How to build a Game Changing webinar series that drives revenue

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Defining the webinar series strategy

Laying the foundation

Finding potential speakers

Inviting Speakers

Structuring the webinar content

Creating a new webinar event

Promoting the webinar

The live webinar session

Repurposing webinar content

Following up with attendees

Reporting & tracking

Seeing the results

Download the templates

It’s no secret that webinars are huge drivers of pipeline and demand generation. In fact, 85% of marketers use webinars as a key marketing strategy in generating demand. Yet, scaling these programs can be a daunting challenge, given the various workflows and manual tasks involved.

But what if marketing teams could kick off their webinar programs in an hour or two and know that they could continue to scale it into the future – without any barriers or added effort?

In an attempt to find the perfect webinar program that was 100% scaleable by design, we kicked off our own webinar series – Game Changers.

Game Changers started as a simple weekly webinar and has since grown into a series that has highlighted marketing experts and thought leaders from high-growth companies like 6sense, Calendly, Salesloft, & Amazon. In less than a year, we can say that we’ve developed the most robust webinar strategy housed directly on our website.

Why do we believe that? We’ll let the results speak for themselves.

🚀 $2.7 million in pipeline generated
🔥 +343% increase in website traffic
💪 +76% in # of SEO keywords
📣 +271% boost in social impressions
⭐️ 400+ repurposed content pieces

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. After running many experiments to find the most Game Changing webinar strategy, we found it. And now we’re going to share all the results, processes and templates we uncovered with you.

Defining the webinar series strategy

Before we were able to officially launch our webinar series, we needed to lock down what we wanted to achieve with this program. Overall, we wanted to build a strong pipeline and create authentic, valuable content.

So the question was, how could we use webinars to engage our audience and build trust in a way that would fuel revenue?

The answer to this question revolved around knowing our audience well. After compiling research on our audience’s preferences, we came up with a webinar structure that looked like this:

🎯 Objective

Our objective is to build pipeline and brand awareness amongst B2B Marketers by hosting marketing leaders and SMEs on a weekly Game Changers webinar.

👑 Core audience

B2B Demand Generation Marketers

💡Format

30-minute, 1:1 casual interview conversation

💬 Guest speakers

Marketing leaders / Marketing SMEs

🏆 Goals

400+ registrations per quarter
Over 40% of registrants attend live
20% of engaged leads book demos
70% of speakers convert to SQLs
Generates 33% of overall pipeline

📆 Frequency

Once a week on Thursdays at 10am PT and 1pm ET

🤝 Team involved

1 host (our CEO) & 1 program manager (our Content Marketing Lead)

Having our webinar strategy boiled down to these highlights and sharing it with our entire company, allowed everyone to get behind the program and help it grow faster.

It’s important to establish a well-defined strategy that acts as your guide and source of truth. It won’t just help prevent you from deviating from driving those core goals, it’ll help your entire team understand the impact you want to drive with this program and keep you accountable.

Note: Game Changers is hosted every Thursday at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET. This isn’t just an arbitrary time to host a webinar. Based on our audience’s preferences, research, and various experiments, we found that Thursdays in the morning and around lunchtime drove the most engagement.

Now you may be thinking, “How do you track all this?” We’ll get to that in a bit but feel free to use the table of contents on the left to jump to the Reporting and Tracking section of the guide.

Laying the foundation for the webinar series

When we established the structure for our Game Changers webinar series, there were two essential elements we needed to consider after defining the strategy – the brand experience and the technical setup.

The nice thing is that once it’s setup, you don’t need to touch the settings again. Customizing these options has even saved us hours of manual work per webinar and eliminates room for human error.

Creating the Game Changers hub on our website

We approached our webinar series in a way that no one had ever attempted before. Meaning we needed to build the technical setup from scratch. But, it sounds more complicated than it is.

Since our webinar tool makes the process of publishing each event nearly effortless, the tech setup only consisted of creating a space on our website to house all our webinars. We use Webflow as our CMS. However, Sequel easily works with any CMS including WordPress.

The designs we created in Webflow consist of two parts:

The Game Changers home page: includes all the upcoming and on-demand webinars highlighting each session’s image, title, speaker, and date.
Individual webinar landing page: includes speaker details, resource links, a Sequel event embed, title, description, date & time.

Both designs are managed by our CMS where we can publish webinars and the pages automatically populate with the correct information. A lot of times marketers see this phase as a barrier to getting a webinar series going quickly since you might have to work with a designer to create these pages.

But since we already did it for Game Changers, we thought we would just share our webflow template with you. It’ll help you get things started much quicker.

Establishing a fully branded webinar experience

To guarantee every webinar is aligned with the overarching Game Changers strategy, it’s key that we make sure the audience experience always embodies our brand and incorporates webinar best practices.

