The Educational Webinar – Part 1: Marketing for Success

Part 1 of our special webinar tri series in partnership in partnership with The Gap. In each part we cover a key element of running educational webinars including Marketing, Technology and Webinar Preparation.

In Part One – ‘Marketing For Success’ Charles Clark, Co-Founder and Marketing Director of BOMA, and Viv Brownrigg, Co-Founder and Director of Strategic Partnerships, will walk you through the best ways to ensure great attendance at your webinars including:

• The ‘Webinar Plan’
• The five elements of webinar marketing
• Crafting your invites
• Tips to boost attendance
• Post-event marketing
• Q & A
• Next steps

‘The Educational Webinar – Part 1: Marketing for Success’ Transcript

Charles Clark:

Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is the first part in our tri-series in partnership with The Gap, The Educational Webinar – An Introvert’s Paradise. Today, part one, we’re looking at marketing for success. My name is Charles Clark, and I’m really happy to be joined here by Viv Brownrigg. Morning, Viv.

Viv Brownrigg:

Hi Charles. Not morning, it’s good night here. In fact, I just about thought about wearing my pyjamas, but I thought no, I’m going to be on video, so I’ll give that a miss.

Charles Clark:

Well, through the wonders of technology and Zoom, we’re both joining you from New Zealand, so thank you so much for joining everyone in the UK. And I know also we’ve got a couple of people from Germany and France, so thank you so much for getting up even earlier and joining us. So I’m sure that quite a few of you are familiar with Zoom, but if you’re not, just a couple of instructions. And obviously if you’re doing a webinar for your own clients, you can take these as well. So your viewer window can be expanded and collapsed pretty easily, and that’s obviously quite useful if you’re also taking notes, and we sent the workbook through a little bit earlier.

Charles Clark:

You can also view and select your audio to turn us up or down. You will be muted however, but if you want to submit questions at any time, you can do so through the Q&A or the chat pane. And so we’ll keep a note of those as we go, and then answer them as we come near at the end. So Viv, webinars is a great big topic, and I think you and I first thought of this, I suppose, series because of some results that you saw in another webinar.

Viv Brownrigg:

Absolutely. So let’s get into it. Thanks, Charles. So very interesting, major changes in the industry this year, really precipitated because of COVID. And so lockdown happened in New Zealand and around the world late March, early April, and The Gap went in to teach accounting firms and bookkeeping firms how to do webinars overdrive, because obviously we needed to be able to reach out to our clients on mass and support them as much as we possibly can. So a few months ago, BOMA and The Gap ran a survey with our firms to find out what worried them about running a webinar, where are the challenges, where’s the anxiety, and here were the results.

Viv Brownrigg:

And of course, down here, 20% said they’re really worried about getting bums on seats, will somebody show up, will they be interested in coming to my webinar. And I guess that’s what this first part in the tri-series is all about. This morning is all about marketing, marketing, marketing for webinars. Another 20% of you said, most worried about the tech failing. Totally understand that. I had a glitch myself this afternoon in New Zealand. And so part two of our webinar tri-series is going to be all things tech.

Viv Brownrigg:

And then 12% of you said, worried that I’m going to get a return on the time that I put into running webinars, presenting, learning how to do it, et cetera. 12% of you said, worried about what I’m actually going to present, what webinar topics, what’s interesting to clients. And another 36% of you said, I’m actually really worried about presenting a webinar for the first time. I can’t see my clients, and I’m not getting feedback, how will I engage them? How will I keep them interested? So this 12, 12 and 36 comes to 60% of you actually being worried about delivery, and so that’s the last part of our tri-series on the 19th of November, is going to be all about how you present, how you engage, and how you get a return from your time spent learning this new way of educating your clients.

Viv Brownrigg:

But webinars as education marketing, it’s here to stay in the industry, and well done to those of you who are doing it or contemplating it, because you’re taking the road less travelled, and you’re going to find that you get a major marketing edge as a result of educating your clients in this way. Okay. So what we’re going to go through this morning, here’s our quick agenda. We’re going to talk about having a webinar plan, just taking half an hour out before you do a webinar to think about why am I doing this webinar, what’s my client’s objectives, what value are they going to get, and therefore, what will my marketing messages be?

Viv Brownrigg:

Charles is going to take you through five important elements of webinar marketing, and I’m going to take you through crafting that webinar invite so that you actually get people to open that email and click through and register for the webinar. We’re then going to talk about some additional tips to boost attendance, and then we’re going to go into what I like to call post-webinar marketing. In other words, a webinar recording is the marketing gift that just keeps giving. So when you’ve finished the actual live webinar, your marketing has not finished. In fact, some would say it’s only just begun, because there’s a lot of ways you can reuse and repurpose that recording to actually get a great return on what you’re doing. And of course, we’re going to have a Q&A session at the end, but please put your questions in as you go so that while you’re thinking about that issue, it’s hot in your mind, get it out there. Okay. So why do we need to do a webinar plan?

