5 Webinar Mistakes to Avoid with Logan Lyles, Founder of DemandShift | Ep. 344

0:00We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials and today's episode is with Logan Lyles, who's built one of the most effective webinar playbooks in B2B right now. We got into what most companies get wrong, how Logan reworked his entire strategy, and how he's now helping brands turn webinars into one of their highest performing channels. I hope you enjoy this one. Excited for you to listen. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen.

0:46Get ready to turn the f*** up. What is up? I'm here welcoming Logan to the podcast. Excited to have you on. He has a new playbook he wants to share with everybody. So yeah, let's just get into the conversation. First, like Logan, could you introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, Daniel, thank you so much for having me on the show, man. Longtime listener, first time caller over here. For those who I haven't crossed paths with on LinkedIn. I'm Logan Lyles. I recently founded Demand Shift. And so we help B2B brands break out of the dead-end marketing or the dead-end webinar playbook that a lot of folks are suffering with and help them implement what we call the webinar fast track framework.

1:33And how I got there was actually through kind of a long meandering path. I spent the first 10 years of my career in B2B tech sales locally. In 2018, I had the chance to join a marketing agency. I think he's been on the show. I know he's a good friend of both of ours, James Carberry over at Sweetfish. And from 2018 to 2022, I helped James, especially on the sales side, with the B2B podcast production agency over at Sweetfish. Since then, I've been in a number of different marketing sales roles, both brand side and agency side. And over the last nine months or so, actually on the agency side, I was kind of tinkering with this framework for webinars and initially saw some really good results and hit what I call the conversion cliff, where seeing lots of signups, lots of registrations, but not seeing that turn into sales calls and pipeline.

2:30and I was able to tweak a few things. And as I started talking about that more and more, people started leaning in and asking questions. And so just a few weeks ago, I launched Demand Shift to take this framework to market. Let's start with the number one thing. What's the number one thing most marketers get wrong with webinars? Yeah, it's interesting. Right now I'm running a research report and I've got close to 100 respondents and there's two questions that I think are really telling on this point, Daniel. One, when I ask them to stack rank, why are you running webinars? What is your desired outcome?

3:10What's the main objective? Number one, by a large margin, is to pass leads to the sales team. They see it as a lead generation activity. I'd argue that you can do webinars as both thought leadership and demand gen, but I'll park that for a second. But if that's their number one goal is to get leads to sales. Elsewhere in the report, I asked them, what is your conversion rate from webinar registrant to booked sales call or sales accepted lead or however you're measuring that? And the number one answer is, I have no idea. So that is where I see a lot of folks have a disconnect. And the first problem that they're having is they want webinars to drive leads, but they're not effectively tracking it.

3:54They don't have a system for converting webinar registrants into leads. I've played with a few things on how to actually do that, that we can get into, but I think that's the number one problem to answer your first question. A lot of people treat it as just like a activity to do in marketing or like everybody's doing it. So I should do it instead of like, if you were going to run it like a Facebook, like Facebook or meta i mean facebook or instagram or reddit like a channel like you would go into it with here's the goal i'm trying to get here is the kpi i'm trying to achieve you wouldn't just go into it and there's a lot of different we can get into there's a lot of different things that you could do with webinars like if your goal your goal doesn't have to be leads right from that webinar, but if your goal is leads and you're not tracking it then or tracking it properly, you're doing something wrong.

4:56But let's get into, let's go into where should I start? So I want to start running a webinar program or virtual events or whatever you want to call it. Where do I even start? Yeah, I think it starts with one of the things that you said right there is viewing it as a program, as an ongoing channel, as a series, right? Even if you want to say, hey, we're going to approach webinars, but we're going to approach them more like a live podcast, or we're going to call them, you know, workshops, or we're going to call them virtual events, whatever, right? They can go by a number of different names. But I think a lot of people box themselves in and think, okay, either I've seen survey respondents to our research report we're doing right now say, hey, I'm just doing webinars because my boss says I have to, right?

5:44And it's kind of that checkbox marketing that you were just talking about. I think the other pitfall is looking at, hey, I'm going to spin up a webinar. It's going to be this one-off thing. And it's going to be kind of this mixture of educational content, but it's going to be a pitch because we're just going to do it real quick and try and get some leads. And I think that that's kind of missing the forest for the trees. So one of the things that was effective for me in the times where I've run effective webinar programs is to look at it as an ongoing series to map out the content. If you're doing, you know, monthly webinars, how do they tie together?