The first step is easy – logging into the Sequel’s customization settings to:

✔️ Choose the event embed theme & colors
✔️ Upload a Logo
✔️ Select a font
✔️ Enable the chat, polls, Q&A, & private messages
✔️ Determine the default visibility of the participant list
✔️ Trigger & tailor email communications

Customizing each of these elements helps create a seamless brand experience every time. For Game Changers, we’ve even customized the automatic email communications outside of the default copy to sound exactly like us. The automatic email communications can also remind registrants about upcoming webinars helping drive higher attendance rates without extra manual work.

But we all know how easy it is to forget to attend a virtual event if it’s not on our calendars. That’s why it is important to have your webinars automatically show up in registrant’s calendars – without them having to add it themselves.

As an added effort to drive high attendance rates for Game Changers, we allow people to register for all our webinars at once. All we have to do is enable cross-event registrations in our Sequel event settings and future webinars show up in their calendars automatically – so they don’t have to register every time.
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We also turn on all the automatic email communications for Game Changers, but you can pick and choose from the list and even tailor them for individual events:

Registration confirmation
Replay registration confirmation
Host invitation
Presenter invitation
24 hour event reminder
1 hour event reminder
15 minute event reminder
Post event – attended
Post event – no-show

If you’re curious what our email copies look like for Game Changers, you can view the templates, here. But this is one example of the customized email that’s sent if someone wasn’t able to attend the live Game Changers session:

Hi {NAME},

Sorry you couldn’t make it to Game Changers live today.

Things pop-up – I get it. But no worries, I got you! You can watch the on-demand replay whenever you have time, here.

All the key insights have also been summarized by Sequel AI in a blog post under the replay if you want a quick recap of the session.

Hope to see you in the crowd next week or any Thursday that you're available.

Here’s the link to all our upcoming events featuring amazing marketing leaders & their actionable insights.

See you soon,
Oana

Integrating Sequel with our marketing tech stack

As a Marketer you likely use a large variety of tools but need them to work well together to easily & accurately find, analyze, and adapt the data you collect. With the depreciation of cookies and UTMs, it’s 10 times harder to do that. This is one of the core reasons why we wanted to host Game Changers directly on our website.

It enables us to collect first-party data through our website via tools like Google Analytics and Hubspot. So when it comes to integrating our webinar solution with existing website analytics tools, there’s nothing else we need to do.

Nonetheless, sending attendee engagement data and mapping custom fields to a CRM can be a huge benefit. We use Hubspot as our CRM and main source of truth.

By going into our Sequel webinar integration settings, we were able to connect our Hubspot account in a few seconds. This allows us to see all our webinar engagement and contact data in one place so it’s easy to identify high-intent leads. But to prevent the data from becoming a mess, we also made sure to map custom fields to Hubspot including contact information like email, title, company, source, etc.

In layman’s terms, when someone new registers for a Game Changers webinar, that contact is created in our Hubspot account. If they answer a poll or engage in the chat, we see that in… you guessed it – our Hubspot account.

We recommend you do this too - it makes the converting leads seamless. We’ll dive more into how we use this data when we talk about webinar follow-ups.

After establishing the webinar setup, it’s off to the races with the fresh, fully branded webinar experience – from branded webinar landing pages and emails to collecting all the engagement data you could imagine. Now you just need to find some speakers!

Finding potential speakers

Depending on the goal you want to achieve with your webinar series and what your audience is interested in, you can invite speakers that serve different purposes.

As we launched Game Changers we started by inviting our customers, partners, and personal connections. This is how we recommend anyone start because it allows you to build up a baseline of content that you can share with future speakers as a form of social proof. If potential speakers see that other people have been on your webinar series and can review the content, they’re more likely to accept your invitation.

The more webinars you host, the more likely you’ll lock in notable speakers and brands. Here is a breakdown of the types of speakers you should consider inviting.

Customers: Customers make great speakers because they are natural advocates for your brand. They’re more likely to talk you up at some point in the conversation even if the topic doesn’t fully align with your solution.
Partners: Bringing in your partners to speak on a webinar makes the event more of a team effort. They are just as invested in the project as you because they’re getting something a little extra from the experience (usually leads).
Personal connections: Reaching out to personal connections is a great way to lock in initial speakers for your series. This helps you reinforce relationships and give people a stage to share their own perspectives.
Thought leaders: Inviting thought leaders to speak on your webinar is going to act as a huge magnet for people looking for expert advice on a specific topic. After the webinar is over, you’ll have a lot of great insights you can repurpose into high-value content pieces.
Influencers: Driving a large number of registrations is much easier when someone with a huge following is helping you promote the session.
ABM / Prospects: People love talking about themselves and their experiences. If you’re trying to sell your solution to someone, consider having them speak on your webinar series. This gives you a little more face time that isn’t seen as a direct sales pitch, builds up their trust, and makes them feel good because you think they have something of value to contribute.