Viv Brownrigg:

It’s really important that we have a webinar plan, because this is going to define our marketing and it’s going to define our marketing strategy. The first thing we want to be very clear on is, what are our clients’ objectives, what do we want to teach our clients as a result of this webinar, and where is the value for them, and then we can craft our messages around those objectives and those points of value. But at the same time, want to make sure that you get an ROI from your webinar efforts, so what are your goals? Is one of your goals to attract more leads and bring them into the fold as a result of them coming to your webinars? Is it to actually get sales outcomes, and if so, which services are we going to actually position during the webinar? And then of course, we need to define what our promotion strategy is going to be, and then we need to break it down into marketing activities. So what I’m just actually do now is, I’m just going to go into the portal, and hopefully, Charles, it works this time. You can see that.

Charles Clark:

I can see it clearly.

Viv Brownrigg:

Lovely. So I’m just going to go into… This is our webinar section in the portal. A lot of you on the line this morning are Gap firms, and so you’ll be very familiar with this. I’m just going to go into the know your numbers webinar, and I’m just going to go down and we’re going to have a look at what I mean by the webinar plan. Now in the portal, these templates are all set up for you, and it’s just a case of you populating a couple of other things in there. So client objectives, these are the things that your client learns, but the client points of value are something else. The points of value are the things that are going to make your clients more money, or help them to have better cash for low, get more time off away from the business, make better decisions, actually in some way, shape or form improve their business or improve their lifestyle.

Viv Brownrigg:

You’re going to slot in here your webinar goals. It might be sales outcomes with a dollar figure attached, it might be the number of new leads that you want to attract into your database, your target market, your positioning, your promotion strategy, local business networks, email campaigns, website, blog, and social media. And then we’re in the marketing phase, and we’re going to actually plan out our email campaign, who’s doing what, when.

Viv Brownrigg:

Now, don’t be put off by this kind of three weeks out mentality. For certain topics, evergreen topics, yes, you can and will plan a webinar two or three weeks in advance, but for very dynamic topics… And I’m very aware that the UK’s heading into lockdown this Thursday, that you may need to do a sudden webinar on additional government support, for example, you might actually do your marketing three days before the webinar, because you just want to get out there. So so on and so forth, and then of course here we have our marketing activity overview.

Viv Brownrigg:

So really, with the amount of work that we’ve put into the portal, you’re going to find that half an hour, 45 minutes tops, you’ve got your webinar plan and you know where you’re headed. So I’ll just go back to my slides. Everything worked. I’m breathing again, Charles. So over to you, Charles. And Charles is going to talk to you about the five elements of webinar marketing.

Charles Clark:

Great. Thanks, Viv. So as you saw probably in the portal, there was a line that had these elements in there, and obviously then the plans that were structured in there. The nice thing with BOMA is that you can use BOMA to send out a lot of those elements. Before we get started, what we’ve done here is basically break it down to the five key parts. I suppose the first and second one are absolutely non-negotiable, and the third one, fourth one, fifth one, obviously the more time you have, the more likely it is that you can do more of these. But as Viv said, if you are suddenly doing one in a very short amount of time, then you might only do the first two of these just in the urgency to get it out and connect with your audience.

Charles Clark:

So in terms of the first one, the registration page, the great thing about the webinar software these days is that it comes with the registration page included. So when you set up the webinar for the first time, it will automatically create a registration page for you. So this will come in two forms. Firstly, it’ll come in the form of a URL, and you can put this into your email in a call to action button, you can put it into your social posts, if you’re doing those, you can even maybe go a bit further if you wanted to, and actually embed it onto your website if you wanted to connect it more closely to your brand and what you’re doing. Other things to think about in terms of brand on that registration page, that mostly they enable you to actually upload a brand logo.

Charles Clark:

So just a nice touch if people are coming to your registration page, especially if it’s just a standalone. So it’s not actually on your website, it’s just a nice identifier for them. Communicating the key information. So likewise, compared to an email or a social post where it’s all about being super concise and brief, especially in social, on a registration page you’re able to go a little bit more in depth. So you can talk to a little bit more about what value the webinar is going to deliver, maybe talk about the agenda. Really you’re able to give quite a fullsome description of the value that they’ll be getting, so you have to really sell in the opportunity that the attendees will have.

Charles Clark:

Time and date will always be added automatically to a registration page, but we find it’s always a good idea just to manually write that in somewhere obvious, again, just to reinforce it, because people don’t always see the automatic time and date. They can be in a bit of a funny spot, depending on which software you are using. In terms of the registration fields, so our advice is always to keep this concise. So really what’s the minimum amount of information that I can ask to get what I need. So that would be first name, last name, company, and email.

