How does a small, 25 person SaaS company regularly attract 700+ registrants to its webinars?
Andre van den Assum
This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast my guest is Andre van den Assum, the Marketing and Partnerships Manager for Wipster, a cloud-based a video workflow collaboration review platform. I had heard from a colleague that Wipster was absolutely killing it with its webinars and was excited to talk with Andre about how he consistently generates such large numbers of attendees.
Our conversation gets super detailed, with specifics on how much Wipster spends on paid media (TL;DR – not much), what the click-through rate is on their email newsletter, how long their promotional timeline is for each webinar, and the percent of leads they get from each marketing channel.
This week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live, the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with keynote speakers including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel.
Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code “SUCCESS”.
Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live
Some highlights from my conversation with Andre include:
Wipster is a video workflow collaboration review platform. The company currently has 25 employees with offices in New Zealand and Portland, Oregon.
They have thousands of customers around the world, including big brands like Disney, Red Bull, Shopify and Delta Airlines, and many smaller brands as well.
Wipster regularly gets hundreds of registrants for its webinars, which it typically produces with partners.
They get many of their webinar leads from email marketing, and typically include a promotional video about the webinar in their emails.
One channel they use for email promotion is their newsletter, which goes out to 40,000 people that has a 25% open rate.
Their webinar marketing campaigns typically last two weeks.
For a recent webinar on which Wipster partnered with Brightcove Deloitte, 50% of the registrations came from email marketing (12% were from promotions in Wipster’s email newsletter), and out of 1100 total webinar registrations, Wipster drove 700 of those (with the remaining 400 from Brightcove).
10% of their webinar leads come from social media.
For one webinar, Wipster advertised in Marketing Profs’ email newsletter. The cost for that campaign was $3,000 and the newsletter went to a list of 13,000. That yielded 120 leads at $24 a lead.
Wipster posts all of its webinars to its YouTube channel, where they typically attract 600+ views each.
Resources from this episode:
Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code “SUCCESS”
Register for IMPACT’s upcoming webinar with Wipster on Make Better Videos In-House: How to Create Consistent Video Production
Visit Wipster’s website
Subscribe to the Wipster Weekly newsletter
Wipster’s YouTube channel
Wipster Stars Facebook Group
Connect with Andre van den Assum on LinkedIn
Listen to the podcast to learn all about the marketing campaigns and tactics that regularly attract 700+ attendees to Wipster’s webinars.
Transcript
Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I’m your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Andre van den Assum, who is the marketing and partnerships manager at Wipster. Welcome, Andre.Andre van den Assum (Guest): Welcome. Yes. Hello. How’s it going?
Kathleen: Good. I feel like it’s hello from tomorrow because you are across the other side of the world, and it is the next day and sunny and beautiful where you are, and it is yesterday and freezing cold where I am.
Andre: You got it. We’re a little bit in the future here in New Zealand and it is the middle of summer for us so we’re kind of on the back of a nice middle of summer Christmas holiday break and just cracking 2019, so yeah, nice to be on your show. We’ve got some fun things coming up with IMPACT actually so this is nice to compliment that as well.
Kathleen: Yeah, it’s great and I’m excited to have you here and for anybody who’s listening, you can’t see, I’m looking at Andre through the video and he’s sitting outside and the trees are blowing in the warm New Zealand breeze and there’s like, water in the background, it’s really stunning. And I’m sitting in the 20 degree weather in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States thinking, “What am I doing here?” So if you’re listening you can always go to the show notes and I have a picture in there of the two of us recording so you can see-
Andre: If it makes you feel better the roles reverse in June, July and we have a team in Portland and the same thing happens, you know?
Kathleen: We all have our turn.
Andre: They’re all off to festivals and beaches and we’re freezing down in New Zealand at the bottom of the South Pacific so don’t worry.
Kathleen: Well it still sounds like a great place to be.
About Wipster
Kathleen: So for anyone who’s not familiar with Wipster who doesn’t know who you are could you tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself and about the company?
Andre: Absolutely! So I’ve been with Wipster for almost five years now, I was employee number five and we’ve got about 25 of us now.
We’re a video workflow collaboration review platform. Born from the idea of a video producer/director who was kinda sick of chasing feedback with his clients and wondered why people can’t just comment directly on top of the video, so click on top of the frame, make your comment, kinda Google Docs for video, and so he went looking for that solution and it didn’t exist.
So we were the first people to kind of create a product where you could literally click on top of the frame. There’s a couple of others that do it now but we’re first to market about five years ago and it’s been an interesting journey over that time you know, going from kind of an idea, a spec, into a kind of fully fledged company.
I guess we’re still a start-up with 25 or so employees but we’ve got thousands of active users, thousands of customers. Some of the biggest brands around, you know, the Disneys of the world and the Red Bulls and Shopify and Delta Airlines and yeah, we’ve got a ton of big users but we’ve also got a bunch of small users, a bunch of agencies that use it for review and approval.
