Earwood (Guest): Hey, thanks. Glad to be here, Kathleen.
Todd and Kathleen
recording this episode
Kathleen: I'm glad to have you. Maybe you could start off by telling the listeners a little bit about yourself, and about MoneyPath?
Meet Todd Earwood
Todd: Sure thing. I am CEO of MoneyPath. I started this, what looks like an agency, really more consulting side, in the last five years. Before that, I started my career with a billion dollar CEO that I was targeting, a job coming out of grad school, and I called in for 43 straight days until he finally gave me an interview. And there for three years, and then he said, "Todd, man, you're really wired for entrepreneurship, so why don't you build or buy a business?"
And thankfully I followed his lead. So I've been building marketing software, for the next 12 to 15 years, and then after we sold that last company, I got encouraged by an investor, that said, "You really should be helping other people with their sales and marketing, and how you bring those folks together, you're really good."
And Kathleen, that was offensive to me, because I thought I was a software guy. And he said, "You're really not. You happen to build software. Why don't you apply those elsewhere?" And so that's what I've been doing with MoneyPath the last five years.
Kathleen: Great, and can you tell me a little bit more about exactly what MoneyPath does for its clients?
Todd: Sure, so we're focused on the five to 25 million dollar revenue range, it's that size company, who already has established businesses. They've already committed some sins in marketing and sales, and they want to start saying, "How do I fix what I have today? And what campaign should I be looking at? That fixes each of of the stage of the funnel?"
The common principles of inbound are still there, I'm just looking at it as scale perspective of how can I help a sales team that might have 15 people already, not their first two, right? And how do you deploy and roll that out, and then help build those marketing assets in the different stages of the funnel? And then we have a strong engineering team on the back end to make sure your systems ... 'cause typically you've committed a lot of technical sins by that point, and we need to help clean them up so you get great reporting, so you know where you should be headed, and is it actually working?
Using Webinars to Reengage Cold Prospects
Kathleen: Got it, and now when you and I first spoke, you talked to me about some really interesting research that your team has done on things like webinars. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Todd: Sure thing. So, it was three years ago, and because I'd come from the SaaS world, building software companies, they're some of the best content marketers, 'cause they have to be, if you're doing, I think if you're growing, especially B2B SaaS company. So what we did was we opted in to the top 300 SaaS companies in the world, including HubSpot. And we saw how did they treat a cold lead, and what do they do? And I hired two data scientists to help me go in and say, "What are the structures of their email? What is the content of their email? What time did they send it? What day of the week?" And then most important, "What is their objective?"
And what we came out with was, lots of fascinating data, we've now analyzed 25,000 plus emails over 600 companies, and what we found was the number one thing of course was content, typically inbound content, right? They weren't selling, this was a cold lead.
But the number two thing was webinars, and that made me go down a whole different path, saying, "That's an old technology, are people really doing webinars?" And the big companies were. And they were doing several things that made me say, "They're not doing it perfectly, but I can take what they're doing, and I think really help my clients, by updating a modern webinar," even, as we all know, it's not a new technology.
And how to you update a modern twist on a webinar to be a great content asset? And that's what we're doing, it's actually bringing together marketing and sales.
Kathleen: Wow. I want to start with by asking you a little bit more about, you opted into how many companies?
Todd: We started with 300.
Kathleen: Oh my gosh.
Todd: And we did this manually, I screen shotted every single landing page, every offer, what the titles were, what the deliverable was, how many pages they sent me if it was an ebook. What was their cadence of follow up. And again, as you can imagine, we quickly outgrew Excel, and said this is too much, and that made me to seek out ... it was far greater then even the engineers on my team could do, this was what a data scientist really needed to do, with a million plus points of data. Down to how many characters should the subject line be? What's the cadence? How long should each word be? Is there nine words or five words? Right? Do they capitalize them or not?
And really, the data scientists helped me add a real scientific approach to what a marketer would do to say, "I can quantify it loosely, I can stare it and assemble," you know, kind of get an idea of what they're doing, and they added real science to it, which has led us to a lot of interesting insights.