Charles Clark:

Everyone is pretty happy giving these out. It’s not necessarily any personal information like a phone number or anything like that. You obviously can ask more information, but just be aware that the more information you ask for, you can create a barrier to entry. Now, the idea here is that if someone registers for your webinar, you’ll have their email anyway, and so you can then, in the future, nurture them in other ways. So don’t necessarily stress about not getting information above first name, last name, company and email. The idea here is that this is maybe the beginning of a relationship or strengthening a relationship, and there’s always time to get those future activity. So oftentimes you won’t be doing the webinar alone. So Viv and I are doing this together.

Charles Clark:

You may be doing it with a colleague, you may be doing it with a guest from another business like Viv I are doing. So make sure that you always have a bio for the panellists. So it’s a great way to make it look professional, and also serves as a useful introduction for yourself, but also any guests and other panellists that you’re having on, and also for the viewer maybe gives a bit of an insight into the background and why you’ve invited that person on in the first place, given the topic that you’re going to be covering. Now, the last thing that we… And this is something that Viv and I have really, I suppose through trial and error, found, is that when you have the registration page, it’s a golden opportunity to run, I suppose, a small poll, or just ask a couple of questions.

Charles Clark:

And the point here is that, you can gather some insights ahead of your webinar, and you can then use those insights, firstly, to maybe craft the webinar. You might get some insights that surprise you. You might need to slightly change the webinar, maybe to reflect the views that you’re getting back, maybe the state of mind that you’re seeing that your audience are having. And secondly, you can then use those answers maybe in some promotional activities, which we’ll cover in a few minutes.

Charles Clark:

So email invites. So as I said before, if you only had two days to get out a webinar, and you did the registration page, then email is absolutely the only other thing that you really need to do. Why is it so critical? So we find that we get the highest ROI of any of our promotional channels through email. So by and large, we get 90% through email. So there’s a couple of reasons why this is. Firstly, it has incredible reach, and it’s also permission-based. So you’ve got a database of people who have indicated that they’re happy to hear from you, and also they’re very willing to hear in an email message for things that you’re promoting. So they check it regularly, it’s permission-based, and they like receiving promotional messages in email. Also, you can personalise your message.

Charles Clark:

So that’s something that you can’t really do on social media. You have to be a bit more generic in your messaging. Email, you can address it directly to that person. Even better… And we’ll talk about this a little bit later in the webinar, if you’re doing a specific webinar that’s maybe only relevant to a specific section of your audience, you can then, using segmentation of your email database, make it hyper, hyper relevant for them. And one example might be with say agricultural clients, you can then, knowing that you’ve segmented your email database, make the pitch, the topic, the value that you’re adding hyper relevant to your agricultural clients, whereas if you maybe were going out on social media, you don’t know who’s going to see it, so it might be that you are not able to be as specific as an email.

Charles Clark:

So having just said that email is really the only thing that you needed to do if you were pushed for time, that doesn’t mean that social media isn’t also really effective, and there’s a couple of reasons for this. So firstly, you will have possibly one or maybe more social channels, and we know that it can be quite hard to always be having activity on your social channels. So think of a webinar and the invites that you can do, the updates you can do as just another part of, I suppose, your content strategy. So it contributes to your feed activity, it also showcases what you’re doing, that you’re active in the community, that you’re adding value, that you’re doing things for your clients and your followers, and things that will deliver them insight and value on specific topics. Also, we often find that accountants will have people who follow them who maybe aren’t at the moment clients or aren’t at the moment in their database.

Charles Clark:

So it’s a way to reach people who haven’t necessarily taken that next step and given you their email address, either through in-person or through another activity. So you can reach new audiences and maybe start to nurture them and really build up that relationship, which hopefully down the track will lead to a sales conversation. Also, you can reach brand new audiences. So we all know that you can do advertising on social media. So if you wanted to, you can actually create a post, and then boost it, or you could create an ad, and then really put some targeting behind it, and really reach out to audiences that you’re interested in. For example… And I’ll just use the agricultural one, you could then target people who are interested in the types of things that would indicate that they were in the agricultural industry.

Charles Clark:

In terms of posting and when to post, whatever social channels you have, so be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, you might be on some other ones as well, whatever you have, I’d highly recommend posting it across all of them. And in terms of when to post, think about your email invites, and they might go out two or three weeks in advance, and you could mimic that on social. So you can send the first invite or the first update on social out three weeks, and then you might do a reminder about two weeks out in advance of the webinar. The only thing to point out when it comes to using different channels, Facebook and LinkedIn, and I suppose Instagram, you’ve got fairly much unlimited text. Twitter, you’ve only got 220 characters, so you might need just to shorten the post.

Charles Clark:

A couple of other things that you might want to think about in terms of some tips. So if you are doing a social post, make sure that you’ve got a banner. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a super fantastically designed banner, but it should have a couple of key things. So it could have photos of the presenters, it could have the title of the webinar, it could have the date, and maybe a one liner which sparks interest. If you’re using hashtags, that could be for your own company, it could be for maybe a guest that you’re having on, you could also tag them in a post. And also think about using a link shortener like Bitly. So this, in effect, just takes a really long URL, and shortens it down to 10 or 15 characters, which if you’re using Twitter especially, but even the other channels, just makes it look a lot tidier and a lot more professional.