6:19What is the story arc that I can put together across multiple sessions so that when people finish the webinar, maybe there is a direct CTA to book a demo or start a free trial or whatever your call to action is. But there's also this built-in engagement of, Hey, guess what we're going to cover next month? It's this, right? And that's how you not only build an engaged audience and you see more leads from your webinars, but going back to what we were talking about earlier, you can be using it for thought leadership and brand building and audience building while you're also using it for direct demand gen.

6:55So I think going into it, thinking about how can I do this as an ongoing series, whatever frequency makes sense for our team, and how can I tie those together so that they build on top of each other and interrelate so that you can build some ongoing momentum with a webinar series, as opposed to a one-off thing you're going to try and do to see how many leads you can get with a quick hit. Yeah, I think if you're going to do webinars, you need to commit to doing them consistently and have um some sort of

7:33type of um thought leadership um let's say thought leadership uh i'm losing track of what i want but like some sort of things you want to get into the market that is uniquely yours that a lot of other people could help or like something that's connected to your products that you're a demand gen tool like having the best like a series with the 10 best demand gen people um could be a good one what we do at the marketing millennials is we do ours all lead up to like our huge like virtual event so like every one of them is like a part of what the larger virtual event and what we do is pre-register get people to register um for that and the bigger event when we do the virtual event so then the list gets bigger for the big big event and then that's where we normally will launch something big during that event so all of it just kind of leads up to this huge huge event that we're doing dude i i love Love that.

8:46I've done a lot of ongoing series, but I haven't necessarily done it tied into, you know, a bigger in-person event or a bigger, maybe multi-day virtual event. But I think there's a lot of power in, hey, you're already here. You're showing interest in this piece. This is actually part of a bigger thing that we're doing. Do you want to opt into that as well? And kind of that like double opt-in has been one of the tweaks that I've made with our webinar fast track framework that has actually led to people being able to connect webinars to more book sales calls. And the way that I've done it is, hey, you're registering for this webinar.

9:21Let's ask a few more questions to kind of help us tailor the content for you. And then at the end of those follow-up questions in kind of a progressive survey is, hey, are you interested in booking a call with a team that specializes in solving XYZ problem that we've just been talking about, right? It is why you registered for the webinar. And by presenting that there, I saw a much higher conversion rate than the kind of typical framework of, hey, at the end of the webinar, you kind of throw the right hook or in some email sequence after the webinar that everybody's looking for. So sometimes there's a lot of power in kind of striking while the iron's hot, while you've got someone's attention.

9:59And you could use that to double opt in for a bigger event or double opt in for, hey, maybe I am in market for a demo of whatever software product it is or whatever the case might be. Yeah. And I also think people underestimate you can use like the registration path to, and like to pre-vet as someone comes into the, um, a lot of people don't use the registration path to pre, to pre-vet someone. Have you guys done that? Oh yeah, we do it all. Like we always do all the time. Like, Like, are you interested in this or this? Or like a question like, are you trying to, is like this your biggest problem?

10:40Like say something. So you can kind of segment people based on not only their demographics, but what's their biggest pain point right now? What's their biggest interest? also i think i think people underestimate that the reason i like doing webinars is not necessarily for like sales but it shows intention of your audience in a deeper way than like a click an email click on an ad because you're taking them down to something and something that they want to attend of yours so if you can get someone to attend an event it shows like that cohort of people like you build a list of people who have attended events usually a more like will convert more down funnel for sales than the people who have in your email list who might not take another action to download something or attend something yeah because i mean you look at the people who take the time to register than the you know 30 to 50 typically that take the time to show up for a virtual event or a webinar like they they've overcome some friction to take those actions so you can, you know, that's true intent data, right?

11:46I want you to walk us through like the, your webinar fast track framework. Like what are the key pillars of that framework? Yeah, absolutely. So to me, there are, there are a few key pieces. The first part is the promotion. So thinking about how are we going to get people to the webinars? And when I started out doing, doing webinars, I was kind of doing the same playbook, you know, email our existing list, then running some organic social posts, and then maybe some paid social posts. And that was, that was really it. And I actually found that like two additions to those, you still using those as the core, but two additions that a lot of people aren't typically using for webinar promotion can really help in this first area of driving more registrations.