Bonus tip: Ask every speaker who they would recommend for your series. If you can get them to make an introduction – all the better. Soon you’ll create a well-oiled machine for bringing in speakers. You can even have a speaker recommendation form that you can plug under your webinars, in emails, or send out to your network.

As you start looking for speakers outside your network, tap into the channels that are the most popular with your audience. For our audience, LinkedIn and Slack communities are great places for us to see who our audience is listening to and engaging with the most.

Even if someone fits into one of the categories above, it doesn’t mean you should invite them on quite yet. See which speakers will be the most beneficial to your business since the end goal is to drive revenue.

When evaluating a speaker, answer these questions to understand if they are a fit for your webinar:

How big is their audience?
Does their audience align with yours?
Can they talk about a topic that is interesting to your audience?
Are they well-spoken? Have they done other webinars or podcasts that you could listen to to find out?
Would they promote the session?
Do they have the potential to be a customer or a partner?

After a while, people will come to you asking to speak on your webinar series but you have to lay the groundwork first.

Community Spotlight: Everflow

Everflow is leading the charge when it comes to bringing in partners and speakers that drive immense engagement – generating a stellar

85% live attendance rate

Webinars have acted as a cornerstone for elevating their partnership program and fueling demand generation.

Inviting Speakers

Finding amazing speakers that you want to have on your webinar series is the easy part. Now you need to invite them and get them to accept.

When reaching out to a potential speaker, consider where they are most active. If you have their email already, you’re one step ahead of the curve. However, a lot of times that won’t be the case and you’ll need to reach out to them through communities or social media channels like LinkedIn.

Bonus tip: Building a following on LinkedIn has helped us bring in more speakers and expand the visibility of Game Changers. It helps build trust with potential speakers when they see we have thousands of followers.

Here are the series of communications we send to people interested in speaking on our Game Changers Series.

Step 1: LinkedIn invitation

If we aren’t already connected to the person we want to speak on Game Changers, we typically connect with them on LinkedIn with a message like this.

Hi {NAME} - I am a fellow marketer turned founder of Sequel.io. I'd like to invite you to be a guest on Game Changers, a live series where marketing leaders from companies like Amazon, Salesloft, G2, and Calendly share their growth strategies and incredible journeys. Hope you'll join us. Oana

If you take this route, just remember that LinkedIn connection messages can only be 300 characters long. Use that space wisely.

You’ll also notice that the host of our series sends the connection request. That way there is a higher likelihood that they’ll accept the invite since we are putting a face (and personality) to the name.

Step 2: LinkedIn follow up message

If they accept the invite, the next step is to follow up with a little more context. This message helps show credibility and gets people excited to join the series when they are appearing amongst other thought leaders in the space.

Bonus tip: If you’re just getting started and don’t have a lot of speakers under your belt, just highlight a few of the biggest names and/or brands that you’ve hosted – even if they’re customers or personal connections.

Step 3: Email invitation to be a Game Changer

This email can act as a communication kick-off if you are already connected to the person you’re looking to recruit. Otherwise, this is a good email to transfer the conversation from LinkedIn to email. Switching to email communications is important so that down the line you can easily send links and loop in other team members without things getting too messy.

Step 4: Email to kick things off & share next steps

Now that they’ve verbally accepted your invite, you need to send them more details about the run of the show and schedule the live session and prep call.

If they can’t make any of the live session slots, book time outside of those restraints to pre-record the session. Then you can host the webinar as a simulated live (simulive) session during your normal program schedule. More on simulive webinars later.

Scheduling tip: Set up your scheduling tool to have designated scheduling links. One for the prep call (~30-minute duration) and one for the live session that only allows them to book for the day and time you defined for your recurring series.

Structuring the webinar content

Great – you’ve got the speaker to accept your invite and schedule the prep call! Now it’s time to start structuring the content for the session.

Before jumping into the prep call, make sure you’re prepared. Check out their LinkedIn and the content they’ve created in the past to get a better idea of what they could talk about that aligns with your audience’s interests. Then when you get into the call you can ask questions about those topics.

This is a discovery call so it’s more about finding what subject make sense for both parties and what’s currently trending in your space. Ask them pointed questions and don’t forget to take notes.

Bonus tip: Consider recording the prep call with the speaker. This will allow you to have a record of what was actually said if your notes fail you. It’s also a great opportunity to repurpose the call into a preview video clip that you can leverage for promoting the session.

After the prep call, create a document with the topic and outline – it doesn’t need to be anything fancy to get started. A simple Google Doc will do.