Kathleen: That is so fascinating, although it also feels like it's the stuff of nightmares, because I'm terrified to think about what my email inbox would look like if I did that, and it kind of gives me the shivers.
Todd: I understand. Again, by getting guidance from them, on how to do this in a scientifically structured way, we quickly had to adapt our plans to say, "Okay, we're gonna do it this way." And now it's something thing literally we do every week. We update our model, that they built for us, was more and more ... and these emails never stop coming.
Kathleen: Yeah. They sure don't. Not until you unsubscribe. And that's a whole other study.
Todd: That's a whole other study, and then we did the same thing in 2016, for all the presidential candidates, before the primary, because I wanted to see what would they be doing, if you thought you were seeking the highest, most powerful position in the world, surely you would deploy the best resources. And the answer was, there are many answers there, many findings, but it wasn't ... it was very different for us, in how they marketed, as you can imagine, but several learnings there, too. So, we love to study research.
Kathleen: That's so fascinating. So, you subscribe to these 300 companies' marketing emails, and you discovered that what percentage did you say was doing webinars?
Todd: Well, it was, there were 12 types of emails, in regards to content, or intent, and webinars was the second most popular of the biggest and best test companies. So an external party made it easy on me, they already ranked these 300, I just opted in, and used their model to find the best, and went from there.
Kathleen: Now, do you have a theory as to why webinars were such a popular approach?
Todd: Well, I do have theories. Number one, bigger corporations can have more resources to take the time to build a webinar. Number two, it's something that brings together sales and marketing. They're good at PowerPoint, they're good at email, so it marries those really well together.
Kathleen: And did you find that the webinars were being used more at the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel, were there any patterns as far as where in that buying journey the webinars tended to be focused?
Todd: Phenomenal question. It was mostly top. Which was a mistake, we learned. You can deploy them in different stages of the funnel. Re-engagements are one of the best ways, on a cold list, and a list that's gone cold. Webinars are phenomenal for that, which would typically be in the middle. But they're focusing on the top. Almost nine times out of 10, it was top.
Kathleen: And in every case, you had already opted in, so they weren't necessarily doing the webinar to attract a new contact, although maybe they were, but in your case you had opted in, and so the point was to really take you in the next step in your journey. Tell me a little bit more about, were there any patterns, in terms of the type of content, the setup? I mean, I have so many questions, I'm not exactly sure where to start.
Todd: Sure. I think there were several patterns. The one thing they did right was they targeted a specific persona in their webinars. Now thing, they've got resources, so they can crank out a bunch, right? Even though they crank them out slow. They got resources to crank out webinars, because most marketers say, "Well, that takes a lot of time."
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: I'm gonna choose a different marketing campaign over webinar. We've helped minimize that with our formula. But, they were very smart to target specific personas that would repel away the other people that don't fit that persona, in their title. Their titles were weak, so we helped them ... we took that model and said, "What if we used smarter hooks, and combined that with focusing on a persona?" And that's been really powerful.
Kathleen: So give me an example of the weak title, versus the kind of title that you might develop for a client.
Todd: So, the number one thing we talk about, from a psychology standpoint, is humans will go to the ends of the earth, to avoid pain. So instead of the top five ways to grow your X, that will not drive registrations, we've tested it, time and time again. If you say, "The top five mistakes," right? "That middle," or "Medium," you know, I'm trying to think of a good one. I don't want to use my client's real ... some of them I can't use.
But, top five mistakes, right? That healthcare director, hospital directors, are making with emergency care services. Super narrow, right? So if you focus in, you say okay, well you're a hospital director, you're not a CEO, you're not a CMO, and you have emergency care, and that's a problem for you? That person will gravitate to you. Does that make sense?
Kathleen: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting that you say that, because I was told once that webinar titles that do well tend to resemble blog titles that do well.
