SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How This CEO Used Webinars - 45% show up rate - to Hit $8m in Revenue
27 Jun 2024
Chapter 1: How did the CEO achieve $8 million in revenue using webinars?
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And this is a graph of all the VC money raised in our space, right? And this is also a graph of my blood pressure. And we used them, A-B tested them in the title, and we saw the registration rate like skyrocketing. Hi, everyone. Welcome back from lunch. I'm Palash. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Goldcast. I'm very glad to be here. We are a B2B video and event marketing software.
And I'm going to talk about how do we use a video and digital event strategy to drive an awesome go-to-market motion. So here we go. OK, to put things in context, this is our revenue trajectory. And what I'm going to talk about helped us get from 2 to 8 million in the last two years. This was especially after we moved out of founder sales, founder-led sales.
And over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk about why did we commit to a video and event-first strategy, what tactics we used to power a great live digital event motion, and then how do we use that to power a great content engine. All three are connected, and I'll talk about them. And before I start, a couple of disclaimers. I know everyone is back from lunch.
So if you yawn or nap, I have no problem with that. And then I do a lot of shameless plugs for Goldcast. And I will apologize all in advance. So please forgive me. And you can use Goldcast for anything you like, you see today. As with SaaS, everything in SaaS, there are tons of competitors and alternatives. You can use them as well, but I wouldn't mind that either. So let's start.
So why did we commit to a video and digital event-based strategy? That's a key question. Why do you do all the hard work? And the big theme here is that SaaS is a red fucking ocean. We all know it's so crowded. This is like MarTech map from last year. Probably won't even fit in this screen if we do it this year.
And I kind of knew this when I was going into MarTech, but you don't really feel the pinch till you have to sell in a market like this. And this is a graph of all the VC money raised in our space. And this is also a graph of my blood pressure as this was all happening. And digital events was like a sleepy corner of SaaS, and it became super hot when COVID hit.
And all our competitors were raising a ton of money. And we also have raised more money than I would have liked to. But we still raised a lot less. And we were figuring out how do we stand out as a verticalized competitor to all these, like, giantly funded horizontals, right? So we tried a bunch of things. We tried outbound. We did all the things that the influencers told us on LinkedIn.
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Chapter 2: What strategies did the CEO implement for a successful digital event motion?
So event series, think about it as a podcast that is video-based, that happens on a recurring, regular basis, and is targeted to a persona. So for instance, we have three key personas. We have an event marketer persona. We have the VP of demand and a CMO. Over the last two years, we have done event series that happen every two weeks to four weeks targeted to these personas.
And we talk about anything that's relevant to them at the moment. We don't talk about a product. It's very thought leadership, but it's very engaging. And the key here is consistency. So you do it over a long period of time. And it initially is slightly flatlined. Then it grows. And at the peak, we have had almost 100 people attending these on a weekly basis. And it's great engagement.
And then it tapers off, and then you move on to the next one. So that event series works very well. If you target the right persona, keep it focused on them. The second is using digital summits and mini series to create lightning strikes.
So if you have something you want as a CEO or marketer focused on in a specific period of time, say a product launch, or you are repurposing your brand or things like that, then you use this. So for instance, last year. We launched an AI product, just like all of you. And it's a product used for video content repurposing. And we said, OK, let's couple it.
Let's launch it with a mini series, like one hour session over four days, talking about AI video content repurposing. And we were talking about things that Eric from Single Grain yesterday was talking about. But there were some things that really worked for us in this and made it successful. So a couple of tactics. Number one is the titles that you see here.
They are all derived from keywords that our prospects use in Gong. So we looked at Gong, what are the words that prospects use. And we used them, A-B tested them in the title, and we saw the registration rate skyrocketing. So you see that 1171 people registering, they are all marketers that registered for this event.
The second tactic that worked is we said, OK, let's ditch thought leadership in this. Let's talk about use cases and tactical content, even competing products, because we want to give people tactical advice. And that helps really well, especially if you are trying to drive mid-funnel. So if you see this, we had almost 500 people attending this in a span of three days and a lot of engagement.
So the stuff in the bottom, that's all data. That's very key engagement data that we got from doing this. And over time, this has become like a big pipeline driver for us. So if you look at this trend, the early bars are bigger because it takes time for leads to convert into pipe. But it almost drives like 750k of pipeline for us every month and for very little cost.
It doesn't cost that much money to do it. And some very big brands also use it. So some of our favorite brands, like Sixth Sense, Drift, Zora, they also use similar kind of strategy, especially if you want to learn about this and see this in action. Look at Sixth Sense and attend their webinars and events. They are awesome. And they very much embody what I'm talking about.
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Chapter 3: Why did the company choose a video and event-first strategy?
And then we post it on a regular cadence on YouTube. So the YouTube algorithm only works really well if you post repeatedly on consistent topics. And that has caused a huge surge of traffic for us. The second thing is we create blog posts automatically that are SEO optimized. And they have clips, video clips interspersed. If a human is actually reading them, then they find it engaging.
And they can go and watch the whole video if they want to. And the third thing, which is very important, is we can automatically create multiple LinkedIn posts using AI. And this is something that all of this Goldcast product does. But you can use ChatGP as well and other tools. But it creates all these posts. And we give it to our employees and post it on our page.
And it creates that drumbeat of posts on social that you need to stay relevant and top of mind to your audience. The second big thing that works really well for us is leveraging the speaker's reach. So we have very nice speakers. And when they come to our events, we give them, just right after the event, when it's fresh in their mind, things to post on social right away.
We don't expect them to create it. We give them a LinkedIn post and a video clip of something nice they said in the event. And we give them multiple options, and they can go and post it. So the two things in between, I look weird in that, but these are basically, this is the CMO of KPMG. And I got her on an event. She gave us just 15 minutes.
But right after I sent her five options, these are awesome things you said, she posted two of them. And we got two financial services firms leads from those posts. And they are both closing into six-figure contracts. And this is something that has worked really well for us. How do we leverage on the speaker's reach?
And ultimately, all of this creates the virality you need from a go-to-market motion that works consistently over time. So we ask our prospects about how did they hear about us. And this is our number one way people hear about us, either through our events or through speakers sharing about us. So we talked about all of these things.
But ultimately, the key takeaway is that you need to be able to create content and do live engagement using digital events. Because in this day and age, a brand is only as relevant as the last ad or the last video you posted. And you need to do that at the speed of social to keep top of mind, especially when things are getting crowded and crowded over time.
So I'll wrap up with some tactical learnings that you can use and just create a checklist of sorts. Use the words that your audience uses to create that extra bump in registrations, attendance. Do a mix of thought leadership and use case to create top funnel, bottom funnel impact. Get great speakers. One thing that I forgot to mention is use automatic calendar invites.
So anyone who registers for our events, we send them calendar invites. And that bumps up our attendance by 30%, 40%. And then last, AI is your friend, right? To create content at the speed of social, you need AI. So use AI to repurpose content, to power your speakers, and ultimately get all of the data to drive pipeline and brand. Cool. I am actually done. Thank you.
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