Something we’re seeing a lot of is some of that capability moving in-house so you know, we’re talking to more and more brands who are wanting to kind of scale their video and we can help them do that, you know, by speeding up their workflow, making it easier to pump out the video ’cause we’re not talking about kind of one video a month, we’re talking about you know, three or four or five videos a week ideally, and some of them even more than that.
So yeah, it’s been a fun journey and been kind of … Selling software as a service means you can do it from New Zealand at the bottom of the world but obviously we needed some people on the ground in the US so our founder moved over there and has built a team over there as well so yeah, it’s been quite a fun few years, you know, a bit of a rollercoaster but yeah, definitely very rewarding in trying a bunch of different digital marketing tactics along the way to kinda get our name out, you know, being from the bottom of the world to kind of getting that presence, you know, we’re in 150 countries or something like that as well, so it’s a pretty interesting time to be doing marketing and kinda trying to do this kind of thing I think.
Kathleen: Yeah, and as far as the product is concerned … So we use it, full disclosure for everybody listening, we’re a Wipster customer, and we have a video team at IMPACT, it’s a couple of people, and we do a ton of video. In fact, I was just up in our office last week and we must’ve shot, I mean, it’s close to a hundred videos in one week because we had a lot of people in from out of town so we wanted to maximize the time.
I first was exposed to Wipster really as somebody who provides feedback so our video team was like, “We have to use this platform,” and whenever we do a video they send it over to me and I get the link, I go into Wipster, and I’m able to just like, as you said, it is very much like Google Docs for video. I can just pop my comments in there and I’m not a technical person so it’s really nice because it makes it very, very easy for me to provide my input.
Andre: Yeah. Well, that’s how we got traction from the get-go was kind of making a tool that was just very easy to use.
The editors are kinda used to these big, complicated editing suites, Premiere Pro and stuff like that with a lot of buttons, but you know, when they’re sending it to their clients or their team members or the legal team or the exec team to get approval or feedback, they just wanna be able to click a link, watch the video in a very kind of simple, enjoyable kind of experience, just click on top, make videos.
And there’s quite a few things going on behind the scenes, you know, like we’ve got integrations with Adobe, with Slack, with all the publishing platforms, so we can kind of help the more technical people as well but in terms of the end user we try and make it as simple as possible and I think that’s what made us so successful so early on was just, it kind of just worked, you know?
Kathleen: Yeah. The simpler the better.
Andre: Yeah, that’s what software’s gotta be like these days, you know? I think there editing some big shifts and you know, you used to have to get a software team into the company carrying massive servers on their backs and all this hardware and the IT guys have gotta do all this year-long onboarding and all that kinda stuff. But that’s changed, the price point has changed, the experience has changed.
So yeah, so it’s nice to be part of that movement.
Wipster + Webinars
Kathleen: Now, one of the reasons I was looking forward to talking with you for this podcast is that you were chatting with a colleague of mine about us doing a webinar together, which we are going to do, so stay tuned if you’re listening, and I remember it was my colleague Vin and he said, “You know, you should talk to these guys at Wipster because they get a ton of people coming to their webinars.”
Webinars are so interesting to me, I’ll have to preface our conversation with this. In some respects they’re a dying marketing form because so many companies do them and I think people have become so used to webinars and so used to webinars especially that are recorded and they send you the recording afterwards and so people might sign up for them but then they never watch them ’cause they’re like, “Eh, it’ll come to my email inbox and I’ll watch it someday.” You know? And so there’s this element of folks being jaded by webinars and you know, having said that I think there are some people doing them really well.
You’re not a huge company as you mentioned. You’re 25 people, but you’re getting large numbers of people to your webinars. So I wanna dive in and learn more about what you’re doing and what’s the secret sauce behind these great results you’re getting.
Andre: It’s interesting because you’ve got all these different things that you can be doing as a digital marketer and you know, for us, you know, we’ve been doing webinars for a few years now and you know, it’s among other things managing all the social channels, doing all these big kind of product campaigns, doing events, doing more tactical campaigns, you know, ad words, all the rest of it, so you know, where do webinars fit in?
I think there was a point where we were kind of, you know, we wanted to kind of partner with more people in our ecosystem, other brands, other product services, and so when we called up these people we kinda went to the table with a bunch of ideas and were open to doing whatever with them. You know, might be events, might be, you know, we could do some blogging, you know, guest blogging on each other sites, you know, good for back links, good for awareness, maybe getting them to share some stuff in their newsletter.
So you know, we tried to think about all these things that we could do, even create some content for YouTube and stuff like that or you know, data content.
So there’s actually quite a few things you can do with someone but it was funny because it almost always would just keep coming back to webinars, that was the thing that kind of ticked all the boxes for both sides.
A webinar is something that when you approach someone, they already have their audience, they’re very protective of the community of the audience, they’re not gonna just be kind of sending anything you send them on to their audience, they’re the gatekeepers and when it comes to webinars, you know, the key is coming up with a really good topic, a topic that kind of speaks to both the audiences.
So I think the first thing we do is kind of figure out what the overlap is for both of us. You know, what are we both standing for and in the case of doing something with IMPACT, you guys are doing some amazing kind of consultancy work around helping brands scale their video.