Todd: Yes. Of course they do. So, we use the ... as humans, again, if I think about human behavior, and marketers, we've totally jumped in on this boat, we know up each other. So, the top 15 ways to make HubSpot do X, and then someone else next month will do the top 32 ways.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: So, we all like lists, right? We know that content can work. So I think whoever told you that's right, because we've latched onto that model, and it's really important for actually making your content structure be something that makes it easy to repurpose later. That's another massive value, is that we're changing the game, and it's not ever about the live event.
We as marketers get hung up on, "How many registrations did I have? How many attended?" That's important, but the true measure is can I create an asset that will have a long shelf life for me. Typically beyond a year. And what are the replay, what do the views look like? How can I repurpose that content into 15 other pieces of content, if I'm gonna take all that effort to create the webinar?
Kathleen: Yeah. Now, if I came to you as a prospective client, or a client, and I said I wanted to do a webinar, talk me through, how would you work with me on developing that campaign, and what needs to go around the webinar to promote it?
Todd: Sure. Number one, we're gonna talk about personas.
Who are your targets? What do your lists look like? Right? And then, what stage of the funnel do you want to target? Everybody thinks top. "No, no, no, I want to grow my list. I want to grow my list. I want to access a bigger audience."
And I would say, "I understand that. Everybody want to do that. But, I will tell you that webinars are a great funnel accelerator, and we should probably," ... the first thing if I had to, and you're gonna buy into my theory, I would say, "Let's go to your re-engagement campaign."
That is the easiest, easiest thing to do with a webinar today. And it works, literally, we've done it 17 plus industries now, right? 80% B2B, 20% B2C. I would tell you, let's go for a re-engagement campaign, of people on your list today, and then the next thing I'm gonna do is say, "You're either not gonna call it a webinar, 'cause people are tired of webinars. Or you're gonna call it a private webinar, and you're not allowed to post it on social media."
Kathleen: Huh, interesting, so give me an example of that. How would you use that? I'm so curious.
Todd: I'll use a real life example, there is a company, a software company that does applicant tracking, and they serve two specific industries, and I said, "Well, you have to pick one."
They said, "We don't wanna pick one."
"You have to. That's part of the formula. You have to pick a niche." And inside that we said, top five mistakes that security companies make with blank, right? That was the formula of the hook.
We targeted their dead, cold list, and the awesome outcome, after they followed this through was, this is literally, Kathleen, one of my favorite stories. At the end, what they found was, they had someone respond to the email, where they'd offered more information the follow up response, same day, "Thank you so much. I never knew you guys existed."
This person had been in their CRM for three years, opted in at a trade show, with a business card in the fishbowl. Sales reps had been assigned to this person. Called him, fourth largest prospect in their industry, and the CEO, who is who they emailed, had never heard of them.
Kathleen: Wow.
Todd: And he ends up signing a contract, worth six figures, and now this person never would have heard of them, and he was on the list, and they'd done everything they possibly could in marketing and sales to get him, but the webinar's what re-engaged him.
Kathleen: So, do you attribute the fact that he said he had never heard of them to him getting the past emails and just ignoring them or..what was the differential?
Todd: That's how they assess it but what they really were seeing os that, I, after talking to them going through the example if you were to come to me, I would say this campaign although a lot of marketers think it takes a lot of time, I can help you around that, but, it's got one of the highest intent.
If you're going to go to a cold list, and you get anybody to sit through a 45 minute webinar, right? And you've targeted a niche with your hook, then you should have someone who's willing to sit there really be either they have lots of time on their hands, or they really are the prospect you want, so it's also great when people have a list, and they go "I'm right next to a percent of that is".
If you write the right title and the right hook, it will attract the right people and now they're offering you their time at more than an eight minute blog post read or open and click an email. The sales reps love it 'cause now you're handing them a more qualified lead 'cause you know who they are, they attended this webinar on this topic and they stayed for 45 minutes.
Kathleen: You're, if I'm understanding correctly, you're beginning with your most highly un-engaged prospects, you are zeroing in on one specific persona and you're coming up with a title that is obviously toward that persona almost like you're mentioning them in the title-
Todd: Most of the times we do.