Finally, send them a link to the content for final approval – and now it’s time to create the actual event & prepare for promotion.

"Don't look at what other businesses do, because they all copy each other. Boring. Find inspiration on YouTube, TV, etc. After you find a few concepts you can parody & clone for your own work, the topic comes naturally."

Ollie Whitfield

Marketing Team Lead – Demand Generation

VanillaSoft

Creating a new webinar event

Since you’ve already set up the CMS landing page for your webinars, creating a new event is easy. Here’s how we do it with our Game Changers series.

1. Designing the feature image

The first order of business is creating the feature image for the webinar. We have a few templates in Canva that help us create these designs within minutes (maybe even seconds). Here’s an example:

Notice that we have a consistent design that aligns with the overall feel of the webinar landing page – including the Game Changers logo in the top corner. We also include the speaker’s photo, name, title, and company logo for the images used for promotion.

Bonus tip: Ask the speaker for a high-quality picture of themself early on. As a last resort, you can rely on LinkedIn or Google to find a picture of them. Once you have their picture you can use a tool like Canva to remove the background making your assets feel more cohesive.

This image can then be used as the webinar registration image, social media preview, and promotional asset.

2. Publishing the webinar

This is the time we create the actual Game Changers event on our website using Sequel. The key to this process is efficiency.

After speaking to so many people about their webinar processes we realized how manual and time-consuming this process was. So we developed a better way to publish each webinar without so many steps.

It simply comes down to creating a new event in Sequel with details including the title of the session, the lovely feature image we just created, and the date and time the session will be held. Then we invite the host and presenters so they can easily access the event when the time comes. Then it's a matter of a single click to publish the webinar on our website.

Note: Our Game Changers community loves this setup because they only ever need to use one link for the registration, live event, and recording. Since the webinar is embedded on a landing page, they also don’t need to download any clunky software. If the goal is to keep an audience engaged, it doesn’t make sense to make the process more difficult than it has to be.

And that's all – how easy is that! The webinar landing page is live on the website and will now be ready for people to start registering for the session. But don’t forget you need to tell people about it first!

Promoting the webinar

Promoting a webinar is arguably the most important part of the process. If you don’t get people into the session, why are you hosting webinars in the first place?

There are two phases of the promotion process – preparation and distribution.

Preparing promotion assets

When it comes to creating the assets it’s nice to have multiple formats to draw from. The great thing is, you already have one done – the feature image!

Here are some of the types of assets we create to promote a session:

✔️ A static feature image
✔️ A ‘count-down’ image (either a static or a gif)
✔️ A video preview clip (taken from the recording of the initial prep call)

Using tools like Sequel’s Media Hub or Descript for video clips and Canva or Figma for creating statics, will help you create one template that you can quickly edit for each episode in your series.

Creating promotion copy

Now you have some amazing assets but what about promotional copy? When you're sharing the webinar with your audience, they’re going to need details including:

💡 The topic and what it’s about
💬 Who’s speaking
⏰ The time and date
📣 Where they can sign-up

But this is just the baseline. You should always try to include additional value when you can. For example, when you are posting on social media, share some insights and tips that will be discussed. This will act as a hook to get them interested in learning more. We’ve found that these informational posts for Game Changers perform the best when trying to drive registrations.

To ensure that you get as much visibility as possible, think about preparing copy for:

✔️ The speaker’s social media post
✔️ The speaker’s company social media post & newsletter
✔️ Your brand’s social media post
✔️ Your brand’s newsletter
✔️ The host’s social media post
✔️ Your team’s social media posts

This might seem like a lot, especially if the speaker creates their own post. However, using the discussion points as your guide and leveraging AI can help you crank out some amazing copy without sinking too much time into it. Plus, if the copy is already written, people are more likely to post about the session.

Bonus tip: Keep all the assets for each webinar in their own designated Google Drive folder. It’s also helpful to only give the speaker access to things relevant to them so it’s easy to find all the resources in one place without confusion.

Now that the copy and assets are finished, it’s time to put them to use. At this point in the process for Game Changers, we start by sending an email to the speaker including all the promotional materials that they can use.

Here’s an example of that message:

Hi {NAME},

Thank you for meeting with me to prepare for Game Changers! The event has been published on our website and registration is open, here.

We would love it if you could share this event with your network. Here is a promotional package that includes some sample social copy and imagery. Who is the best person on your marketing team to coordinate promotional efforts?

Notice the last sentence in the example. At this stage, it’s going to be HUGE if you can get in contact with the speaker’s marketing team to help promote the webinar. It’ll help you generate more registrations by tapping into a larger network.