Charles Clark:

Also, another thing to think about is that you can also do some posts in the hours before. So if you’re doing the webinar in the mid-afternoon, you could do a couple of posts in the morning, maybe tagging the people that you’re presenting with, just counting down, I suppose trying to tease and excite, because you never know who you’re going to get in the hours before the webinar actually launches.

Charles Clark:

So in terms of blogs and articles, this is, I suppose, a little bit more of a longer play. And this is, I suppose, the opportunity to set the scene, start the conversation in advance of the webinar. As Viv said, if you are doing something super last minute and it’s two or three days out, then maybe you won’t have a chance to do this, but if you have planned it and it’s two or three weeks out, maybe a month out or five or six weeks out, you might say, well, look, I’m actually going to do some content that supports the webinar topic. So an idea here might be if you’re doing a webinar on cashflow freedom. So you could actually queue up seven causes of poor cash flow series of articles and say they’re in The Gap, and they pull through into BOMA.

Charles Clark:

You could queue those all up, and you could actually have them posted out on social, out in your newsletters in the weeks before. And the idea here is that you really start to, I suppose, sew interest levels, get the conversations started. Especially on social, people might be commenting. And then when you send out the corresponding invitations, you’ve already wetted their appetite, and you might find that there’s a bit of crossover and people start, oh yes, I’ve been following that topic for a while, now you’re going to tell me the real insights, and I’ll sign up for it.

Charles Clark:

So lastly, in terms of referral partners. So the things that we’ve talked about first, the first four steps of marketing webinar, that’s really very much all on you, but let’s not forget that you guys often have fantastic networks and great referral partners. So as we’ve said here, the banks associations, lawyers, business associations, tech providers, these are all within your network, and you will be surprised at how many of them will be interested in, I suppose, letting their clients, their database know of your webinars, if you ask them to. So the great thing here is that it will not only boost your webinar, but may also introduce leads for you into your database, which you can then nurture and have those conversations further down the track. One point here is… And Viv through, I think, a lot of trial and error and experience, has very firmly stated that you can’t rely on them to do any of the work.

Charles Clark:

So you really need to do it all for them. And look, it makes perfect sense. They’re doing almost you a favour, so try and make it as easy as possible for them. So let’s organise everything in advance for them. So send them a suggested marketing email with links to the registration page. So this isn’t an email from you to their clients, it’s an email from them to their clients about why they recommend their clients to the webinar, and why you’re a trusted partner to their company. And then after that sort of introduction, you can just do the main email invitation as follows. You might also want to talk about when you’re going to be sending out these emails and maybe social posts, have a look at your diaries, and then maybe make sure that you aren’t stepping on each other’s toes.

Charles Clark:

So if you’re going to send one out on Tuesday, make sure that they’re going to maybe wait a day or two before they send one out. And the idea here is obviously to, I suppose, try and maximise the spread. And if you do have any of the same clients, then you won’t be bombarding them on the same day. And lastly, ask if you can be added to the database so that you can see the marketing go out. Great to see, A, that they’ve done it, and also to see how they did it, because that’s always an interesting thing just to see how they’re talking about you. They may give some insights or perspective that you hadn’t necessarily considered. So Viv, I’ll hand back to you now.

Viv Brownrigg:

Thanks, Charles. Okay. So let’s talk about constructing the magic email that’s going to get the bums on seats. Really important. And the shorter, the better. People have got small attention spans now, and if you occupy a screen or three quarters of a screen, you’re just going to lose them. So less is absolutely more. So how do we construct it? We have a bit of a formula, and we do mix it up sometimes and do something a little bit off pieced, but generally speaking, we stick a little bit to this formula. Good, compelling, short subject line, really important, because you want them to open the email, and then starts off with a strong opening statement. That’s kind of your why, that’s why you’re taking a stand for this particular piece of education, why you believe this webinar is important to your business community.

Viv Brownrigg:

And then we move into the body of the email, three to five points of value, bulleted list or a numbered list points of value. Not long paragraphs, so short paragraphs. If you’re going to provide any giveaways to those who attend the webinar… It could be an ebook, could be a checklist, it could be a particular tool, then make sure you make it super clear in your email invite that those who attend will get X, Y, Z, because that just adds some marketing weight to your email. Then of course the call to action book now, and link to the registration page. Nice wrap up and sign off. So let’s just look at that in a little bit more detail, and then we’ll look at some examples. So some really simple writing rules, really simple stuff. The first one is to use what I call contractions.

Viv Brownrigg:

I’m not talking about going into labour here. We’ve got a couple of people pregnant at The Gap at the moment, so we seem to have… I think we’ve got our third Gap baby on the way in a couple of months time. So what I mean by contractions is, instead of saying you are, you are becomes you’re. And it’s just more powerful, it’s shorter. You’re trimming the words. The second one is to use the active voice, and what I mean by that is the active voice is the doing voice. So instead of saying, better business decisions will be made, that’s using the passive voice. The active voice is when you turn that around and say, you’ll make better business decisions. Now, by using the active voice, you’re actually talking to your audience and you’re putting them in the driving seat. That’s quite powerful from their perspective.

