Annie Lei
Chief Revenue Officer, AmpLive

The foremost question at the ongoing Webinar World’18 is -‘How to put the personal back in marketing,’ – with a focus on how to build context-based campaigns and deliver events that put the customer first and foster authentic engagement between the audience and the brand. In the run-up to the event, we spoke to martech thought leaders speaking at the event. We spoke to Annie Lei, Chief Revenue Officer, AmpLive to understand how she leverages technology to reach out to customers.

What are you excited to speak about at ON24 Webinar World 2018?

I’m excited for the opportunity to educate people about new ways of targeting and expanding audiences for live content. In particular, I’m excited to get the word out about live stream audience growth and distribution. Marketers spend a lot of time thinking about content, promotion, and registration, but there are better, more efficient ways to make sure people see your live content.

What do you believe is necessary to foster authentic engagement between your customers and your brand?

Two major things are vital to foster authentic engagement between our customers and our brand. First, it’s important to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, and really think about what it is that you would need to learn and achieve from the product. I try to always re-read or review content and think about what value I would have taken from it if I hadn’t known anything about it beforehand.

Second, we try to always listen and pay attention to our audience. They’re always communicating, either through words or actions and ignoring how people react to our message would be counterproductive. With our most recent product update, for example, our customers were a huge driving force in the new features that we added. Listening to our customers and letting them drive our product’s evolution has allowed us to build a sense of collaboration and community that continues to help us grow the live ecosystem.

What are you hoping to take away from Webinar World 2018?

Personally, I’m looking forward to learning more about how other people are taking advantage of the live medium. It’s an exciting and creative time for live content, and Webinar World will be a great place to see what people have come up with.

How should marketers leverage marketing technologies to empathize with customers?

Marketing technologies provide important insight that can help marketers step into the shoes of their customers. Social media lets us ask our customers how they feel about things, and automation platforms let us see how they react and engage with our content, which teaches us about their tastes and personalities. All of these things help us know our customers and empathize with them.

For example, AmpLive provides insight into what types of audiences are engaging with different kinds of live content, which helps companies get more strategic about how they interact with audiences. Marketing technologies that allow marketers to deliver content live provide a unique opportunity for people to communicate with their audiences directly and in real-time. In order to empathize with customers, you have to know them. What better way to learn about what motivates your customers than to have real conversations with them?

How do you leverage webinar marketing tools to engage with your online audience? How does it help you build a strong sales pipeline?

Webinar marketing tools are great because they allow you to reach a large number of people all at once, in a particularly human way. You get to put a face on your brand, engage with your audience, and learn from them all while teaching them something useful that (hopefully) leads them back to your product or solution. I think webinars help us establish ourselves as authorities on certain subjects, help us build trust with our audiences, and help us reach a lot of new people (especially through distribution). Of course, they need to be approached strategically, and the impact of a webinar on sales pipeline can vary depending on the promotion, distribution, and retargeting efforts of marketers and organizers.

AR/VR/Webinars and Event Automation– How do you predict online experiences will change with rising technologies, from promotion to event engagement to follow-up?

We can already see things becoming much more targeted and dynamic. Our online experiences will become much more individualized and tailored to our unique interests. Promotion, event engagement, and follow-up will all adapt to this new level of personalization. Also, we are discovering that live content can be incredibly powerful when it’s part of a larger, longer game involving tracking and retargeting audiences based on engagement. Taking live content to the next level requires tools, which we’re always striving to refine and strengthen.

Thanks for chatting with us, Annie.
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