12:41The first was finding partnerships or even paid placements in industry newsletters. So if you've got someone who has an engaged audience of a newsletter or a community, either doing paid ads in those channels to promote your webinar or collaborations, right? It could be pay to play or not. But I found that really, really effective. I started partnering with my friend, Marketing Max, who has a large email list for his CEO report and growth daily. Both of those newsletters total, I think something like 115 ,000 subscribers, which to me is a lot. So some people, maybe that's not that big, but I started working with him to put ads for our newsletter, for our webinars in those newsletters.

13:25And I saw my registrations jump up quite a bit just by adding that new tactic. And then the other one has actually been cold email. So a lot of people think, you know, Hey, if I'm going to promote my webinar, I've got access to my email list. And that's pretty much it. If we're running cold outbound over here, that is usually straight with a direct ask or demo request, or, you know, going for the right hook of the sales call. So I started actually blending those and running cold email campaigns, um, to targeted audience with just the content offer of, Hey, we're hosting in this webinar. This is what it is.

14:00This is the only ask, no straight up sales ask on the front end. And I saw as much as 40 % increase in my registrations and signups by adding cold email to the mix of my promotion on, on the front end. Yeah. I think you can only rely on your like existing like list or like you, like if you're going to do something, you also need to bring other people into the mix and figure out like if like i always get confused when people put out such great pieces of content and they forget that like that's only 50 of the job or less of the job or less yeah i was gonna say the same thing yeah yeah like get the really like if you're gonna put out something great you want people to be there for it so you should one put some money behind it to get people there if you're a brand you should put it in places where you're the people you desire to come on the those places uh like your icp is there and you should be marketing um it as great as great as you can um because like what's the point i mean i also think this benefit of using webinar as like a content engine like one webinar could supply like content for two three months if you're if you're if you're doing if you're doing it right absolutely yeah but like i said i'd never get why people don't invest in one well we can go into this next like I think promotion as well.

15:47One thing I see people doing really wrong with webinars, but I want to see if it's in your playbook, is how they set up the title, the description. I feel like every webinar these days look the same. So what in your framework is different than what other people are doing? Yeah. And some of this I've been experimenting with, and it's right along the lines of some of the things you're saying. So one, there's usually not a whole lot of thought given to the title, right? And you talk to people who are in B2B or outside, when they think about YouTube, they think about title and thumbnail as two of the biggest things of how they're going to package that YouTube video before they even get into all of the rest of it.

16:36How are they going to promote it? Even scripting the video and those sorts of things. What is the package? And I think spending more time on that, because let's talk about both of those, the title and the graphic for a webinar. Typically, the title isn't outcome-based. It's not written like a YouTube thumbnail to entice some curiosity or maybe some fear. right? I see these boring webinar titles where, you know, there's no number, there's no outcome, that sort of thing. And so I think part of my framework has been to write an initial title and then iterate on that 10, 20 times to really hone it in much like a, you know, a YouTube strategist would for their titles and their videos.

17:18The second piece is then the thumbnails. What do most webinar thumbnails look like? Like Daniel, I'm sure you and I, and a lot of the listeners have the same thing in our head, right? The little circles with the speakers and maybe the titles on there. And then we've got both company logos or at least one company logo. And then taking up a lot of space is the time, the date, the join, the Zoom or whatever webinar platform is. And I've started taking a lot of that out, even taking oftentimes the time and date off of being prominent on the landing page, because it's not really adding a ton of value.

17:53Because when most people decide to register for a webinar, at least for me, I'm not necessarily like checking my calendar to see, Oh, is this a good time for me to attend? I'm saying like, Hey, is this content going to be valuable? I'm just going to sign up. It's going to throw it on my calendar. And if it's at a good time, I'll try and show up live. Or if I'm really interested, I will. Otherwise I know I'm going to get the recording, that sort of stuff. And so, um, two things on this point, I've started designing webinar graphics, more like YouTube thumbnails to increase click-through rates. I'm actually partnering with a YouTube thumbnail designer on a series that I'm doing right now to see what that lift is going to be on a certain series.

18:31And then with the landing pages, I've stopped leading with, hey, here's the time and the date and how you join and that sort of stuff. And really optimizing the copy on the landing page to be short, punchy. What are you going to get out of it? What is the outcome that you're going to get from this content of the webinar and try and summarize four to five key takeaways and really have that front and center, as opposed to like the big typical graphic with the small faces and the date and time way too large. I think, I mean, that's amazing. I would say 99 % of webinars don't do that. Um, now I think rarely people care who the people are speaking are.