Viv Brownrigg:

Thirdly, use really short paragraphs. Less is more. Use bulleted and numbered lists, so you’re making it easy on their eye, you’re not making it hard and tiring to read this epistle of an email. And number four, add images. Now this is super easy if you’re a BOMA and Gap subscriber. You can hit that email link within the portal, within those webinar badges and go straight into the BOMA platform. You can change up those images, you can change the title, you can change the text now of that email, and you can make sure it’s sounding a bit more like you. Number six, don’t use accountanese. We need to speak in the language of small business, not in the accountant’s language. And number seven, really important, use the appropriate tone and voice, and I want you to think a little bit about what is your digital voice.

Viv Brownrigg:

Our digital voice here at The Gap, everyone knows what it is. It’s fun, frank and modern. And so whenever anyone writes something, whether it’s a blog, whether it’s a marketing piece, whether it’s an email, and it’s not in the right tone, it’s not using our digital voice, our content department rip it to shreds and fix it up. So what is your digital voice? So let’s go in and have a look now at a couple of examples. Now, this first one is straight out of our Know Your Numbers webinar, which I was in just before, and this is the initial email. Hi Tina. And here’s our why. You don’t have to be an accountant or bookkeeper to understand your numbers, just as you don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but having an overall understanding of financial reports puts you in a far stronger position to make better decisions.

Viv Brownrigg:

So that’s the why. Know your numbers, you’ll make better decisions. So here’s the call to action. Join us, complimentary webinar. Here’s the five point of value. Here’s our giveaway. We’ll give you a copy of our ebook, A Guide to Your Financial Reports. Secure your seat now, and see you there. So that’s an example of the initial webinar, and you can see it’s really short and it’s really punchy, and every spare word has been trimmed out. If you can say something in seven words instead of 10, say it in seven. Here’s the next email invite maybe a week later. Want to understand… Different subject line. Now, the content, the messages are actually the same, but the words are different. So don’t miss our upcoming webinar. After attending this, you’ll be able to… So there’s different points of value just reworded slightly. You’ll also get a copy. Register now. See you there.

Viv Brownrigg:

So it’s actually the same message. It’s just written in different words. That way, you’re not just sending out the same email again. It’s a different email. Nobody’s going to go, oh, I saw that last week, delete. It’s a different one. Here’s a reminder to those who have registered. Send that a couple of days before. Now, most webinar platforms like Zoom, GoTo Webinar will do the auto reminder a day before, and I think an hour before as well, but this is, hey, you’ve registered, don’t forget to come, block it out in your calendar, download the workbook, arrive a bit early so you’re not fumbling around, figuring out how to get in, and start thinking about what questions you want answered.

Viv Brownrigg:

So you’re just priming them to get involved, to get engaged in the webinar. So those are just some examples, but really easy, if you just grab hold of The Gap emails for your webinars, and just use that as your formula, and then just dial it up a little bit with changing the images, maybe changing the title and applying a little bit more of your digital voice, so it’s kind of a bit more you. Okay, Charles, over to you.

Charles Clark:

Sorry about that. So tips to boost attendance. So what we’ve got here, I suppose, is a two part, and it’s tips to boost attendance in terms of making sure that the people who registered a couple of weeks before maybe turn up, but also taking advantage of the fact that sometimes people don’t like to plan, and if you put something in front of them that gives them a sense of urgency and immediacy, then you can actually get them to convert. And we’ve actually had real success with this. So maybe the day before, we’ll send out an email, and oftentimes we’ll see that people who, the first two emails, they didn’t sign up, the last one gets them, and that’s because they didn’t want to think too far in advance, they weren’t sure if they were going to be free, but they’re like, oh yep, I know that tomorrow I will be free, this sounds interesting, and they’ll click on the registration link.

Charles Clark:

Excuse me. So as Viv said, sending out those email invites, really, really important. And this goes for social as well. So you can do social reminders the day before, and even the morning of it, as we sort of said earlier. Email reminders the hour before are also really important. So for this morning, I sent out the reminder about half an hour before, and it had a link to the webinar, which is really important, because for those of you, maybe you registered a couple of weeks ago, maybe you just registered a couple of days ago, you may have misplaced that original email. We know how busy inboxes get, so to have the registration link right in front of you half an hour, an hour before the webinar just means that you don’t have to muck around trying to find it. And so this will actually help get bums on seats, because you don’t have then people missing out saying, oh, I didn’t know where I put that original email.