Since we are trying to engage B2B Marketers with our Game Changers series, we also encourage the speaker’s marketing team to join the session. If the company fits our core ICP, we already have a foot in the door to introduce them to our tool.
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Tapping into their network of marketers and nurturing a relationship with them – that’s what we call a conversion engine!

When to promote the webinar

At this point, all the promotion assets have been sent over to the speaker and it’s time to start driving registrations. This is where your audience research will come in handy because you’ll know exactly where to find and engage with them.

With Game Changers, we try to promote each session for a solid 3 weeks with a minimum timeframe of 2 weeks. This gives us plenty of time to share the webinar through various channels and in different formats. Not all promotional formats will resonate with everyone – that’s why it’s nice to mix it up.

Here are some of the core channels we use to reach our B2B Marketing audience.

📣 Social media: We primarily leverage LinkedIn because this is where our audience is the most active and looking to learn. We don’t just tap into our company accounts but also enable our employees, speakers, and partners to promote through LinkedIn as well.
📪 Newsletters: We publish a weekly newsletter via direct email and as a LinkedIn newsletter. This is where we share upcoming Game Changers webinars and the insights from previous ones. We also encourage partners and speakers to promote their session through their own newsletters.
🗺️ Syndication channels: We don’t publish the event on other websites but we do share all the details and insights for each session on various content-sharing platforms and forums. A lot of times these platforms will share events and new content in their weekly newsletters helping increase your visibility.
🪴 Communities: Being active in B2B Marketing communities like M2 and DEMAND Community allows us to share our expertise and support the growth of other marketers through the value of our Game Changers series.

Bonus tip: We have an internal Slack channel called #amplify dedicated to rallying our team behind each other's posts as well as the ones from partners and brands. This helps motivate the entire team to support one another, share their stories, and naturally boost the Sequel & Game Changers brand. We encourage other marketing teams to do the same.

"Draft an internal event activation kit to mobilize your team, evangelists, SMEs, & partners – make sure to emphasize "what's in it for them". This will really help you drive more registrations & attendance rates."

Corrina Owens

Chief Evangelist Officer

purple cork

Our Game Changers promotion taps into each of these channels throughout the 3 weeks leading to the webinar. To keep things in order and stay on top of promotion, we have a calendar that tracks each activity.

There are a lot of different templates we use to make promoting Game Changers as seamless as possible. You can check all of them out, here.

The live webinar session

It’s finally time for what you’ve been waiting for – the live webinar! This part will go by in a flash so make sure that everyone is aligned on the run of the show.

15 minutes before we go live every week with our Game Changers series, we get the speaker, host, and the “webinar coordinator” together to:

✔️ Reiterate the content and flow of the session
✔️ Make sure everyone understands the tech setup
✔️ Nurture the relationship – whether its a partnership, potential deal, or someone you see working with down the line

Remember, connecting with the speaker is just as valuable as connecting with your audience.

What happens on stage

When it’s time to go live, it’s as simple as clicking a button. This is the moment the host has a very important job to withhold. Here are some of the guidelines our host, Oana, uses during each session.

1. Host introduction
“Welcome everyone to this week’s session of Game Changers. I’m Oana Manolache, Founder & CEO of Sequel.io, the webinar solution that allows you to turn your website into a conversion engine. I’m also the host of Game Changers, the weekly webinar series bringing in Marketing Leaders from top brands like G2, Amazon, & Calendly to share their insights and expertise with the greater marketing community.”
2. Kick-off engagement
“Before we get started, tell us where you’re tuning in from in the chat. You can also respond to the polls and add in your questions so that we can answer them throughout the session. You’ll also be able to watch the recording right on this page, automatically after the webinar has ended.”
3. Speaker introduction and topic
“Now it’s my pleasure to introduce {NAME OF SPEAKER}, the {TITLE} at {COMPANY}. {SPEAKER NAME} is an expert when it comes to {TOPIC} – and that is exactly what we’re going to be diving into today. Welcome to Game Changers, {NAME OF SPEAKER}.”

Having an introduction outlined for the host helps give your audience the context they need for the session and answers the questions they would most likely ask in the chat if they weren’t already addressed. Does “Will we get the recording” sound familiar?

After the initial kick-off of the session, it’s on the host to follow the discussion points that were defined earlier. Feel free to go off script to make it feel natural and dive deeper into certain topics. You can always schedule another session to touch on the points you missed.

Note: We don’t use a script for Game Changers since they can make the conversation seem robotic and unauthentic. We prefer to reference general guidelines with the option to talk about other relevant topics that come up naturally.

Once you’ve reached the last few minutes of the session, it’s time to wrap things up. This is a good opportunity to reiterate some of the main takeaways, thank everyone for tuning in, and land your core CTA.