19:15I mean, that's a hard take, but It really, like, unless you have a huge name or someone from, like, a huge company, really they're going to really care. And people, like, put their face, these people's faces, like, we were supposed to know who they are. Really, they're trying to go for what you said, the problem they're trying to solve. Or, like, I want to figure out this. Having the people there are good in the description and having them in part of it so people know who they're learning from. but they first going to look at problem. They're not going to be like, Oh, unless you have like a huge name speaking, they're not going to be like, Oh, I, this random person.

19:57I want to hear from them. I completely agree with you. Like it has a spot, maybe it's all on the landing page, but it's more like, like lead with the problem. What are the things that they're going to get from it? And Oh, by the way, it's kind of like your social proof on a landing page or on a website, right? of like oh by the way here's who's presenting on this and why they're the person speaking about it right but like that's down here for anybody watching video right um not way up here at the top like we normally do with our webinar graphics and landing pages yeah and the promotion could have some like promotion you can like layered story tell um all that thing i think the next question i have is i know a lot of people so they get to say mark could be good depending on your like say you got 100 people registered for your event what are some ways to improve like people coming to that event um because you want i mean you want people to register get the email you can build an email list with that but um but like how do i get people to show up at the time of that event.

21:06Yeah. So to me, I don't think I did a good job earlier of kind of talking about all parts of the framework. So we're kind of jumping to, I think number three, which is fine, but I think about promotion. I think about the signup flow. I think about how you deliver a quality live show and then how you repurpose and amplify. And so we're kind of in a mixture there of like two and three. And I would say with a live show, if you are doing it as a series, as we talked about earlier, one way to get people to show up more live is to get them to show up the first time and then engage them and make it valuable for them, not just the content, but what can you do to get them more engaged so that they're more likely to become a repeat webinar attendee?

21:57And I've seen that as I've done more series. So step one, we already covered is like, do it as an ongoing series and you'll get more people showing up live because they'll have experienced it. The second piece is doing things live that only people live get to experience. And I find that, you know, even when you have a pretty good engaged audience, getting them to type into the chat still is, you know, it still is some work. Everybody's not going to do it. You got to make it easy. And so I find that when you're pre-planning the content, pre-plan the polls that you're going to launch, usually one at the beginning, one in the middle, one at the end, because it rewards those attendees of feeling like, hey, I'm experiencing something that other people didn't get to.

22:38And now a poll isn't anything magical. It's not like super high lift. But I think that's something that, again, 90 % of webinars are probably not doing, not pre-planning and having baked into kind of their run of show. I've seen that, and this varies depending on what platform that you're on, everybody kind of does the Q &A thing. Very few people are like allowing people, quote unquote, up on stage to ask their question. And I think that that, again, kind of rewards that engagement and gives you something live that you're not going to get if you just watch the on-demand recording and makes those attendees feel a little special, feel invested in.

23:16So it's a lot of those, I wouldn't say there's one silver bullet, but I think it's a lot of those little moments of what can you provide as a unique aspect of attending live yeah one of my friends jay schwettleson he um he runs a lot of virtual events one thing that he does which i think is so smart is um he basically says like this is you're not going to get the recording if you don't come um so you'll say that and then you'll say like if you attend the first like 15 minutes or more we'll send you the recording like like if you come we'll send you the recording or like so he like kind of like gets that action of hey you're not you're not going to see this again so right it's like for forcing you to see the rain fish can at spark toro do that with some of his here recently as well yeah i think there's ways to get like you say if there's exclusive giveaways there's polls there's things that people can't get or see live like i mean you and or like asking questions to be able to consult like thing you have to add those aspects it can't just be yeah um someone's gonna tend to hear your cool thoughts yeah yeah like you gotta make sure that you know the content is valuable and and package it the right way like we were talking about earlier, but you can't just rely on that.

24:43One thing I'm doing with one of my clients right now where I'm running their webinar series for them is we started talking about what is a unique offer that you can bake into the webinar only for live attendees. And so they're a video as a service agency. And one of the things that they often do for qualified folks that are considering their their services is they either do an audit of their video strategy or they offer one free video. And so we were talking about like, how could we use that to say, Hey, the first, you know, there's going to be this value added free giveaway. That's not just content, it's actual service, either consulting or some actual work.

25:28And it's going to be open to the first five people who book that's only going to be available during the live session. So you can play around with different things like that as well. I think, yeah, I mean, it's all playing around, but I do think starting from the beginning, what you said is I have something consistent that don't just do a webinar and then forget to do another webinar and we'll just do it in a random, like keeping people, it's just like content in general, people expect a certain thing at a certain time or a certain part of the month or I'm doing, you do it once a month. Like people started expecting those things and it becomes habitual to them instead of, um, instead of, I don't know when you're going to do your next webinar or, um, things like that.