Charles Clark:

In terms of the registration polls and questions, so we talked about these earlier, they are really good if you can then include them in some of your social reminders or even invite reminders or email reminders. So you might have some insight, you might have some unexpected results, and you can actually include those in your social work, in your social place, you could even include them in a 30 second highlight video that you then post to social, just to create that interest, tease the webinar, tease the fact that actually there will be some really interesting insights that maybe speak to other members of your audience. In terms of recording that short video, look, how fantastic is it that we all have our iPhones or our Android phones? these are almost like a sort of a recording camera in your pocket, and you can do high quality or definitely high enough quality to do a 30 second highlight video and send it to social.

Charles Clark:

So you can either just record it straight to your phone, or there are some different softwares out there. We use Loom quite a lot. That’s really good, and you can just record it, and edit it, and post it to social really, really easily. And again, this is just a different way to talk about the same thing, but in a different way. As Viv was saying earlier, it just creates, I suppose, a change in the messaging, even though you’re getting them to do the same thing. And also just take a minute to remind them of what they’ll get if they come along, so whether it was an ebook or a guide or some special offer. Again, it’s just something that may just help entice them either to sign up and registering, or making sure that they do attend the webinar. So Viv, I’ll hand back to you.

Viv Brownrigg:

Thank you, Charles. Okay. So post-event marketing. So you’ve done the webinar, but your marketing’s actually probably just starting for that webinar, because that webinar recording is gold, and it’s the gift that will absolutely keep giving, but only if you do something with it. So obviously record your webinars. And the question is, how are we going to reuse and repurpose those webinars? The first natural thing to do is to email the recording to all registrants, whether they attended or not. Now, some of the people that didn’t attend, they may have lost the email, something may have happened to them in that day and they just couldn’t get there. Hopefully they’ll listen to the recording, and it may actually spark their interest. They may contact you. That could lead to them actually getting some additional service from you. And obviously include any links to any webinar giveaways as well, eBooks, tools, et cetera in that email. But I just want to point out that not all of your clients want to actually come to a live webinar.

Viv Brownrigg:

There are plenty of people out there who prefer to digest content in their own way, at their own time and on their own terms, and they don’t want to be in a live environment, and this is why it’s really important that we do repurpose the video recordings. Okay. So another thing that we can do is, we can turn that webinar recording, could be 45 minutes, into shorter segments. So break it into three natural parts, part one, part two, part three. Give each one a name, and now you’ve got three marketing assets. It might be a five minute video, and that’s just so much easier for people to digest, because it takes less time. So being prepared to give smaller videos to people who like to digest smaller amounts of content in one bite, if you like.

Viv Brownrigg:

And a little tip, if you’re presenting at a webinar that gives you this opportunity, notice where a natural segment might start and end in the webinar, make sure there’s a nice placeholder slide there, so there’s a nice natural beginning and ending, and as a presenter, just pause for a few seconds there, because when somebody comes to edit that video and cut it into three, it’s not going to finish abruptly, it’s all going to be quite elegant. So you can turn a webinar recording into three parts, or what you could do for future marketing is take some highlights out of the recording and use that as a one minute video or a 30 second video to promote the webinar next time you want to run it. Now, most of us really only have a stock of 10, 15, maybe less webinars that’s evergreen type of content that we’re recycling month in, month out. Sure, we have our dynamic webinars that we may not be able to use again and repurpose, but most of our webinars are evergreen.

Viv Brownrigg:

So you’ve got the opportunity to create a highlight reel, so you can promote that same webinar when you run it in the future. Very importantly, because this is where you’re going to get additional views, it’s really important to load that recording, if you’ve got a resources page in your website, to load that recording to your resources page. Now, if you don’t have a resources page in your website, pretty easy to set one up, and make sure that you’re constantly turning over the recording so that your most recent webinar recording is at the top of your resources page, it’s the newest content. And make sure there’s a lead capture form there. So there’s your opportunity to capture new leads, bring them into your database, bring them into the fold. They’ll come to the next webinar. Four or five interactions later, they may become a client. And of course you’ve got to remember that a lot of the people visiting your website, 90% of the people visiting your website, unless you drive an existing customer to the website, most of the people coming to your website are leads, they’re not existing clients.

Viv Brownrigg:

Obviously, share the recording on your social channels. Instagram’s starting to make a little bit of a play in the accounting industry, great for videos. Some firms have set up channels on YouTube or Vimeo, and we’re starting to see a couple of firms create a podcast series. And so they’re just repurposing their webinar recordings, audio only, and perhaps looking at Spotify as a channel. We’ve got a couple of firms doing that right now. So there’s a tonne of ways that you can keep get that marketing asset continue to give you a marketing ROI in the months and even years to come. Let’s have a look at a couple of examples of that where people have turned these recording into real marketing assets. So here’s an Auckland firm, their business continuity plan. Webinar recording up on their website with a lead capture form.