Kathleen: -talk X solutions for so and so and you're, what you're seeing is that they're responding because it is so specific to them.
Todd: It's so specific and you said, we're offering either an educational series on X, that's another way of putting it, you can try to, don't use the webinar name! For some people it's a negative connotation and last week, I was at Go to Webinar's headquarters and we were talking about different key metrics and 20 percent of people sign up for webinars just with the intent of watching the replay.
By taking out the "hey this is an educational series on this interesting topic" if you're really the marketer who cares about the attendees at the really core measurement of our why, then that's a great way to do it is either make it, call something a webinar so they don't think it's a replay for one or number two, right, say it's a private webinar.
People are more likely to come in because they know it's not being promoted everywhere so don't put it on your website, don't put it on social media.
Kathleen: Now, in either of these cases, describe for me the method you're using to promote the webinar. Is it just email?
Todd: In this case in the re-engagement obviously it would typically be email. I've got people that want to do top of funnel, that are doing paid media to go strictly to a registration page or the advanced people frankly will go to content, retargeting, retargeting goes to after you've actually taken some action but you haven't entered the funnel by opting in yet. You had then re-target that person due webinar but I would do step one is content, step two you got to that page, re-target them with the webinar.
Kathleen: What I hear you describing is basically creating content related to the topic of the webinar, seeding that out in social for example and then if somebody bites on that you can re-target them with an actual webinar ad, is that right?
Todd: That's right and think of it this way, if you really break down what a webinar is, at it's core beyond the invites and how you get them to there, at the end, for most of us, it's a PowerPoint. It's a PowerPoint that we record. A lot of people don't even put their face on here, it's just their voice and then record it and now it's a video asset.
I think if you think about a webinar and you take out the live event, there are lots of things you can do where I've got clients who don't feel, frankly, comfortable, almost like stage fright where they don't want there-obviously Kathleen you're not one of them 'cause you wouldn't sit here and talk to me and we're staring at each other, BUT! Some people are scared of that so they'll go "please, I don't want to do it live, I don't want to do it live."
Okay, so we'll record it and we just don't do the fake, nonsensical "oh there's 700 people in this webinar, thanks for being here." We don't do the fake stuff, instead we just say let's, it's gated content.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: You took the time to create that PowerPoint deck, you used our formula to make it engaging and I'm going to give you the bookends if don't want to do the invite with paid or email or whatever, social, right?
At least you're going to build this great asset, you're going to gate it and have proper follow up because we're great at inside of our content formula we're doing specific things for segmentation.
Kathleen: What is your formula for making a webinar engaging?
Todd: Well, there's two key parts. There's probably 22 but the two core parts today for brevity's sake is, number one, I'll tell you that I'm the son of a Minister. Imagine whether you go to church or you don't if you can imagine going to a church and my Dad were to greet you at the door and then he were to make the announcements and sing a song and say a prayer ask for your money, right? Give the sermon, get you to come down forward and all that, it would be very odd for someone, one individual person to try to do that but at webinars that's what most of us are doing! We have one voice, they don't even see our faces and somehow one voice is supposed to hold that engagement and attention and it's damned near impossible.
What we suggest is, it's a two person minimum, three person maximum game. I am the host, Kathleen you are the thought leader. I am the emcee, you're speaking at a conference, I get to tell them all the great things about your bio, you don't need to stand up and say how awesome you are 'cause you're awesome. I can do that for you as your emcee and I can do the housekeeping and that keeps you high up on the thought leader throne when you're telling us and educating us about these top five points and so that's the number one thing.
If you can get more and more attention by using two people instead of one.
Kathleen: Okay.
Todd: The second thing is, use polls!
Todd: It's an easy feature. Our webinar clients are getting 60 plus percent people to actually click a button on a poll. We do a front end poll before the content, we bookend them. Front end before the content begins, the emcee-
Kathleen: Front end in the webinar? While they're waiting to start?