You know, we happen to make a tool that helps them do that so let’s kind of talk about that.
It should never be salesy, so you know, I think part of the secret sauce is just coming up with something that people wanna click on that’s really, truly valuable when they click on it and learn something. So that actually can take a little bit of back and fro. I’ve even had to kind of can a webinar late in the planning phase because we just couldn’t quite come up with that … And that was a tough decision for me to say, “Look, you know, we’re just not quite aligned. You wanna talk more about this but that’s not really interesting to our audience. We wanna talk more about this but you don’t have enough leadership in that.”
So kind of to answer your question, the reason why we do things in the first place is because they’re really easy to share to both your communities, they both provide a lot of value to both those audiences, and they provide leads and bound leads, you know?
A lot of these other pieces of content doesn’t have a gate and a form like webinars do and it’s just natural to enter your email and sign up for these things. So therefore when you’re looking at kind of what the outcome is for both these companies, you know, you both get a nice list of leads and you both provide a lot of value to your audience and it’s very easy to share.
And then so once you’ve got a really good topic and once it kind of … You know, that’s gonna help massively and then there’s a few other things you can do to help drive them and one of ours is to have quite an active community, to have quite a big email database, you know, a good open rate, so that’s kind of some of the work we’ve done over the years to build that up that we can now go to with good content.
It’s quite traditional marketing really. We still get a big chunk of our leads through email.
Another one, which is kind of obvious for us, but make a video to promote that webinar.
When you look at the click through rates on the emails or even with our partners, we really tend to always overshoot their goals on what they kind of expect. And even when we have at times kind of brought less, you know, having not done a partnership and having to drive all the traffic ourselves, you know, gone through things like MarketingProfs and kind of sending out email blasts to 15,000 users, for them, you know, they come back, it has a thumbnail, so we create a GIF thumbnail with a play button on top and they’re like, “Oh, this is some of the best results we’ve had!” And that’s good topic, good copyrighting, and a video thumbnail to help drive it.
But yeah, we use our social channels. We have audiences across different social channels.
We have an in-app kind of pop-up that lets people know.
We have a newsletter that goes out to 40,000 people that has like a 25% open rate.
So it’s a combination of all these things, you know? Probably there’s no secret sauce on it – it’s a combination of value and you know, and finding something that kind of works for both you and some potential partners.
Kathleen: So taking a step back, you mentioned you start with really trying to figure out topics that will resonate with your audience. Tell me a little bit more about who your audience is.
Andre: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we stand for video, you know? We’re born out of video, out of making the video workflow easier, about helping people speed up their video workflow. So that’s the kind of things that we like to talk about.
The topics that come under that are kind of, you know, video marketing, or video ideas, creative ideas, you know, making videos for your clients, things like that.
Our audience is a few different types but our main audience is the video creative themselves, so the video editor, video producer, video director. They can be a freelancer, they can be working for a small production company or an agency, they can be in a brand, you know, be an in-house team for a brand, you know, so that’s pretty much the mix. They can also work for big media companies as well.
And so they’re all slightly different, you know? We have actually done quite a bit of content targeted as well, at kind of marketers, marketing managers, marketing execs, to help them scale their video strategy and the reasons why they need to do that.
So that’s kind of our audience, but I think that the large chunk of that is video creatives.
Kathleen: And assuming you’re able to really nail down a topic that’s gonna be relevant and useful to that audience, you then talked about working with your partner that you’re doing the webinar with to really refine the topics, make sure the presentation is not gonna be too salesy, and that sort of thing.
How long does that process generally take for you guys?
Andre: I mean, sometimes you just come up with that topic and it’s just real obvious and you kind of nail it. It’s one of those … Kind of that creative writing part of it is hard to … You always think, “Oh, I’ve got a couple of hours, I’m just gonna smash this out.”
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, you know? It’s a bit of wordsmithing.
I think one of the key steps to this – and this wasn’t, you know, we didn’t have this from day one– was having that kind of, that one page, well, not one page, just that one document, that collaborative document that starts with a time and a place and a kind of general theme. You kind of flesh that out, you come up with an abstract … a title, abstract and a few bullet points. It’s actually not a ton of words but you kinda wanna kinda get it quite synced and really kind of interesting.
I think part of that process as you’re doing this, you know, you actually list all the kind of requirements for your partner and it kind of helps to show what you’re gonna commit to. Especially around promotion, you know?
We’ve kind of been burnt in the past by kind of our partner not living up to what we’d expect for them because I’ve got other things going on. That’s fine, but you know, when you’ve got in writing that’s saying, you know, “We’re gonna send it out to our email list of this size twice,” you know, “and on these dates. We’re putting it out to our social channels. WE’re gonna throw 500 bucks behind it to boost it.”
Once you’re kind of quite transparent about what your expectations are and then relaying how many registrations have come in as it happens, put the heat on a bit more, but it gets fun, you know, you share in that success.
So I think, you know, it does take time and I know some companies do a webinar a week or something like that. You know, I do too many other things to be trying to take on that. Even a webinar a month is pretty … I’ve done that for a few months in a row, you know, four or five months in a row and that’s like, you do at least two months promotion time for each of them.