26:16So I know we skip, we're skipping around. So promotion, is there anything you want to go down on like the reg path that people could do differently to help them? This to me, and it sounds like you're doing a little bit of this too, Daniel. So that's encouraging for me to hear because I rarely hear of people doing what I call a two-step signup. And this to me was one of the key unlocks. I went from running webinars where I was getting to 50, 300 registrants per webinar, which to me was an increase over what I was kind of expecting and kind of hovering in the 100 range. And so I was seeing more registrants, but I wasn't seeing that turn into pipeline at all.

26:54And that was my goal, or at least one of my goals in this instance. And what I did was I implemented this two-step signup process. So I would have a landing page that I custom built. I wouldn't drive people just to the Zoom registration page because you have very little control over what that looks like, what you can do after someone submits, those sorts of things. So I started building custom landing pages that integrated with Zoom and would register them. and then as soon as they submitted, it would redirect them to a survey type form. So think of like type form or a progressive form on HubSpot or high level or something like that, where you can kind of present one question at a time.

27:35And the beauty of this process was that it's two steps, right? So I'm going to ask maybe five or six more questions of this person who just signed up for a webinar, but if they don't complete it, it's fine. Cause the first step was complete and we still captured them and they're still signed up for the webinar. But by making it feel like a one-step process to the person signing up, by making that first question just say, hey, thanks for registering. Complete your webinar registration by answering a few more questions. And then making sure your first couple questions are super easy to answer, like what's your role, what size of company, those sorts of things.

28:08But then you kind of have permission to ask a few more lead qualification questions about, like you said, what are your biggest challenges. Let's say you're an agency that specializes in doing LinkedIn ads. Like, how much do you spend on LinkedIn ads per month? Those sorts of qualifying questions. And then you give people the option, just say, hey, last question, would you like to book a call with a team that specializes in XYZ, whatever that is? And by doing that, I went from one to 2 % of my webinar signups actually booking sales calls to as high as 10%. So it was a five to 10x increase of making sure I was capturing the hot leads just by asking that question.

28:48Because if I only asked it at the end of the webinar or in the email follow-up sequence, we know that only 5 % of our market is in market at any given time. But I was not giving myself the opportunity to always capture the maximum of that 5 % that was in market. And so there's some nuances to how you set that up, different ways you can do it, how you design that survey. But that to me, I started booking sales calls before the webinars were even live. And so one, I was reaching my goal faster. And two, it allowed me to show up with less kind of pressure of, I really got to sneak in the pitch here during the webinar.

29:27And I can just focus on thought leadership and education. I also think it helps you not burn the rest of the audience that you're trying to. So I honestly think the problem with a lot of webinars is you get a list of 300 webinar attendees. They send it to SDR or AE, like go reach out to these people. Instead of like, here are, we had 300 webinar attendees. 50 of them said they're interested in learning or interested in getting help with their revenue program. um go send custom reach out to these 50 people instead of saying like and the other 250 just let them or are not ready yet and just let them keep nurturing like there's 50 of them that we need to like why are we sending a whole list because you don't want to like those are people who showed intention so why are you why are you burning those people yeah it's like we you don't want to miss out on the 5%, but you don't want to burn bridges with the 95%.

30:35And that's exactly what we're doing by kind of putting everybody through the same playbook of like webinar, hey sales, here's the list, go follow up with them, right? And by asking some of those questions in the front end, you separate the hot from the cold leads. The hot leads go straight to sales, maybe even straight onto their calendar because they rose their hand and said, yeah, I want a sales call or I want a demo or whatever the case is. And the other 95%, you ask a few more questions and you get some idea of like, hey, we can actually segment these folks and we can tailor our follow-up.

31:06They've already been asked, do they want a sales call? And they've said, no, not right now, but we can tailor our follow-up based on the answers to their questions. We can prioritize those. We can say, hey, they're not ready for a call, but how could we position our sales team to add value, to share some other resource, those sorts of things to nurture those relationships. But right now we just take the 100%, we drop them all in the same bucket. I completely agree with you. I think that's a big part of the problem of the typical webinar playbook. I think that's part of the problem. And part of it is like you, the question you're asking the reg path needs to align with that hook that you had at the beginning.