Viv Brownrigg:

Here’s an example, John Skoll from Malloch McClean in Invercargill in New Zealand, and he’s done a recording on his smartphone. Little tip here, if you’re going to use your smartphone to do a recording, hold the phone up on landscape, and you won’t get these black edges, just to look a little bit more elegant. So John posted that in Facebook as a enticement to actually watch that recording. So this was after the webinar. Here’s Pink Pig Financials. They’ve got a channel on YouTube, so they’re posting up their videos there. And here’s one of the first firms to actually set up a podcast, and they’re setting up their webinar recordings in their podcast series, and they call it Two Drunk Accountants, which I think is an absolutely fantastic name for a podcast series.

Viv Brownrigg:

So some really innovative stuff starting to happen, and it’s actually becoming easier and easier to do it. Don’t get fancy about your webinar recordings, top and tail them. Take the dross at the beginning, how to use Zoom, whatever, out, and take any chit chat at the end out. It’s really easy to do, and you’ve trimmed your vide, and don’t spend hours pouring over trying to edit out ums and ahs. Nobody cares about that stuff, do they, Charles?

Charles Clark:

No.

Viv Brownrigg:

Okay. Now, I know there’s some questions there, so Charles, what questions do we have?

Charles Clark:

Great. So a good question came in, and so it’s what is the best day, best time to send out these, I suppose, invitation emails?

Viv Brownrigg:

Yeah. Good question. Okay. So long story short, Monday doesn’t seem to work very well, end of the week doesn’t seem to work very well either, Friday doesn’t seem to work. Tuesdays and Wednesdays for us… I don’t know want you think Charles, but Tuesdays and Wednesdays for us seem to work better, and we tend to send them out around 10:00-10:30 in the morning, according to each country’s time zone, the theory being that people are having their second cup of coffee, and you might just reach them at a down moment. Now, there’s a bit of art and science behind this.

Viv Brownrigg:

The reason why we don’t tend to send them towards the end of the week is because we think that an email’s got a tail or a life cycle of about three days in it, and you’ll get most of your hits from a marketing email in the first three days, you’ll get 80, 90% of them, and then it just trails off, so the tail, so it dies, it’s past its use by date. The only exception to the rule would be if you’ve got a particular sector of clients that you think it might be better to email them in the evening. So for example, if you’ve got farming clients, they’re not going to look at it during the day, they’re out on the farm. They might be doing the paperwork, catching up on their emails at night. It just depends on your clients, but Tuesday, Wednesdays in the morning. What do you reckon, Charles?

Charles Clark:

Yeah. No, look, I thoroughly agree. I think, as you say, if you send something end of the week, by the time Monday rolls around, it’s buried beneath 400 other emails, so you’ll miss out. So I think, yeah, exactly, Tuesday, Wednesday are definitely the best. Interesting question about podcasting. So repurposing for podcasting, is this to be streamed on big platforms like Apple? And I think you mentioned obviously Spotify, Viv. Are there costs involved? Do you have a subscription? I know that we’ve done this a couple of times, and we worked with a software… And the name escapes me, but basically that allowed us to convert video files to audio, and then we had an account with iTunes, and we uploaded it to that. So we actually created a channel on Apple iTunes. But I think you said your clients are doing it as well, Viv.

Viv Brownrigg:

Yeah. Yeah, Spotify. And by the way, most editing software, whether you’re using Camtasia or the Adobe Creative Suite, when you edit that video, you can convert it to audio only. So I haven’t done it myself personally, but I’m told, Jade tells me it’s really easy to do.

Charles Clark:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, and that’s a good point. In terms of editing your videos, as Viv said, it doesn’t need to be anything special. One thing I would recommend in terms of the topping and tailing, if you do have a designer maybe on call, and you could get them just to create a five second intro and a five second outro, and it maybe would just have your brand comes up with your tagline, and then… So you can always just put that top and tail, and then you can put the video recording in the middle. That’s just a super, super easy way to neatly package up a video webinar. And then wherever you happen to start the video, it just always looks nice because you’ve put your brand and your messaging beforehand.

Viv Brownrigg:

And just on that very… I’m not finishing the webinar right now, please don’t go, but we always put a tailing slide on all of our webinars for that reason, Charles, and the webinar kits that we’ve got in The Gap portal, for that very reason, just to… Wherever you can make life easier for yourself when it comes to editing, the better.

Charles Clark:

No, great point. Another question, really good one is, how long should the presentation be? Do we have to keep it under 45 minutes? Can it be shorter? And I think Viv, we know it definitely can be shorter, depending on what your topic is.

Viv Brownrigg:

Depends on your audience, depends on your topic. And so, for example, we’re about to publish a couple of webinar kits on governance. One of those webinars is designed to be 25 minutes long. Because when you’ve finished what you need to say, you need to stop. So there’s no rule. There’s absolutely no rule of thumb here. What I will say is that people’s appetites for long webinars is diminishing, even in the accounting profession. Now, I’ve been doing webinars to the profession for 17 years in previous business lives before The Gap, and we used to do one and a half hour webinars, and then we turned them into 75 minute webinars, and now we’re into 60 minute webinars and sometimes 45 minute webinars. So we need to say it quicker, and we need to get to the point, and we need to let people be able to get on with their lives. So shorter is a little bit better.