Todd: Yeah, so you're going through the housekeeping, you're telling them the big takeaways they're' going to get, you get them interested in it. "When you attend our webinar you're going to walk away and be able to tell your boss X and here are the three main points you're going to learn today." A-B-C.
Hit them with the value and then say "to get us started and to make sure everybody's tools are working correctly, I'm about to ask you a softball question that everybody can answer that is not personal but it gets you engaged and it gets you clicking the buttons and paying attention."
We go through the content formula and at the end, 'cause you're the thought leader, I'm the host, I thank you Kathleen, for teaching us all these great things 'cause I'm the emcee and I say "guys, I'm so interested to see what you think about this content and this segmentation piece" not only are they engaging but this is how you're going to segment them. You then ask the question with three to four multiple choice questions and there's two ways of doing it. The best way I've seen is "now that you've learned about this content that Kathleen has shared with us, what are the actions you're most likely to take next?" You are now measuring the temperature of the lead.
"Interesting topic, I need to research more." Not warm, right?
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: "I like this, I need to hand it off to a colleague." Medium warm, maybe a little warm, right? That's also not a decision maker you discovered.
Kathleen: Right.
Todd: Finally it's "I can't wait to go implement, I've got to learn more now".
If you use those kind of poll answers, sales reps love it.
Now, when you think about all the, we work so hard as marketers to build these great leads and to nurture them properly, this is something when you go to a marketer and say "they spent 42 minutes on a webinar, I held their attention, Kathleen educated them on this topic, on these top five mistakes and they said they need to figure how to implement it", I know many sales people who would love to follow up that kind of lead.
Kathleen: Now, I imagine that if you do this and the system is working and you're using the right software or tech stack you'll be able to see who said what at the end and of course, kind of capture that. Do you have a system then for post webinar, how the follow up occurs and how you close the loop?
Todd: Absolutely. We look at it as there's three big buckets and the third, everyone forgets. Number one, we're all as marketers going to follow up the people that attended, of course we do, right? That's a good one to follow up with. I'm usually using a three email sequence on that.
The second one is, of those who registered but did not attend. Again, GoToWebinars says "20 percent of those people are only there for the replay", so give it to them.
Now, offer that replay in a replay room that should be gaited, if you're using HubSpot its automatically gonna auto fill most of the fields on the form anyways for them. Click through and now they're watching video, right?
What I also do though is you're missing out on "what's your replay follow up sequence?"
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: Treat 'em like an attendee now. So take your original attendee sequence and update it to know that they didn't watch it live so make sure the messaging doesn't fall down there, but then have an attendee, now that they've watched the replay, you can trigger those emails.
Todd: The third one that we all seem to forget for some reason is, go back to your list of those who did not register and say "we know that 20 percent of people who come to webinars were here to watch a replay, maybe that day didn't work for you, but we were so happy about the results that came from this we thought it would be valuable to you, so we're going to offer this for a limited time for you to go see the replay now." Again, it's gated content but people don't ever email those people again.
Kathleen: That's so true. Yeah.
Todd: It's an easier way to pick up more views, more leads and then what we're doing is putting web forms on the landing page of the replay room, right? There's other tools now that GoToWebinar has where they can actually embed all that together for you, you don't even have to use super landing pages but as marketers we want to style it the way we want so we do anyways..BUT! There's ways to do that and I think it's a great opportunity to get more traction with whoever.
Kathleen: Going back to the issue of the tech stack, you mentioned HubSpot, is GoToWebinar your preferred platform for webinars?
Todd: It is. It's, and here's why, you know you've got the ON24's of the world where you can spend 15 to 25,000 dollars a year and they'll create content for you (which they really won't) but they'll help you put things together and that's a great enterprise solution that a lot of people can't afford. GoToWebinar is above the middle for sure, but I like GoToWebinar because I know it's going to work.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: It was built for the intent of a webinar and there's other people who built meeting software, right? That's what GoToWebinar used to be. They came out of GoToMeeting but they've actually got software with the full intent, the full feature set for webinars, all the bells and whistles, it works, it has syncing to almost all of the marketing animation tools we love and so that's my tool of choice.
