We are just about to come up on the one-year mark of when I was told the exciting news that the efforts put into creating a 3rd party webinar and content program would be rewarded with TechTarget’s Archer Award ‘Digital Team Of The Year’ at the EMEA ROI Summit in London.

Anytime you receive recognition it just feels good, but this one was extra special. I am sure many can relate to the challenges and uphill struggles you face when embarking on strategic partnerships with marketing services vendors. In particular when you know the solution is right but you need buy-in for the investment and resources to manage it internally. Too often you will hear “we already tried this, it didn’t work” or “we can’t spend budget on this when the ROI can’t be guaranteed” or the worst killer of them all “we don’t do that here – stick to what we usually do”.

As someone who has run up against hurdles like these more than a few times, I usually like to give comebacks such as “you haven’t tried it this way, and you haven’t tried it my way”, “if we need it to be a success, we decide it is going to be a success, and it will therefore be a guaranteed success” and one of the more snarky ones “you hired me to make a difference – let me do what you hired me to do.”

Now, as any person under a whole lot of self-imposed pressure to prove something successful, you turn to the next person in line and pass on some of that pressure, but only the good kind, naturally. The kind that fires you up and brings you in real close, real fast. Aligning everyone on the mission that was just fully accepted. My first call with my OG BrightTALK team (shout-out to Ashley Blair and Lily Smith) was a lay of the land kind of call: we either make this a success, or my job is going bust. We have one option and one chance and we are going to make it work. Ashley and Lily heard me and they were all in from day one.

Launching Your Marketing Program Right

We ran the pilot with great outcomes (a special thank you here to Lily for making sure quality never slipped). But then noticed the next hurdle on the road to success; an internal perception of lead quality and perhaps even a lack of education on how to best work with leads of this nature. Now, this I know is a challenge many of us marketers come across more frequently than not and it can create unnecessary frustration and friction between internal teams – all of which prevents success from truly bursting through.

This is why I called on Ashley to come give an internal kick-off training for our Sales team. In my past experience, vendor trainings can be a big hit or miss, so I asked Ashley to not do this as a product introduction training, but as a Sales Best Practices training from the POV of an Account Manager doing outreach sales. In short, how to leverage a lead, such as a BrightTALK lead, in the quest for reaching quotas and clubs.

Ashley delivered in full and then some! Immediately an understanding was built between Sales and Marketing and the conversion rates went sky high! So much so that they had never been this high for a 3rd party vendor before in the history of the company!

Scaling Your Marketing Program To New Highs

Nay-sayers have been converted to Yay-sayers, Sales is happy and boasting about their quota attainments, conversion rates are high – the determination to build success is paying off.

Then comes the next hurdle; scaling the program to 5x in size with a near same amount of resources available on both sides of the Sales and Marketing aisle. And to top it off, my OG BrightTALK team got an account shuffle and I was introduced with a new account and customer success manager.

How lucky I was that it turned out to be Swaroop Iyer and Jake Ashby, and that they too were eager and ready to take on the mission of momentum building. We had the success so now was not a moment to lose it.

The new strategy to scale was built on three core pillars:

1. Diversifying Investments Without Compromising Predictable Outcomes

Rapid growth and hyper-scaling are no new challenge for us in B2B tech, but what I often find is that success can quickly turn to diminishing returns on investment if one does not diversify the investment made into products and services. Hence why you always need to have a well-balanced marketing mix. I find that it is no different when you scale with your vendors.

With the careful guidance and analysis from Swaroop, we teamed up to find ways to optimise and diversify without compromising on the KPIs that we must deliver. Instead of relying on one service offered by BrightTALK, we went for three services (ABM program, Summits, Live Events). In addition, we would split the ABM program into three; regional, local market, and industry.

To no one’s surprise, the more granular you get the higher conversion you create. However, as organisations going through hyper-growth know, you need both volume and higher conversion rates simultaneously. When you diversify your investments into multiple services as you scale with your vendor, you avoid having to compromise on outcomes and turn a success into “we tried that, it didn’t work”.

2. Cost-Efficient Content That Captivates And Converts

With BrightTALK being a webinar platform, the main focus here was to build a scalable and cost-efficient content strategy that can fuel the growth of the services invested in. Here is where I see many struggle to keep up and even see a breaking point when it comes to building ROI with this program.

I am here to tell you, that you do not need to create +10 webinars each month, you do not need a dedicated person only to creating webinar content, and you definitely do not need webinar content solely for the purpose of fueling one marketing program, in this case BrightTALK. There is a quicker, easier, and much more cost-efficient way to get around this.

a) Take a look at what you already have from other marketing programs. Whether it is from your online strategic events, technical partner webinars, product demos, campaign webinars, industry speakers, technical walk-through, etc., you probably already have quite the content library of video content you can dive into. Start by mapping out what you have and how frequent new content gets produced. Make that your largest pool of content to use and plan ahead according to content availability.

b) Identify your audience content gaps. For example, if you are in a product-led marketing organisation, chances are your thought leadership content serving senior management decision-makers is very low. Look at your audience from seniority levels (technical, operational management, senior leadership) and identify content gaps according to that. I find that time and time again, this is what proves to be most successful. Too often content gaps get based on internal organisational priorities, such as GTM or product group offerings – this is not the place to do that.

c) Create cost-efficient content to close gaps. Could you fold the cost of an external speaker into one of the services already paid for? Are there options for inviting lower-budget industry speakers along for a conversation? Can you change up the format and value simply by bringing in a moderator? There are many ways to leverage and build cost-efficient webinar content in service of a program such as BrightTALK. It doesn’t require big budgets.

d) Recycle content as much as possible to increase return on investment, whether by your budget or someone else’s. I will dive into this in much more detail another time, but for now start thinking about the many ways you can recycle your webinar content across multiple digital channels to increase ROI on content investment. For example, a Live Event webinar on BrightTALK can be recycled on your own domain to your own database (with every single DG channel you can possibly think of), and then recycled once more for another third part service, perhaps content syndication. One content piece, full bang for the buck.

3. Enjoy The Momentum Of Organic Growth

One of the reasons for the award was the very high organic growth the company channel on BrightTALK was able to generate, both in terms of followers, content consumption, engagements and revenue. At the time of the award, the program had been live and scaling for just over a year. Consistency pays off, big time.

Around the first half-year mark of the program, the growth in organic as well as paid audience started to grow at similar rates and at the time of the award it was a 40% / 60% split between organic and paid audience followers.

Through a consistent combination of a comprehensive webinar strategy and storytelling tactics, the company channel reached over 10,000 subscribers in a year and continues to achieve 20% quarter-over-quarter growth in followers – something BrightTALK tells me is very unusual, in the best way possible.

Celebrating Momentum And Collaborative Achievements

On stage at TechTarget’s EMEA ROI Summit in London, I was presented with the award for our efforts in building and scaling the success of the BrightTALK marketing program. It was a huge testament to everyone involved in making the program a success from start to finish (have to shout out my BrightTALK people once more here; Ashley, Lily, Swaroop and Jake – it would literally not have been possible without you!).

As part of the Summit, I was also invited to speak on the panel ‘Hacking Content: Strategies to Captivate in a Fast-Moving Tech Space’ which you can watch on-demand here. I will also dive into our discussions from this session more later on.

And if you have read this long but need a TLDR version, TechTarget caught me on camera telling the story behind the BrightTALK program success and you can watch it here:

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Thank you for reading my blog. If you need help with building a high-converting cost-efficient and easy to scale webinar program, let’s talk. I can advise, consult or create for you. Contact me here and let’s have a conversation about how I can help you build your momentum.