Especially if they’re using customers, customers are really good if you have a shared customer with your partner. That’s ideal, but you’re also adding another person who’s busy into the mix and so, yeah, be a little bit realistic about the times and it does take a bit of time, you know, and I wish it took less time.
There are actually other models or other styles that can take less time. You know, AMAs on Twitter or you know, we’re thinking about starting kind of a live video kind of creative chat, monthly chat. That actually requires less of our customers and more people that we want to highlight and less of us in terms of kind of planning the content and stuff, but when it comes to webinars it does take us a little bit of time to get all that stuff together. A few moving parts.
Kathleen: Yeah. I love that idea that you mentioned about having that collaborative document. I almost think of it as like a creative brief for the webinar and getting both parties in it and aligning around it because I do think that it’s easy to say, “Hey! We’re gonna do a webinar on X,” and the two parties have very different visions of what X means and should represent and you certainly don’t wanna be surprised the day of with slides that are not, you know, that are not along the lines of what you were hoping to see. Time-wise-
Andre: Yeah, you do wanna control, not control some of that but yeah, you wanna avoid surprises, have those timelines, have the dry run. You know, do all that stuff, have all those steps in place, and once you’ve kind of got a document that kind of outlines that stuff you can copy the document, pull out some stuff depending on what the next one is, and at least it kind of puts that up front very early on in that kind of conversation.
Kathleen: You were talking about timelines earlier and it sounds like, if I understood correctly, you leave yourself about two months to promote a webinar. Is that accurate?
Andre: No, two weeks.
Kathleen: Two weeks, oh, I thought you said two months. I was gonna say, “Man, you’re really good about planning ahead!”
Andre: Well actually we’re gonna be doing one with IMPACT in just over three weeks, and they do three weeks promotion so I was quite impressed with that.
As long as we’ve got a solid two weeks of promotion time we find that’s plenty to kind of include it in some of these letters that we send out, you know, pop-up in-app, put it across the social. So yeah, as long as we’ve got two weeks we’re pretty good at pulling a bunch of registrations for sure.
Wipster’s Webinar Promotion Campaigns
Kathleen: So let’s break down your promotion process. You’ve got these two weeks, you just mentioned a few things you do, let’s start with email.
Am I correct that you have a weekly email newsletter?
Andre: Yep, every Thursday, US time, we send out a Wipster Weekly and this has been something that’s been really successful for us. We’ve had it around for ages, and we curate a bunch of content, you know.
We kind of scour the interwebs and find all the best kind of video production, video marketing tips and tricks and you know, educational stuff, so we pool all that together. There’s like five articles and then inspirational video of the week. One of those blogs is our blog. We put out a new blog every week, and so that’s kind of pretty value-driven and people love it.
We get a lot of responses from it saying how much they look forward to watching the weekly and the different articles and pieces in it and it also provides us a pretty good regular promotional tool.
We’ve got a little banner at the bottom that we can use and also the intro to the newsletter is personalized so we can kind of let everyone know that there’s a webinar.
Kathleen: And that’s going out weekly. Do you do then on top of that separate like, email blasts if you will, to your list?
Andre: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and we don’t send a ton of emails to our users, you know? So I know even for us we’re quite sensitive about kind of sending too many emails but actually we don’t send that many.
For a webinar we typically send either two or three. You know, one kind of a week or week and a half out or two weeks out from the webinar. I think, you know, because people get that Wipster Weekly every Thursday they also might not have time that day and kind of know what’s in it but when you send a dedicated email and the subject line is all about that webinar, it’s a bit more focused so it’s gonna get some different types of people clicking on it. And so that’s an important tool, you know.
I was just looking at some numbers earlier … Let me just have a quick look here. But to give you an idea-
Kathleen: As you’re looking at those numbers I’m curious, and I don’t know if you can get this specific, but you’ve got a two week time period. Is it one email newsletter mention and then one email blast or … What does that cadence look like?
Andre: Yeah, it depends on what day it falls on but usually it would be like one email kind of a couple of weeks out, a week and a half out, and then a kind of reminder one day away email.
We might sometimes send two emails with different subject lines and different content with that big thumbnail as well, ideally a thumbnail. Then send that kind of one day away, just last chance to catch it, and if we get clever on it, if we’ve got other promotional stuff going on and we don’t … ‘Cause it kind of depends if we’ve got other things going on whether we send two or three emails and sometimes, you know, if people have clicked on the email but haven’t registered then we might only just send those guys the one day reminder.
So we play around with it a little bit but they’ll always get at least two dedicated emails you know, about the webinar and then also one to two mentions in the newsletter because it can just be as short as a little intro in the newsletter just reminding them.
So it’s just, you know, you’re actually letting people know something that they like to be kept informed with, you know. Especially if it’s good content highlighting some amazing customers at Deloitte, a video team of three making video for a company of 280,000, you know, learned how that’s successful with internal video, et cetera.
So that’s stuff that you’re proud to share and I think that’s a real key part of it.