Todd: Zoom obviously has features, I have clients that use Zoom, we're on Zoom right now! GoToWebinar is my preferred method because I know it's going to work and it's got every feature you would ever want with a webinar.
Kathleen: Yeah, you know it's interesting. I've used GoToWebinar a lot, it is a great platform. I wish their integration with HubSpot was deeper because I would love to be able to send confirmation emails to people through HubSpot so that it had my branding but instead it comes from GoToWebinar, so that's the only thing I really don't like about GoToWebinar is if you want to have 360 degrees of brand control and you're using HubSpot with it, you can't really get that at this stage.
Todd: You know, it's interesting. They've put in a request for the last four months for HubSpot to update to their new API and when they do we'll get all those things we want as marketers.
Kathleen: Oh, that'll be great.
Todd: HubSpot is actually saying it's on their next, by end of year, they're hopefully going to move over.
Kathleen: Wow. Wow.
Todd: I think it's coming so let's just iron this out of next year.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: For all parties involved but that's actually coming out so, I'm with you. We want that brand control, that is a downfall for sure and I've kind of conceded that because I want all the other great elements-
Kathleen: Yeah!
Todd: -of GoToWebinar but I've had to concede the confirmation emails. That's the one I've conceded.
Kathleen: Well-
Todd: I'm totally with you.
Kathleen: -I'll say, we do a lot of webinars here at IMPACT and my team has demoed just about every platform their is. There is no one perfect platform -- there just isn't.
Todd: No.
Kathleen: I mean, which is huge market opportunity for anybody who can solve for it but-
Todd: Absolutely. Its the way the tech stack is today for us as marketers -- they need to talk seamlessly, but they talk at an 80 to 90 percent level if you're lucky, like HubSpot and GoToWebinar do. I will tell you that it's enough for me to add that extra hassle. Again, I'm conceding that because I wish the innovation was a little better and let's hope it gets there soon.
Kathleen: Now, taking a step back, you have kind of described your webinar playbook, or your system, that you use, and I know you've used this with quite a few other clients, and other companies. Describe for me some of the results you've been able to get.
Todd's Webinar Playbook Results
Todd: Sure thing, so we've done, you know, our initial test, when we went out, was we tested 17 different industries. And those were not just our existing clients, we went out and said, "Well who else could we apply this to?" So we've done everything from the B2C side, where we're targeting pregnant mothers. We've targeting enterprise healthcare CEOs of people who have 50 or more hospitals. We've targeting NCAA coaches. So that's an interesting one right there.
Todd: There's someone who has software for NCAA football coaches. Pretty narrow, there's only 320, or if you start-
Kathleen: Yeah, that's a really small market.
Todd: Right, but expensive and they've taken something from the NFL and applied it to the NCAA to expand their market. Super interesting product. Hadn't been doing webinars, they come to me, "Here's what we want to do." Complete cold outreach. To the sales people, you know how this goes too, Kathleen. They wouldn't let us email the hot leads. "No, no, I'm taking care of that."
Todd: And I was like, "No, I can really help you," but we emailed the cold, and what we found was we could get, in the university sector, there are, if you look at athletics, they're the power five conferences, which now you're even narrowing it further than-
Kathleen: Yeah.
Todd: Down, right? To 70 or 80 teams, and we were able to pick up three of the top 20 largest schools in America, who were interested in their product, who had never heard of them before. Strictly cold, they have tried ... they had not yet tried trade shows, 'cause it's a new market development, and they got not only hey, someone to attend, but demo follow ups, which was their metric of ultimate success, is they know if they get to a demo, where they're gonna go in their sales process.
So we've been able to do that. But now, the company who's targeting pregnant mothers, this is an automated webinar. Again, think gated content, we're not doing the fake stuff, right? We're not doing all that nonsense.
But what we are doing is saying, they've got a cycle where literally you're going to be pregnant for nine months, maybe. So they've got really a five month window to convert you into their product. It's a breast pump. Excuse me, it's a breast pump.
