Daniel Waas
Director of Marketing – LogMeIn

Webinar marketing has become a buzzword of sorts in martech.We spoke to Daniel Waas, Director of Marketing, LogMeIn to understand the nuances of webinar marketing.

MTS: Tell us about your role at LogMeIn and the team you handle?
Daniel Waas: Here at LogMeIn I serve as the director of product marketing for GoToWebinar. My background is in demand gen. I used to run the marketing for the GoTo products in EMEA. Back in Europe, I had three teams. One each in the UK, Germany, and France. My team ran up to 100 webinars per quarter across three languages and we saw great success with the program. That ultimately got me so interested in GoToWebinar that I wanted to go beyond just marketing the product. I wanted to get involved with the product roadmap and that’s what I’ve been working on heavily since moving to the US in late 2014. As a demand marketer, one of the opportunities I saw was to make better use of on-demand content as a constant source of new demand. That idea is the core of our newest product, GoToStage.

MTS: What was the idea behind releasing the Big Book of Webinar Stats?
Daniel: My team engages with our customers every day, be it through our webinar program or in 1:1 conversations and there are a couple of questions we get all the time – questions like “What’s a good attendance rate?”, “What’s the best time to host?”, “How can I be more successful with my promotions?” With the Big Book of Stats, we wanted to provide definitive answers to these questions that are based not on anecdotal knowledge, but on the massive dataset of actual webinar data we have. Our 55,000 customers run millions of webinars on our platform every year, reaching more than 60 million viewers and that number is growing. That puts us in a unique position as nobody else in the industry has a comparable footprint.

MTS: What are the most astonishing revelations from the book that you would like to share with our readers?
Daniel: When I presented our findings at INBOUND this year there were a couple of insights that stood out to the audience. One of the most surprising was the level of engagement. We found the average attendee spends 61 minutes in a webinar. Where else do you get to spend 61 minutes live with a prospective buyer?

The other big aha moment was the limited impact of the attendance rate. Webinar organizers obsess about their attendance, yet our research has shown that 26% of registrants never even intend to show up live. They’re signing up with the explicit goal of getting access to the recording and want to watch on-demand, on their own time. A trend and need we’re servicing with our new on-demand platform, www.GoToStage.com. And to add to that, we found that 42% of the top 100 webinars run on our platform in terms of attendance actually had a sub-par attendance rate. So what really matters is how you promote the event, not the attendance rate. Accordingly, what most resonated with the audience were our insights on how to boost registrations: the effectiveness of co-marketing, simple tweaks to your webinar title that can increase registrations by up to 43% and of course the optimal times to promote and host.

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MTS: What would be the next frontier for in live events, on-demand video or content marketing?
Daniel: I see on-demand video as the next frontier in B2B and in the content game. Research shows video is the preferred way for how people want to learn. In an ocean of written content, remarkable video content is a great way to stand out. From a webinar perspective the move with to on-demand with GoToStage is also interesting because it allows our customers to scale beyond the live event. Live is great for customer engagement and interaction, but by adding a stronger on-demand component marketers can get a better return on great content they already have.

MTS: Are webinars the new-age B2B customer advocacy programs?
Daniel: Webinars can certainly play a role in advocacy. Existing customers frequently join our webinars and this is the easiest way we can truly connect with them at scale. We want to be as authentic as we can possibly be when we’re engaging on video live and to have as much fun as we can get away with. To me that is the key difference between a webinar and other content tactics. Only on a webinar will you be able to build rapport. That said customer advocacy to me is more of a second-tier goal for most of our customers. Generating awareness and new demand is the number one goal we hear from customers, followed by fostering customer engagement and loyalty.

MTS: 2018 is already seen as the “Year of Hyper-Personalization”. How should marketers firm up their action plan to optimize marketing campaigns around webinars?
Daniel: There are two elements to this. One is the promotional side. You’ll want to make sure you have great audience/topic fit and a tight targeting in your promotional efforts. We’ve had great success using 30-60s promo videos for each of our webinars, where we deliver a concise what’s-in-it-for-me that pulls people in. The second element is the interaction during the webinar. The easiest way to personalize your delivery to the audience is to get their feedback early and often. So actively asking the audience open-ended question via the chat and making ample use of polls and Q&A to get an understanding of where the audience is at, so you can respond to their needs on the fly. The polls and surveys are also a great way to ask qualifying questions that you can re-use in your marketing automation system to further personalize your email communication.

MTS: How do you utilize data science and machine learning algorithms to create customer value?
Daniel: On our new platform, GoToStage, we use machine learning extensively to personalize content recommendations for our audience. And as for data science, the Big Book of Webinar Stats is a great example of how we use the smarts of our data team in combination with the data in our system to generate valuable insights.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Daniel.
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