Charles Clark:

And then, look, I’ll just go through the two last questions. So a general question, is it possible to get printer-friendly workbooks? So Ian, in the instructions on the title page of the workbook, there should be instructions on how to download it to your laptop or desktop, and from there, you should be able to print it out without too much difficulty. And then the last one was, if we create an e-book from The Gap and BOMA content, who has the copyright? I’m just wondering how it fits ongoing usage of the material. Well, that’s a very good question.

Viv Brownrigg:

Okay. So I can answer that from a Gap perspective. I was actually having to fix a couple of little tiny things in our licence agreement. I know our licence agreement a little off by heart. IP is a really interesting issue. If the content is substantially the same, then the IP resides with The Gap. However, your licence agreement makes it super clear that you are free and able to use that IP with your clients, because that’s the whole point of subscribing to The Gap, is that we do this for you and save you all that time and money. However, when you’re no longer a Gap firm, you can’t use that IP if it’s substantially similar to the IP that we licensed to you. Does that make sense, Charles, what I just said?

Charles Clark:

Yeah, it does. And I think from the BOMA’s perspective, where we have partnerships like with The Gap or Xero, there’s obviously specific licencing agreements there. And you’ll see when you’re in the BOMA product, we actually specify where you can use it. So in the actual piece of content, it’ll say you can use this in email, social, and sometimes it will also say you can use it on your website as well. Because as Viv said, if you’ve gone in there and completely changed things and made it your own, and almost no longer resembles what we had, then obviously that’s a different kettle of fish. And our content is obviously a little bit different from The Gap’s. It’s more, I suppose, informing, whereas The Gap’s is more, I suppose, business development, and so there’s more IP in there.

Viv Brownrigg:

Yeah. But we want to encourage you to repurpose the content because that’s why you subscribe to us. I guess any customer just has to respect intellectual property. We’ve put 70,000 hours into this content, we don’t want it to disappear into all sorts of places that it maybe shouldn’t be. But enough said on that. Look, before everyone disappears, just a reminder as you exit the webinar, there’s a simple exit survey there, which you can now do in Zoom, which is a relatively new thing. So there’s just four questions in there. Please give us the feedback. It’s super important to us. No more questions Charles before I wrap up? Just one?

Charles Clark:

No, that was it. Just back to Ian in terms of getting workbooks that don’t use up all the printer ink. Well, we’ve got the images in there just so you can obviously have the context with the slides and take notes, so I’m not exactly sure, maybe if you download them to your desktop and just type the notes in, and then just keep them digital maybe would be one way to save printer ink. And then just the very last one, just because it just came in, is how do you do a poll? So look, I can answer this from a Zoom perspective. Maybe Viv, you’ve got more insight on GoTo Webinar. So in Zoom when you set up a webinar, and you can go down, and there’s basically a set of… At the very bottom of the page, you’ve got the invitation branding and survey polls and a couple of other, I suppose, subheadings.

Charles Clark:

If you go into the polls, you can actually then create a poll and you basically design it up. So you ask the question, you choose whether it’s a multi-choice, a yes or a no, or you’re wanting sort of a short text answer, and you can create multiple questions. And then when you’re in the webinar, you can actually… There’s a little button, at least in Zoom, which says polling. If you click on the button, then you can decide when you want to launch the poll. And even better, you can see the results as they come in, and then if you want to, you can actually share those results to your viewers’ live, which is really, really interesting. And also, when you finish the webinar, you can actually download those poll results. So a really interesting way to get some more insight about what your audience are thinking and how they’re viewing a particular topic.

Viv Brownrigg:

And Charles, we will definitely be covering that. That’s a nice segue into next steps, because the second part in this three part series is Getting the Tech Right on Tuesday, 10th of November. That’ll be Cat and Jade from BOMA and The Gap. And we’ll be covering things like polls, including how to do instant poles using… So you can create word clouds using things like Mentimeter. So it’s a lot of engagement tools that you can use. You don’t want to overdo it, because you can actually end up getting yourself in a bit of a pickle and distracting people, but used wisely and sparingly, polls can work really, really well. So next steps guys. For those of you who aren’t doing webinars yet, get onto that road less travelled. It really works to capture leads and to really look after your clients and to get better engagement in business development services.

Viv Brownrigg:

So get thinking about your webinar rollout plan. Make sure you use The Gap webinar kits. We’re getting one or two out there a month at the moment, and the latest one is all about reclaiming your time. Make sure you get along to the next part in our three part series. The third part is all about presentation and engagement, and that’s the one I think that scares people the most. So guys, thank you so much for coming. Charles, thank you for being my co-presenter. I really enjoyed it. And thank you to BOMA, because our partnership is a really successful one and we are growing together, which is awesome. So thanks guys. Have a good rest of the day there in UK and France and Germany and wherever else you came from. It was lovely to talk to you this morning. Bye for now.

Charles Clark:

Brilliant. And thanks again for everyone. Have a great day.