So, they've got this cycle of new prospects coming constantly into their funnel, and what they found was by taking an automated messaging approach, when someone came in, but didn't purchase and do follow up cart abandonment, they found great success.
Kathleen: Oh, that's great. So, it sounds like in the case of the second example you mentioned, it's not even a re-engagement approach, just because if it's pregnant mothers, I assume they don't have enough time to get unengaged, they gotta get-
Todd: Right.
Kathleen: At the beginning.
Todd: Right. Yeah, re-engagement is only ... I started with that because it's the lowest hanging fruit, and if you ... I tried to be true to the example of if you came to me and a lot of people are skeptic, because webinars aren't new, is they're skeptic, and I say, "Hey, I know what I can prove to you, these are cold leads, found money, let me do that for you."
But no, we're doing it bottom of funnel, and I think if you think about creating an asset, that's what we're trying to do, we're creating that asset.
And at the end, if you follow our top five, or top three mistakes, on how to avoid pain, we've structured the content so you can splinter that out, repurpose it as separate different assets, whether it be blog posts or videos, and that's where you use the bottom funnel approach, when you can arm your sales force, or your bottom of funnel email sequence, with extra content, like, "Here's a video about a very esoteric issue," that you know that prospect has, right?
That's a great way, sales people love having those assets and markers, that you can just hand to them if you follow that formula, because now we can cut up that content, and really give them something thing very valuable at the bottom of the funnel.
Kathleen: Now, you just made me think of something. So, you create this asset, which is the recorded webinar. It's living behind a gate on your site. Do you have a playbook for how to promote that then, to a cold audience. Do you do any non-email promotion for that?
Todd: Oh sure. I think of it as a timer, right? So I want it to ... I want that asset to be valuable over more than 12 months is the goal. We should do that. Some people are now doing it two plus years, still using that evergreen content.
So what we would try to do there is the playbook, some people will say, "I'm gonna make five blog posts out of that. I want the organic traffic out of that," but what we do is say, "Give that replay, that gated content, some time." You've not, if you've done my model, you've not promoted on social previously, probably. You've done a private webinar, email only on phase one, phase two is, now I'm gonna promote it on my website, and I'm gonna have a social push behind it, email's not really involved. You're just getting your existing organic traffic coming in.
And then step three is, I'm now going to create other content, like blog posts, transcribe the webinar, splinter that into five separate things.
Or, what people are doing is, if you've got the video capabilities, like I know you guys have and we have, is we're gonna make a highlight reel around that topic, and use that as a teaser on the gated organic page, that's just linked on your website. That's the teaser to get you to sign up and watch the replay.
Kathleen: Oh, that's great. I like that a lot.
Todd: Yeah, so there's a lot of plays you can run.
Kathleen: Do you feel that this approach works in any industry?
Todd: I mean, when the breast pump versus the enterprise CEO model work, versus the NCAA coach. We did a food engineers, which was fascinating, because knew nothing, literally nothing about the topic, all they talked about was really deep science. So I'm convinced at this point that any industry can work. It doesn't matter, really, the size of the company.
I've told you about where we target out clients, but we've got small startups that are doing this, and we've got large enterprise companies who have gigantic lists, and frankly, they don't want to take the time to create all those man hours of creating a webinar, and they're ... and the landing pages, and the branding elements.
All that takes a lot of time, so we focused heavily on building a few tools to minimize that content production time.
Kathleen: Oh, okay, what kind of tools?
Todd: So, if you buy our training kit, our playbook, we actually have several tools. One of which is, we're using this for ourselves, so we're now we obviously had to offer it to other people, is we're gonna take you through one of our three playbooks, whichever one you choose, and we built literally a web form software, that if you answer the questions, it will kick out the PowerPoint, with the notes associated for presenting, with the tips on how to present the topic for the host, right? And the thought leader.
And if you do that, like now, you've brought the barrier down, all you have to do is style the PowerPoint.