And just to kind of talk about you know, where some of our leads come from. We did one with … We did a webinar with Brightcove and Deloitte, as our customer, someone I just mentioned, and 50% of our registrations came from our email. You know, that was dedicated email, from the newsletter, that was like 12%. So out of 1100 registrations we drove 700 of those ourselves and yeah, so 50% came from emails. So email is really powerful and then … Yeah.
Kathleen: So then I have a really specific question and you may or may not have an answer for this. With email I know my team spends a lot of time, because we’re all total marketing geeks, talking about subject lines. And you’re obviously getting great results from your email blasts and we’ve debated back and forth, especially for webinars.
Does it make sense to have the word “webinar” in the subject line or like … Have you found any lessons learned from how you craft your email subject lines for your webinars that seem to work well for you?
Andre: We do typically use the word webinar, but in saying that, we sometimes don’t and you know, it kind of depends because we’re only doing these every couple of months. You know, we have those conversations at the time, “What are some good subject lines?”
We’re also sending probably two emails plus a reminder so “webinar” is gonna be in there somewhere. But nothing really stands out for us in terms of you know, in terms of what works more than others. It doesn’t vary hugely, you know, as long as it’s a good topic, you know?
I don’t think things like that make a massive difference for us. Definitely not something we’ve noted, but we’re all so busy that it’s kind of hard to get too down in the details.
But you know, I think it’s good to let people know that it’s a webinar. I think people still enjoy webinars and you’re saying that they are kind of old-fashioned and we’ve had those same conversations.
We go to the table with these partners with you know, “Let’s do a video series on … We can create a landing page, do an educational series about how our brands are turning into media companies,” you know, “Put a topic outline,” and then it’s kind of like, “Well what’s the goal here? Are we looking for leads? ‘Cause where do they enter their details? This is quite a lot of work to do, you know, where is it gonna live?”
And it just starts getting quite complicated so you know, it just keeps coming back to webinars being really successful for us.
Kathleen: Yeah. And in the emails themselves, are you putting … You mentioned that you make like, a promo video for your webinar. Are you putting that video with your animated GIF into the email?
Andre: Yeah. So yeah, like, if you can’t do a GIF – they’re pretty easy to make as much tools – you can just do like a screenshot of your video, so a thumbnail with a big play button. The play button is one of the most recognizable, recognized logos there is. You know, everyone knows what that means and people just wanna watch that video so that’s something that really increases your engagement or the click through rate of that email.
So yeah, definitely recommend doing that.
What we’ve been doing recently is kind of taking a few frames and making a little GIF with a play button over top ’cause GIFs play inside the email. Thumbnails don’t. Videos don’t.
And then everything drives to a landing page which is optimized and that’s something we’ve kind of … There’s a few steps we’ve taken over the years and we’ve actually been using a site called Instapage, you know, where it kind of takes away your navigation at the top and really kind of makes it clear what the offer is on that page.
It’s got a form above the fold. It’s got the video kind of above the fold. It’s got the description so kind of, you know, making that as nice and as optimized as possible, not a ton of ticks, you know, really clear what they need to do to sign up.
So that’s something that has helped our conversion rate on that end.
Kathleen: So you talked about how you use Instapage and your emails and things. You also discussed that when you’re doing these promotional workflows for the webinars you have a couple of other channels you use and one of them was social. Can you walk me through what you do on social to promote your webinars?
Andre: Yeah, for sure. Social, you know, surprisingly social will only get us about 10% of our sign ups but you know, it’s all about … For me, I think social channels are really good for brand awareness, showing that you’re active, that you’re in the conversation, that you have an opinion, that you’re coming up with thought leadership.
So we kind of throw around $500, if we’re doing something with a partner we might throw $500 or so dollars just to kinda get that topic and webinar in front of a bunch of different people and you know, our target audience, showing that we’re just leading thought leadership, we’re talking about the things they care about.
It often doesn’t result in a ton of registrations, as I said maybe 10%. We have used, on Facebook, we have used the forms before so people can … So the form is actually embedded in Facebook, it auto-populates some of the details on there because Facebook has already got that information.
And so that has worked out for us, you know. They’re like $10 a lead or $10 a registration, which is actually lower than almost anything else we put money towards.
To give you an idea, you know we, for that MarketingProfs, email blast, that cost us $3,000 and that’s a list of 13,000 and I think that got us like … What was it? That got us … Let me see, that got us like 120 leads, so that was $24 a lead. So $10 with $24 …
Yeah, so social typically doesn’t work out to be an amazing return on getting leads. Plus you know, with something like Facebook, for $10 for using that form, we have to integrate that form with our content management system that integrates with our webinar thing so it takes a little bit of back and forth work.
We’ve tried it, it’s a pretty good cost per lead, but we don’t think the quality there is really very high.
So yeah, I mean, the videos are great because honestly I think the video is the key on a lot of this stuff because video looks great on all these social channels. It shows what you’re doing. It does drive registrations, but about 10%.
I think it’s a collective, kind of, you’re using all these channels and if you’re building them all up I think it all really helps.