For Game Changers, the CTA usually revolves around promoting the next session. However, if there is an amazing resource we’ve just launched or a giveaway we are doing, we will use this time to share more information about that.

The best alternative to a live webinar

Whether you have competing schedules, are targeting multiple time zones, or your speaker has come down with a case of stage fright, there is an alternative to hosting a webinar live. It’s all about the simulive webinar experience.

If you aren’t familiar with the term simulive (simulated live), all it does is allow you to schedule a pre-recorded session to premier at a certain time. You can still engage your audience via the chat, polls, etc. like normal, but you don’t need to worry about any scheduling conflicts.

Although most of our Game Changers webinars are live, there are a few that we host as simulive. You won’t even be able to tell the difference (but you can try).

Since all webinar recordings are automatically stored in our Media Hub, we just click a button for the recording to go live for a particular session and it’s good to go.

What happens backstage

While your amazing webinar is running, it’s always nice to have someone backstage to help engage the audience so that the host can focus on the discussion at hand.

These are the main ways we hype up our audience during Game Changers:

Polls: In a 30-minute session, we usually run 2 polls. Since we have the discussion points prepared, it makes it easy to create a few in advance and publish them when they align with certain points in the webinar. We usually give participants a few minutes to submit their responses.
Q&A: Encourage participants to ask questions. The host should be checking in every once in a while to see if there are questions that they can answer. If necessary, the person backstage can always send a private message to remind them.
Reactions: Show the audience that they can use the reactions at the bottom of the webinar screen early on. We like to kick the session off by using the reactions feature so that people know they can do the same throughout the webinar.
Chat: The chat is an amazing place for your audience to connect with the content and each other. It’s also a great place to share more details and resources. Consider adding links to relevant content and where people can connect with the speaker. But don’t forget to stay on top of the chat to answer questions and generally engage with the audience.
Giveaways: This isn’t something we do for every episode of Game Changers. However, incorporating a giveaway into your session can help boost registrations and engagement. For example, you could ask the audience to answer a question in the chat and select one person to receive a Grove Cookie box or other special gift.

Bonus tip: Engagement features like polls and Q&A, are extremely valuable tools as it allows you to segment users based on their responses. If their responses reflect pain points your solution is solving for or they show interest in a topic you're an expert in, you’ll be able to reach out to them to continue the conversation.

Overall, lead by example. By engaging with the audience as much as you’d like them to participate, more people will likely follow your lead, creating a network effect.

Repurposing webinar content

What do you do with the webinar content after the session has ended? We noticed how overwhelmed some marketers can get with this stage of the process. That’s because traditionally repurposing webinars required 5+ tools, multiple weeks to create the content, and hiring expensive freelancers to make it all happen. At that point, most marketers choose not to repurpose the content, losing out on over 60% of that additional content’s potential.

But there is a new way to create a more efficient and effective repurposing process thanks to AI.

Every Game Changers webinar we host gets repurposed into over 6 content pieces, using 1 to 2 tools, and is entirely done in-house. Meaning we don’t hire expensive freelancers. This is what our process looks like and how long the process takes us.

[0 minutes] On-demand recording: This one should be a no-brainer. Since we host Game Changers on our website, we don’t need to upload anything – it’s automatically available on the webpage where we hosted the session. All we have to do is send people a reminder to watch the recording after the webinar has ended.

[1 minute] Blog post: Every Game Changers recording we have is automatically stored in our Sequel Media Hub, which just so happens to include Sequel AI. It’s a matter of simply adding in the tone & SEO keywords we want to optimize the content for and it will generate a blog post within seconds.

What it’s doing behind the scenes is taking the webinar transcript and running it through AI to create a cohesive content piece that you don’t need to pay freelance writers for. Then it’s all about copying and pasting it to your blog.

[1 minute] Social media posts: This is a similar process to how we create the blog post. The only real difference is the output. We still include tone and topic keywords, but what gets generated with Sequel AI is optimized for social media engagement including your beloved hashtags and emojis.

[15 minutes] Video clips: Remember how the webinar recording is housed in Sequel’s Media Hub? Well, there’s also a way to access the recording and repurpose it into short video clips for social media.

Based on the transcript and key takeaways provided in the AI-generated blog, you can identify the most insightful parts of the discussion and cut them into bite-sized pieces.

Typically, we use a Descript template to quickly add in the speaker’s name, our logo, and a few other details so the clips look polished. And people love it! These Game Changers video clips are some of the most popular content we share on social media. Our speakers enjoy sharing this content with their networks too.

[10 minutes] Newsletter: Creating a weekly newsletter fueled by the insights from our Game Changers series was huge for us – building up a community of thousands of marketers in a few months.