And we're going as far in phase two, is to push a button, and go create all the workflows for me, and hub spot, and the event, and GoToWebinar/Zoom, or whatever you prefer.
Kathleen: Wow that is so cool, I'll definitely have to include the link to that in my show notes (check it out here), so we can all test it out. That's awesome.
Well, Todd, thank you for sharing all the different you know, ideas and strategies that you're using with webinars. I love the idea, myself, of using the webinar to specifically target unengaged contacts, that's something that I haven't really tested out before.
Kathleen's Two Questions
Kathleen: I want to shift gears now, and my listeners know that I always ask everybody the same two questions in my podcast, so now it's your turn.
First question is, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?
Todd: Man, I ... there's a lot of folks that are doing it really well. I'll tell you a clever twist, I think someone who's a little non-traditional, but his name is Jason Swenk. His messenger bot trick that he's got, where he's replaced his Contact Us page, is just something so awesome, because it's fun, and it's playful, it's definitely on brand, and he's not promoting it, it's just literally organic traffic's coming in, right? And he's able to convert and do the messaging, you know the marketing messaging that we like now, with bots, he's doing in a very clever way, so I love what Swenk's doing.
Kathleen: He actually was a guest on my podcast.
Todd: Of course he was, yes.
Kathleen: And he talked about that.
Todd: Yeah, Swenk is just like, he's a good guy, and I just think it's super clever, what he's doing.
Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. Well, the other thing I always ask, and it's purely out of my own curiosity. You know, the world of digital marketing is changing so quickly these days, and everyone, a lot of times I hear people describe it as drinking from a fire hose.
I'm curious, how do you stay up to date on everything? How do you keep yourself educated and on the cutting edge?
Todd: I think two ways. Number one, I try to ignore part of the noise. So, I've decided that I'm gonna be great at several elements of marketing, and that's where I'm gonna focus hard on. As you can tell, webinar's one of my choices, right?
The second thing is, I have staff, my team members, who are splinting that up into different areas, where we have a quarterly report where you're gonna talk about social, what's happening social, and we bring it back to each other, and we try the divide and conquer method, where we keep just rolling Google documents, now funny to see when you go look at what we thought was new, two years ago, right?
Because I've told people, as marketers we get a lot of asks, and we get a lot of tasks. And so when you gotta wear 72 hats, we can't all be great at all these different things. As a company, we're gonna be great at a few things, and as a team, we're gonna educate ourselves, and keep our eyes out, but we're trying to stay in one lane, for each of us, and bring it back to the group.
Kathleen: Yeah, it's tough, I mean, similarly I have a team, and thank god for Slack, and we're just always sharing articles in Slack for each other, and I'm not sure that there's anybody who could read it all, but it's-
Todd: That's right. It's overwhelming. It is the fire hose. So, as long as you can accept you're never going to keep up with everything, I think, for us, this is the best method we got of dividing and conquering.
Kathleen: Yeah, makes sense.
Well, if somebody's been listening and they have questions for you, or they want to learn more, what is the best way for them to find you online?
Todd: Yeah, they an go to Webinar Works, plural, to any of the social places, or WebinarWorks.co is the website, not com, it's dot C-O co, and there's a page there for your listeners, slash inbound, where you can see how you stack up, there's a greater tool to figure out, there's all kinds of links to other resources, that I think if you're interested in webinars, you can find out a lot more there, with tons of resources to get you started.
Kathleen: Great, I'll put that link into the show notes (click here to check it out).
Well thank you so much, Todd. This has been interesting, it definitely gave me some new ideas on how I can use webinars, and I'm sure that everyone listening got some new tips. I appreciate it.
Todd: Thank you so much Kathleen, and I appreciate you.
Kathleen: Thanks.
And if you are listening, and you like what you heard, please give us a review on Apple podcasts, or the platform of your choice. It makes a huge difference, especially for small podcasts like this one.
And if you know someone who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @WorkMommyWork, because they could be the next person I interview.
Thanks for listening.