You know, 10% is nothing to kind of scoff at, that’s really important, plus it’s quite low cost. But yeah, it’s not super efficient in terms of driving leads and it just provides us really good content to share and shows that we’re kind of active and talking about the topics our customers care about.
Kathleen: That’s interesting to hear how … Some of the different paid media channels that you’ve used. Have you done any other promoted newsletter placements like you did with MarketingProfs or was that the only one?
Andre: That’s the only email blast that we’ve done and the reason we had to pay for that one, because we ended up throwing like five grand at that webinar, we got like 550 registrations.
It was really good content but it was a little bit more targeted towards marketing strategy and marketing teams so it’s not gonna be quite as attractive to all our freelancers and production companies-
Kathleen: Got it.
Andre: So I think that’s why we didn’t get quite as many. But however, you know, we also … It was something that we ran completely ourselves and we didn’t have a partner to leverage their audience so then without putting a bit of money …
I mean, at the end of the day we all want new leads or new eyeballs on our product or service, on our thought leadership, we wanna attract people that are outside of what we already have, which is pretty much our primary KPI.
There’s still a lot of benefits to be had about engaging people in your database, you know? People that aren’t quite customers yet or even customers. To reengage them with how other companies have been successful and et cetera, et cetera.
But you know, when we’re working with a partner we really wanna kind of get in front of a new audience and so when we’ve done webinars that highlight our customers, and we haven’t done this with a partner, then we’ve gotta look at new ways to kind of top that up.
Andre: I mean, so we got 130-odd registrations, you know, through that channel with $25 each so you know, that was quite interesting.
But then if we look at a webinar we did with Lemonlight we got like 1200 registrations. The topic was kind of, 24 inspirational video ideas or something like that, so a little bit more generic, a little bit more kind of collective for quite a wider audience. And we spent $500 on that, you know, so 10% of what we spent and we got a bunch more leads.
But you know, you’ve gotta consider what you’re looking for, what the cost of your product is, how much you’re willing to spend to get someone into your, kind of into your world and educate them about what you’re offering.
We’re a business-to-business product, we have kind of a varied list of what we charge our clients so it depends.
When we did the webinar with Brightcove and we highlighted Deloitte that was a bit more of an enterprise play and Deloitte, I mean Brightcove, you know, by and large their customers are bigger companies, bigger media companies, bigger brands. So they’re a real enterprise solution.
So even though we attracted 700 versus their 400, you know, we got some really top quality brands that came along to that. You know, like an amazing list of brands that tuned in for that one.
So it also isn’t always about quantity, you know, there’s also a quality argument to that as well.
Kathleen: Absolutely. It sounds like especially if it’s maybe an audience that isn’t in your core of the video editor, the producer, et cetera – like when you did the MarketingProfs thing – it sounded to me like you’re looking to maybe expand into and get more leads in a segment where you didn’t traditionally have a ton, so that makes sense.
Andre: No, absolutely. When we started this business all those years ago, you know, our bread-and-butter customer was video producers and agencies and freelancers dealing with that client feedback process. And so we saw a big opportunity in these brands because things were starting to move a little bit more in-house. So we really wanted to get in front of brands as well and help them along that journey.
So then you start to do some kind of more tactical plays in terms of getting in front of those decision makers, their brands, the marketers, and whatnot. So that influenced our content strategy last year when we really made some kind of conscious plays targeting marketers, video marketers, marketers in general, making sure they’re aware of tools like ours to help them scale their video.
And then, so part of that is creating the topic and the ideas that are really valuable to them.
That was highlighting Xero’s journey, you know. They have an amazing in-house video production team. They use video across their kind of content strategy so it’s not all actually just marketing, it’s about all the education and kind of onboarding and all that kind of stuff as well.
They are a global company with an awesome in-house team and the guy that runs their team kinda walked us through how they went from you know, 10 videos a year to 1,000.
So that was really targeted at these brands who have started their video journey but wanna kinda scale it up. So it wasn’t really targeted at those freelancers necessarily.
And then that was just part of our overall kind of marketing strategy in terms of building awareness in that segment and kind of trying to drive some business in that area.
So yeah, I think getting new eyeballs and getting new leads, you know, based off what your kind of strategic objectives are as a company, but getting some new leads I think is one of the big outcomes of webinars, especially when you’re doing it with partners ’cause there’s already …
Kathleen: Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Now, going back to your data on where your webinar leads are coming from. We talked through email which is 50%, talked through social which is 10%. What were some of the other significant sources for you?
Andre: Well actually … I was actually looking at the Xero webinar numbers so I’ve kind of got that a little bit wrong. The numbers are still correct but this was for the Xero, not the Deloitte one.
So this was the time where we had to drive all the registrations ourselves. So 50% email, 22% came from that email blast that we paid three grand for, 12% was the newsletter, and then like eight or nine percent was across our social channels. We also have a pop-up in the app and that kind of drove a couple of percent and also our website as well. So on our homepage we have a little banner at the top of our homepage and that drove another two and a half percent. So that’s our 100% there.