To create the content for the newsletter, we take the AI-generated blog post and focus on the main actionable insights that our subscribers can use right away. On top of this, we like to share details about upcoming Game Changers sessions and other insights and content from the community. Because our audience is very active on LinkedIn, we also share a post that’s all the rage from the previous week.

[10 mintues] Infographic or Carousel: Depending on the content of the session we are repurposing, we also like to take a similar approach to the newsletter – distilling the main actionable takeaways in an infographic or carousel. We use a template in Canva so that we can plug in the content and not have to worry much about the design.

Let’s round up and say this process will take you about 40 minutes to complete. It’s now the perfect time to reach back out to the speaker to share these content snippets, while they're still feeling the energy from the session. The faster you send these resources to the speaker, the more likely they’ll share it with their network.

There are so many opportunities to repurpose your webinar content but the core focus should be on value and efficiency. If your audience doesn’t prefer a certain format or isn’t on specific platforms, don’t waste your time creating that type of content. However, try to streamline the repurposing process where it makes sense. It’ll help you milk every last drop of value from your webinar series.

Community Spotlight: Morrow

Morrow takes event repurposing to the next level by using content from conferences & events to write extensive reports. One conference in particular, they took 16 hours of content and

created a 4k word report in 1 hour

By leveraging AI, the team has been able to repurpose event content at an immense scale.

Following up with attendees

Now that the live session has ended, the pressure is off… right? Depends on how you think about it but you’re not at the finish line yet. You first need to decide what to do with all those webinar attendees.

The good news is we have already set up the automated emails so that everyone will receive an email customized to whether they attended or not. Yes – it includes the webinar recording link too.

But then what? We do a couple different things for Game Changers:

#1: We share our weekly Game Changers newsletter with all the registrants to keep providing value and act as a way to nurture our audience.
#2: We partner with our sales team to dive deeper into the engagement data.

Who engaged the most? What is everyone’s lead score? Have they attended multiple sessions or asked for more information?

We can easily see this information right in our Sequel event analytics to pinpoint the biggest opportunities. It’s also helpful that we automatically enrich this data with company sizes, positions, LinkedIn profiles, etc. Then if someone is identified as a warm high-intent lead, sales can reach out with a personalized message.

Bonus tip: We use Sequel’s Lead Scoring to help us decide on how to follow up with specific registrants. The higher the score, the more personalized the follow-up approach is. This helps us focus our time on the most engaged and valuable accounts. Otherwise, it can be easy to get lost in the data.

Timing is key at this stage. You need to make sure that you are engaging with every single person within 48 hours to make the biggest impact. If you reach out while the session is still fresh in their minds, they’re more likely to genuinely interact with you.

We’ve already established that revenue is Game Changers’ end goal. Even if that’s not the case for your webinar series – if you don’t follow up with attendees, what’s the point?!

Community Spotlight: Userpilot

Userpilot is a amazing example for generating pipeline through their webinar series, resulting in

Boosting demo bookings by 3x

The two biggest factors for achieving these results is by hosting their webinars directly on their website and having a follow-up strategy that keeps them top of mind with their audience.

Learn more

Reporting & tracking

When we set up Game Changers from a technical standpoint, we made sure that we integrated Sequel with our CRM, Hubspot, so we could easily analyze our webinar engagement data in either tool. And since the webinar series is hosted on our website, we have even more first-party engagement data that we can access through Google Analytics.

To make sure we are staying on target, we take a look at our individual event data as well as run quarterly performance reviews for the entire program. Here’s everything we take a look at for individual events:

Traffic to event page: helps you understand how many people you brought to the event landing page via your promotion efforts.
# of registrations: shows you whether or not people are interested in the content of your webinar. It’s also good to take a look at the conversion rate from visitor to registration to see if there is an irregular drop-off.
# of attendees (live, on-demand, and both): see who is truly interested in your content since these are the people who didn’t just register, they showed up.
Live attendance rate: Understand what percentage of your audience is ‘all in’ – meaning they took time out of their schedule to watch your webinar based on the time you defined.
Lead score + engagement (ie. response to a poll): It’s one thing to ‘attend’ a webinar while multitasking. It’s another when an attendee is fully engaged in the content, chat, polls, Q&A, etc. The more engaged your audience is, the more likely they’ll engage with you again & take a high-value action (like booking a demo).
Time on site: After each webinar ends, it’s important to see if everyone stayed for the entire session or left early. The longer you keep your audience on your site, the more Google will recognize the value of your website.

This looks like a lot of information to track for each Game Changers webinar but all of these metrics are automatically collected and presented in Sequel’s analytics dashboard – broken down by series and individual event.

So instead of having to collect, analyze, and visualize all this data, it’s done for you. Now, understanding the success of every webinar is seamless so you can learn and adapt your approach quickly.

