- Ryan Robinson came to my attention recently,
as a marketing guy for Close.io.
But he's been in the space for a very long time,
blogging at ryrob.com, and tackling all things marketing.
I had the chance to be on two webinars
with him and Steli Efti,
and the Close.io team, and it got me interested.
What is this webinar strategy they're running?
Because I'm getting emails every week
with a different sales influencer.
So, I wanted to have him on
and talk about his webinar strategy.
So let's talk about it.
How is Ryan running two webinars a month for Close.io?
- They've been great.
They're something we're doubling down on.
We're doing two a month currently,
and we're trying to get two to three brands on
for each of these things.
So, you know, you were on one with Aaron Ross.
We've done stuff with Salesloft, Calendly, Zoom.
There's a bunch of like really recognizable brands
with cool products, tools, services,
that are designed for sales people.
We're basically sort of pooling our audiences together
and doing joint webinars
where we have cross over on topics
that our audiences care about.
And then yeah, it's a win, win, win
because everyone walks away with a list of new sign ups
that are theoretically targeted
to their product or their service offering.
- When I was on it was a pretty easy set up,
they're just using Zoom.
They have multiple people on the channel.
Since they have an audience already,
there were a lot of questions coming in.
But the webinar itself was very conversational.
Ryan would ask a question to the panel,
the panel would ask a question to each other.
The only thing that stayed consistent
was the inconsistency of it.
We didn't have to worry about presentations,
there were no bullet points for us to hit.
It was a free flowing conversation,
but because of the structure
and the interviewers knowing
when to have people stop talking
and ask questions of other people on the panel,
that's what kept the entire thing moving forward
and kept it engaging.
So his acquisition strategy is identify a sales influencer,
send them an email, book them on the webinar,
and host the webinar.
My email from Ryan was very last minute.
Somebody had dropped out of one of the webinars
and he just sent
"Hey Alex, I'm hosting a webinar in a few days"
"about cold email with Steli Efti and Aaron Ross"
"would you mind joining? I know it's last minute."
So that is a quick email script,
and he assumed I knew
who both Steli Efti and Aaron Ross were,
which I've had them both on my podcast,
so that was clear, and it worked.
I don't recommend that as the scalable strategy,
but that work in my case to get me on.
Next we talked about
how Ryan's driving signups to the webinar.
- This is really driven by email pretty much only right now.
We're not doing any sort of paid advertising
spent towards these webinars yet
because we honestly haven't quite determined the value
of a webinar signup yet.
So that's our goal.
We're looking for a Director of Marketing right now.
We're hiring for Director of Marketing
and Product Marketing Manager.
So with those two hires we hope
to get way more granular and scientific about, you know,
how much is a blog subscriber worth,
how much is a webinar signup worth,
and then we can start looking at paid channels
to like really scale, you know?
See if like Facebook ads would be worthwhile
to drive in webinar traffic.
- One thing that's key is he shares email signups,
with the people that are on the webinar and that promote.
But, it's an ingenious strategy
because it's not something where he'll say,
"Hey, we have 1,000 people on the webinar,"
"so you get 1,000 email sign ups at the end."
Instead he shares emails based on how many people
you bring to the webinar.
So for instance,
if one of the guests brings 100 people,
they get 100 from the pooled email list.
When I first heard that strategy,
it sounded a little off putting,
but I can see how it encourages
other people on the webinar to share.
Ryan also has a minimum of 100 signups
that you need to bring to be on the webinar.
And we had a couple times
where people were cut from the webinar
for not bringing enough people.
So he actually enforces those rules.
If you want to see an example of one of these webinars,
I'll link down to the one we did with Aaron and Steli
over on the Close.io YouTube channel.
And if you want somebody
to help you run webinars as an agency,
maybe you sell IOS development, or back end web,
or advertising, branding, anything like that,
and you want enterprise clients,
check out experiment27.com.
And if you want to help the YouTube channel out,
I would love if you would,
one, identify a friend who you think
would get value from this specific video.
Two, write them a quick email.
Something like, "Hey, I found this video about webinars,"
"and I think you'd find value in it."
Then post a link and, three, send it.
That's it. I'll be eternally grateful.
I'm Alex Berman, thanks for watching.