You know, if you look at when we do something with Brightcove, you know, we pull 700 and they pull 400 so they’re bringing in … I don’t know what that is, 30-odd percent themselves.
Kathleen: I love that you’re pulling in more leads than Brightcove.
Andre: Well you know, that was-
Kathleen: I mean, they’re a decent sized company, you know?
Andre: That was fun because they said to us, you know, they were like … I was like, “Okay, what’s our goals?” ‘Cause I already had this kind of, you know as I said, the documentation to help drive the process, and usually I always put a goal here and I kind of put, “What is our goal and what is our stretch goal?”
And so they were driving this one a little bit and they said, “Well, our goal was 300 registrations,” and I was like, “is that each?” And they’re like, “Oh no, total.” I was like, “We’ll get that ourselves, no problem. I think we should aim higher.”
And when we launched our campaign we launched it a few days before them and we kind of got 300 out of the gate and so then that kind of lit a fire on them as well to really kind of drive registration.
So you know, if you think about it, they were aiming for 300 all up and they ended up driving 400 themselves. So that actually made them push harder. We got 700 of those and then we just kind of … I had a chat with the team on slack but the kind of brands that we attracted was Bank of America, Oracle, Cisco, Goodyear, McCafee, Oxford, Milwaukee Tools, Hallmark, you know, Sears, Walmart, SAP, Apple, Pixar, Canadian Tire, Baby Center, Airbnb, Visa, UNICEF, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Air New Zealand, LA Times, Whataburger.
So you know, when it came to big brands, and a lot of those we actually drive ourselves, but they pulled some big brands in there as well. It was a roaring success and you know, the guy that spoke for us was a great presenter as well so it was really a valuable webinar that everyone got a lot out of.
And then actually … You know, you talked about, what is it, about 15 or 20% of people turn up on the day, I think that’s roughly the number, maybe 25, 30% turn up to these webinars on the day.
But then of course we do share them and we even put them on YouTube and like, that webinar has got 600 or so views on YouTube, you know, for long form content of an hour long webinar, you know, you are getting people engaging with it, even if they don’t turn up on the day.
Kathleen: Yeah. Now, I’m super curious, you do an event with a company like Brightcove and you pull in 700 registrants, they pull in 400. I mean, both numbers are great, but to what do you attribute your ability to pull in such large numbers? I mean, you’re not a much larger company, I don’t know if you have a larger database than they do. Is there something that you’re doing differently that’s getting you those results or is it something about your relationship with your audience?
Andre: Yeah, I’m not sure because I guess we’re both using the same video and we’re both using the same kind of a topic so you know, so that stuff, you know, we take pride in getting that stuff up to standard.
Yeah, I think we do have an engaged audience, I think we do understand our audience. Yeah, I’m not sure what drives that kind of engagement.
I think from the get-go when this company started we were very kind of interactive with our audience, we did a lot of AMAs on Twitter, our social channels were quite active, we had a Facebook group.
You know, we’ve always been about thought leadership and sharing knowledge and trying to drive it through value-first based content, so maybe it has to do with our relationship with our audience. Our database is about 40,000 strong, which is pretty decent. Yeah, I’m not sure. You know, I know like for those guys …
Maybe it’s also because we’re quite agile and we can use all these different channels, you know. Like I’ll put up the banner on our homepage myself, I’ll set up the pop-up in that myself, I’ll create the landing page myself, I’ll schedule some ads myself.
So maybe that also means that we can kind of be more active on these different channels and leverage these different channels. If they were to do a pop-up on their landing page, or not a pop-up, just a little banner at the top, they might have a few more hoops to go through in a bigger company with other things going on so maybe that works top our advantage as well in terms of getting the message out.
Kathleen: That’s a good point. There are definitely some advantages to being small and agile.
So interesting, you know, and I appreciate you sharing so many details about this because it is … The devil is in the details with these things, so, fascinating to me.
Kathleen’s Two Questions
Kathleen: I wanna change gears for a second. I have two questions that I always ask everybody who comes on the podcast. You’re somebody who’s doing a good job with his inbound marketing, doing a great job really, with the results you’re getting.
When you look out in the world is there another company or an individual that you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now that you would hold up as an example?
Andre: Yeah, in the video space I always love what Wistia does. You know, in terms of like, you just go to their website and how they’ve separated their content and each product and the education center. It’s all really nice and all really value-driven and the content in the videos they create and the kind of brand personality that they’ve created is really good. And you know, if you wanna look at an engaged audience, they have one. Massively.
You know, people are part of the Wistia tribe, you know. They’ve got a Slack group that creates content on it’s own. They’re all sharing tips, discussing, critiquing, you know, providing value for each other. So they’re really good.
In fact actually, I’ve been on IMPACT’s list for years so it’s quite cool to be doing something with you guys ’cause you do some amazing content that’s definitely gone in front of me time and time again over the years so that would be a couple.
I really like what Wistia are doing for content-wise.
Kathleen: Yeah. They do have a great brand personality and I’ve actually spent dome time in their offices and got to be filmed for a little video they were making about their partner agencies and it’s just a fun group of people to work with and they know what they’re doing for sure.