On top of checking in on the results of each Game Changers webinar, we do a deeper review every quarter. This helps us measure the success of the series as a whole.

This boils down into two categories: learnings and performance against goals.

Learnings: This category’s purpose is to dive deep into the data to see what’s working and what’s not. We also gather all the insights from the team and do a retrospective to make sure everyone's input is considered.

‍Performance against goals: This category's purpose is to see if our Game Changers engine is impacting our bottom line as a business using the goals we defined in the webinar series strategy. On top of the individual webinar metrics like registrations and live attendance rate, we also measure and track the following:

Traffic to all program pages: This doesn’t just show us if our promotion strategy is working, it shows us what people keep coming back, the traffic generated from SEO (even after the event), and what channels are working and which aren’t.
Comparisons & conversion rates: By comparing the success metrics of each webinar, we can analyze which sessions, topics, and speakers performed the best to adjust our content and strategy accordingly.
Performance against benchmarks: Our goal is to have one of the best-performing webinar strategies amongst B2B Marketers. We collected benchmarks from other businesses running webinars and compare them to our performance. This helps us understand if something is missing in our program.
Demos booked: Because our webinars are hosted on our website, we can see who booked a demo after a particular webinar in both Google Analytics and HubSpot. On top of looking at the top converting webinars, we also look at what other webinars they watched contributing to each demo booking.
Pipeline & revenue generated: These numbers show us whether or not our demand generation efforts are actually working. If we don’t see these numbers scale with our efforts, we know that the strategy needs to be adjusted.

To manage all these metrics and learnings, we’ve built out a document that acts as our core source of truth and helps us compare our growth quarter over quarter. You can use our template here, to help track and report on your webinar series success metrics.

"Don’t rely solely on industry benchmarks. Run your own tests. What your audience prefers may differ to others. Benchmarks are incredibly helpful, but should be used as a starting point, not the final decision on your program."

Stacy Combest

Manager, Webinar Marketing

Hootsuite

Seeing bottom-line results from the webinar series

Our Game Changers webinar series has proven to be one of the best-performing programs we’ve run to date. We know plenty of other teams that have seen the same results from replicating our model including Mutiny, Carta, Business Class, and many others.

Quarter over quarter we decide to invest more into the Game Changers webinar series. That’s because the results have been incredible! Since kicking off the Game Changers webinar series we’ve surpassed our goals including:

🚀 Generated $2.7 million in pipeline
🔥 Converted 80% of speakers to SQLs
💪 24% of engaged leads book demos
📣 Achieved a 58% live attendance rate
⭐️ Drove an average of 511 registrations per quarter

These metrics are a true testament to the value a webinar series can bring to a business (and its audience). However, there were also a lot of other successes we saw from Game Changers, such as:

🏆 Website traffic increased by +343% with continual growth as registrations and returning users continue to climb
👑 Impressions grew to over +271% primarily through LinkedIn
🤝 Our community grew by +751% including newsletter subscribers
🎨 400+ content pieces were repurposed from our Game Changers sessions
📈 SEO keywords shot up by +76% since the kick-off of our repurposing program just 6 months ago

No matter what goals you set, strategy you decide on, or webinar format you leverage – this guide based on our own webinar series, will help you navigate each step of the process.

Forgot a step? Want to adjust your strategy? Or are you ready to scale your entire webinar approach? You’ll be able to access everything you need right here – anytime you need it.

To get you started on the right path, we bundled up all our email copy, templates, designs, etc. into one resource that you can access below. Since you officially have all the tools to create a scalable, revenue-generating webinar series, what’s stopping you from getting started now?

How to build a Game Changing webinar series that drives revenue

Defining the webinar series strategy

Get quick access to the webinar strategy template

Laying the foundation for the webinar series

Creating the Game Changers hub on our website

Get the Webflow landing page template

Establishing a fully branded webinar experience

Integrating Sequel with our marketing tech stack

Finding potential speakers

Community Spotlight: Everflow

Inviting Speakers

Step 1: LinkedIn invitation

Step 2: LinkedIn follow up message

Step 3: Email invitation to be a Game Changer

Step 4: Email to kick things off & share next steps

Access the webinar tracker & email templates

Structuring the webinar content

Creating a new webinar event

1. Designing the feature image

2. Publishing the webinar

Promoting the webinar

Preparing promotion assets

Creating promotion copy

When to promote the webinar

Check out the promotion asset templates

The live webinar session

What happens on stage

The best alternative to a live webinar

What happens backstage

Repurposing webinar content

Community Spotlight: Morrow

Download the repurposing checklist & templates

Following up with attendees

Community Spotlight: Userpilot

Reporting & tracking

Seeing bottom-line results from the webinar series

Download the webinar templates!