Posts Tagged ‘webinars’

Wistia does it live with our first webinar

Friday, March 30th, 2012

Yesterday, we held our first ever webinar! We’ve been thinking about this for a while, because the questions we get from people aren’t just about Wistia — they’re about the big picture of video marketing as a whole and how to think about it, as well as specifics of what works and what doesn’t. For our first topic, we decided on the obvious, Introduction to Video Marketing.

We invested a lot in our first webinar. We talked a lot about what to cover, made slides, and decided to shoot it more like a radio show than your typical pre-recorded webinar, setting up several cameras and doing the entire thing live (we didn’t reshoot anything). This may have been more risky, but we also hope it will allow us to get more out of it — letting it serve as a more permanent piece of content. We may gate this kind of content in the future, but for this one, we wanted to make the learning available to everyone, so we hope you get something out of it even if you didn’t attend.

We’re really happy with how this webinar went — 60% of those who registered actually attended, and people asked lots of good questions. We’re hoping that the behind-the-scenes approach we used will make this webinar more engaging, and we’ll share our results with you as we figure out how well this worked and talk more about our webinar process here as we refine it.

Here are some links and resources that we mentioned in the webinar:

Make Recorded GoToMeeting Videos Viewable Across Devices

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Wistia now automatically converts recorded GoToMeeting webinars! You can finally publish your meetings and webinars to the web so they’re viewable on laptop, desktop, and mobile devices.

By default, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar use a proprietary and highly efficient video codec (called G2M3) to record your webinar. No video hosting provider up until now (not even YouTube) could convert these proprietary GoToMeeting video files. This meant that if you wanted make a recording of your webinar available after the event, people had to download the video file to their computer and hope that they had the GoToMeeting software installed to view it. Needless to say, this was a poor user experience.

Now, just upload your recorded meeting or webinar to Wistia, and they’ll be ready to be watched on every device.

Then you can:

  • - Embed the webinar onto your website
  • - Send out the webinar to people who couldn’t make it
  • - Put the webinar behind a lead generation form to capture new prospects

And of course, you’ll get the same second-by-second video heatmaps and analytics that show you who is watching and what they are care about.

Stop Throwing Away Valuable Marketing Assets: Your Webinars

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

It might seem odd for a video marketing company to extol the power of webinars (an arguably competitive medium to video), but we think webinars and video go hand-in-hand like TV and TiVo.

Why are webinars valuable?

For the viewer, webinars provide a way to learn something new about a process, product, approach, or feature. In exchange the viewer is asked to give up their email and any other relevant contact information. For the host, webinars present a way to connect with a new audience. In return the host gets more leads, it’s a simple and overall valuable arrangement.

So why are webinars more valuable than previously thought?

They can be recorded. The first time the webinar is presented it creates value. But by simply recording your webinar it can continue to create value for months (and sometimes even years). Here are a couple of easy ways to get more from your recorded webinars.

  • Feature it as a resource on your website
  • Use it as the main event of an email campaign
  • Have your sales team send it as follow up to prospects
  • Provide access to those who couldn’t attend live

But how much value will my recorded webinar really add?

We’ll measure it. With webinars coming in at 30 and 90 minutes  in length, they are 15-50x longer than the average marketing video. NO ONE will watch 30 minutes (let alone 90) of something that isn’t interesting. This is a powerful point. By tracking those people that actually do watch your video you’ll learn which individuals are most interested in your topic (not a bad starting point for the sales team) and what interests people most in your webinar (so you can learn how to make your next webinar even better).

And here’s a teaser from a future post, a couple of the common ways we see people watching recorded webinars.

Webinar Viewing Types