Andre: Their office is in Boston, yeah?
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andre: Pretty cool office and they’ve got this like stadium set up. You probably saw all that. It’s like, “Stay Weird” on the walls and you know, kind of embracing that kind of diversity and just …
I don’t know, there’s definitely something they’re doing right and being good at video, you know, using video because video says so much more than a lot of other mediums so you know, they’ve been at …
If I just say one thing on a video you actually get a lot more because you might see where I am, what I’m doing, so they’ve really used that to their advantage and done a really good job, which they should be because they’re advocating for video.
Kathleen: Right. Agreed, agreed. And what about how you keep up to date? Digital marketing is changing really quickly, there’s always something new happening or you know, Facebook changes it’s rules, whatever.
How do you stay up-to-date and current with everything going on in the world of digital marketing?
Andre: It’s hard because, you know, I often don’t have time to click on even the most interesting subject lines but I do follow a couple of good newsletters that I get in my inbox and I click on those.
One of the things that I think keeps me quite up-to-date and inspired about marketing and particularly videos is just talking to some of our customers. You know, I’ve had some really good, in depth chats over the years with some really interesting people who are kind of … You know, I talked about Xero, this guy, Pat MacFie, he’s just like … I get off the phone and every time I get off the phone with him I’m just pumped, you know?
Sephora, you know how they’ve kind of grown, they were making 24 videos a year and now they make over 1000 and they’re talking about … And that just started with one. They brought in one video producer in-house, they were kind of renting a studio in San Fran once a month and just shooting a bunch of content once a month and now they’ve got their own studio in LA and all the brands come to them wanting to borrow their studio and they’ve got all these …
So just watching that, and that’s over a couple of years. You know, you talk to these guys about how they’ve kind of actually built that and the process, the steps that they’ve gone through and in two years to be so different and why they’re making educational content and how-tos on YouTube, you know, what is that trying to achieve, and the greater trends around kind of how brands now own …
You know, you don’t have the gate keeper of the big TV stations anymore. You’ve got all these different channels. You’ve got millions of people on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and there’s no gatekeeper. You can kind of …
So it’s all about audience building and engagement. So talking to the people that are doing it for some of these big companies. Shopify, the guys there make wildly high production video content that they’re trying to shop out to people like Netflix, you know, so they’re taking a different approach where they’re going super cinematic.
You know, if you talk about branded content, that makes them like, cringe, you know, it’s just like, disgusting, you know? We’re all about making the audience feel different, you know?
Kathleen: I’ll have to check those out, I wasn’t aware that Shopify was going in that direction.
Andre: They also do a ton of video for more technical purposes. You know, helping people use the platform, TVCs, little technical campaigns on Facebook promotions, so they still do that kind of video but they’ve actually got a department fully focused on you know, entertaining their audience.
So actually that’s probably where I get most of my inspiration – off talking to customers, specifically around video.
But I think it just depends on what I’m trying to focus on, you know? I talk to some peers around Wellington, kind of around what they’re doing on LinkedIn, what they’re doing with their blog around driving inbound traffic. So I think, yeah, talking to people has been quite useful to me.
How to Reach Andre
Kathleen: Great. Well, if somebody is interested in learning more about Wipster or wants to get in touch with you and ask a question, what’s the best way fro them to connect with you online?
Andre: Twitter might be an easy way to find me, you know, @Andre_VDA, but LinkedIn … I’m probably more active on LinkedIn. It’s got my full name in the description or something like that, just search me on LinkedIn and yeah, we can connect and chat marketing.
I am quite passionate about where it is and all the tools we all have to kind of use and kind of to tell our message, tell our stories and help each other out. So yeah, I’m open to any connections for sure.
Kathleen: And Wipster’s URL is?
Andre: Wipster.com. W-I-P-S-T-E-R.com.
Kathleen: Yeah, I’ll put links to all those things in the show notes so if you’re wanting to find that information just head to the IMPACT website and you’ll find it on there. Thank you Andre, it’s been-
Andre: We’ll be doing that webinar in a few weeks as well so make sure to look out for that and we’re talking with Zach, so he’s a video consultant for IMPACT and he goes to a bunch of different brands and actually helps teach them to make a video because he’s a firm believer that the only way you can actually make multiple videos a week that’s kind of affordable, scalable and kind of really effective and authentic, the only way you can actually do that is to start making it yourself because the agency model doesn’t quite work when it comes to making a handful of videos a week for these kind of different purposes.
You know, because you can’t really pay an agency a lot of money to do that and get the ROI so that’s gonna be all about kind of helping you guys make more video in-house so check that out.
It’ll be in a few weeks time, I’m sure you’ll find out about it through the various channels we have.
Kathleen: Well, and I’ll put the link for that in the show notes as well, so.
Click here to register for the webinar with Andre and Zach
Andre: Perfect.
Kathleen: So you can click that and register. If you’re listening and you found this to be helpful I would love it if you would give the podcast a review on Apple podcast or the platform of your choice and if you know someone else who’s doing kickass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That’s it for this week, thank you so much Andre!
Andre: Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.
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