Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how webinars became a core business driver. They cover registration and show-up rates, co-hosting strategies with people like Adam Robinson, and targeting founders and marketers from publicly traded companies using tools like Apollo and retention.com.
You want to talk about what we learned by doing webinars? You're doing a lot more webinars.
You go first.
You're doing co-hosted webinars now.
Oh yeah, I did one with Adam Robinson this past week. That one's good, you should do one with him.
We don't really do co-hosted webinars. We used to already do that. I have tons of learnings on why we don't do it.
You already get a lot of attendees anyway. You're good, you don't need to do co-anything, dude.
We do the co-hosted one, I'm like, So we give you all the attendees and you got us very little.
Yeah, I'm giving you— so I'm doing all the work. What are you giving me? Yeah. So okay, this one was cool. And then you can talk about your numbers because Neil gets a lot of attendees. So Adam Robinson, he does a good job with LinkedIn. He gets a lot of reach. And he runs retention.com, which is like B2B enriching tool.
Yeah, it tells you when someone comes to your website, well, yeah, who they are, what their email is, all that stuff, right? We help brands grow their email list.
And so I did one with him, 9,000 people registered and about 600 or 700 people showed up, about 550 concurrent was the highest, which is pretty good, right? Most of the time the attendees are 90% founders and this time it was 50% founders, 50% marketers. So I was like, oh, that's kind of cool.
Yeah.
But point is that actually did well because we asked them to email afterwards and that got us like 15 to 20 qualified leads for the LinkedIn ABM tool that we have. And that thing, that's a whole nother conversation. Like that thing this week is like, it's been like Like really productive. We'll just call it that.
So that's awesome.
Yeah. But point is, webinars work really well. And actually, Neil turned me back on to webinars. Let everyone know that he turned me back on.
We've been doing them for years. What time do you do your webinars?
Usually at 9 or 10 AM Pacific.
Do them earlier. You should get better attendance.
Yeah, you're always doing it earlier. Like I watch your Instagram Lives where there's like 100, 200 people watching and I always like leave weird comments. But yeah, you don't see it.
So Yeah, no, try them earlier. Because if it's— if you have 6,000 registrations, that's amazing. 600 is a low show-up rate. 9,000 registrations? Yeah, that's 600. But 600 live at a time, it's a low show-up rate.
Because what's your show-up rate? Uh, 20, 30%?
Yeah, more than 20%.
That's high. But it used to be pre-COVID or around COVID.
Like, if we get 12,000 registrants, we'll have like 4,000 to 6,000 show up and see live.
That— how big is your email list now?
2-point-something million.
When's the last time you cleaned it?
Every month.
Oh wow, so it's really compounding.
Yes, but we do them so often and we're getting more specific with our topics. Like if I do a webinar topic like how to do SEO with little to no money, I'll get like, I haven't done that topic. I've done one with lower budgets. But if I had a topic on like how to do SEO when you have no money and rank on page 1, I'm making this up.
You get all the attendees.
40,000 to 50,000 registrants. I'm not joking.
Yeah.
And I'll do an email blast a few times and promote it on social to help boost the numbers, but then I'll generate zero revenue. But on the flip side, when I'll do a webinar presentation on like the AI-ready CMO, not as sexy because a lot of people on my list are also startup people or founders, right? A lot of them are also CMOs or VPs or managing directors. Don't get as many registrants. Same like if I do one on like, how to maximize Google Analytics 4, right? And just talk about, hey, all the changes that you could be doing with GA or the new GA that's been around for a while. Not going to get too many registrants. People just don't care. But the people who do register, they're more likely to be customers.
Yeah.
So our registration numbers have been going down, but we've been more picky on the topics, not for total number of registrants, but to try to appeal to our ideal customers. And then we look at what percentage of our registrants come from publicly traded corporations and we optimize Yep.
And what we do after is we'll look at the entire list and we might enrich it with like Apollo or something like that. And then we'll reach out to people that seem to fit our ICP and say, hey, look, you missed the slides over here, right? Or saw that you missed it, you know, here are the slides and, you know, feel free to, you know, if you guys want to chat on marketing, blah, blah, blah, right? And that works pretty well too. You guys do the same thing, right? Yes.
And our overall goal when we do a webinar is to get 20% of the attendees from publicly traded corporations. We haven't hit 20% yet. Sometimes we'll get closer to like 15, 16%.
Yeah.
Keep in mind, if we get 10,000, 12,000 registrants and 15, 16% are publicly traded companies, a lot of times you'll have 6, 7 people, 8, 9, 10 people, 20 people from one company that are in the marketing department. Because some of these organizations have tons of people in marketing, like 500 or 1,000. But we count that as, you know, call it 6 or 10 people or whatever it may be from publicly traded companies, even if they're at the same publicly traded company. But we're just optimizing for percentage of signups of people who are at publicly traded companies.
And we do one, we try to do one per week. How many are you guys doing?
Well, we don't do that. We do 2 per month.
2 per month, okay, so biweekly.
And we cap it out at that. And we just focus on being very picky about what the topic is versus doing quantity. We went as far as doing almost one a week and we found that we got better results when we were really picky about the topic and we optimized for our ideal customer.
My podcast co-host's agency, so NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global, they're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. I think what we're trying to get at here is events matter. Events do well, whether it's an online event or like an in-person event or a private event, like even a dinner is like a private event. They work well because you're building relationships at the end of the day.
Yes.
Yeah. All right guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. I think the price right now is $199 or so. It's a 7-day free trial. We're bumping it up to $399. So depending on when you listen to this, the price might already be at $399. So that being said, goodbye.
