The One Where the Podcast Killed the Webinar

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

webinar, podcast, audience, people, content, omni channel, create, dedicated, put, email, business, bit, linkedin, attend, lead generation, lead, absolutely, blog post, join, youtube

SPEAKERS

John Paul Mains, Ted Jones

Episode Transcript

John Paul Mains  00:00

All right, welcome back to a another episode with myself and Ted here on growth ventures. And we are always trying to talk about ways that you can grow your business using marketing technology. Yes. And so our what we’re wanting to kind of focus on today is, yep, lead generation. Okay, it sounds a little boring. But hey, that’s what keeps all of our kind of b2b companies going and

Ted Jones  00:29

the door lead machines. Yes,

John Paul Mains  00:31

I can’t tell you all. I mean, over the last few months, I have been getting so many LinkedIn these days on, hey, let us help you out with your LinkedIn generation. I mean, I am getting LinkedIn after email after LinkedIn after email. It’s just nonstop right now. I’m like, Oh, my word. This is crazy. And I know good. And well, these people are just fart doing data farming and doing out emails that are probably worthless, and so but if a lot of is going on? Yeah, definitely. And so yeah, one of the things that is one of the one of the things I wanted to kind of dig into specifically today on our webinar is, you know, we used to use the word webinar, I want to talk about. So we have back back, not actually not too long in the past webinars used to be huge, huge lead generators for businesses. You know, I was I was at a software company, a new national software company. We did webinar. We did so many webinars. It was crazy.

Ted Jones  01:33

Yeah, marrying that multimedia, though PowerPoint and voice and putting it on the web. And having a live audience there with you was part of it.

John Paul Mains  01:44

Yep. And they usually ran for 30 minutes to an hour. And I attended. I mean, I learned so much from webinars. It was just unreal, like HubSpot. I used to attend every single HubSpot webinar that ever came out. They were fantastic. It was a huge learning experience.

Ted Jones  02:01

And even you don’t hear about them. Yeah,

John Paul Mains  02:06

it seems like they went by the wayside a little bit. They became so vendor focused, look what we can do. We’ve got this amazing technology and, and they were our long I think people got pretty burnt out on them over time, and they’d lost their value. Now I know they’re still put on. Yeah, I still get requests for coming to join a webinar or things along those lines. And there’s occasionally that I’ll attend a webinar. But not anymore. I’m used used to put on a whole bunch, didn’t you?

Ted Jones  02:34

Oh, yeah, I used to put on them all the time. And, you know, send out a poll question after this slide. Do the you know, let’s see what the audience is thinking of, you know, how did everyone how long they everyone stay on? What was the status with that webinar? Sure. You know, I think even now, it’s almost some of the virtual events kind of group those together. In a bigger sense, but yeah, one off webinars, you don’t see him more often. I think that just because the medium, you know, has, and the audiences really don’t want to sit tethered to their desktop that much.

John Paul Mains  03:10

They really don’t, they really don’t. And then, you know, after your webinar was over, what did you do? Then you went in and downloaded that email list all those attendees. And what did you do?

Ted Jones  03:19

You had to send it to the business owner or whoever sent it and tee up that email? Thanks. Automation plan, but

John Paul Mains  03:30

yep, those emails, you if you attended a webinar, you knew you’re gonna get a sales call within a few days. Time? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I can understand that. I mean, this is what businesses do. Because yeah, this, it was a very, it is still a very powerful vehicle for lead generation, if you can capture these people. Wow. But I think that’s to me, I hardly attend any of them anymore. But I think what has happened is that we’ve seen a transition to something more useful, which is exactly what we’re doing here. Podcasting, I think webinars truly transitioned over to being podcasts now. Because to your point that people didn’t want to sit in for something really long. They’ve kind of got burnt out. They don’t have time anymore. We’ve continued to get busier. But you can consume a podcast, whenever you’re

Ted Jones  04:21

on your own time or exactly, you know, you subscribe to it, you get it and play it when you’re ready. You’re not constrained by the, you know, be there at 2pm. What’s the best time to have a webinar? Absolutely, whenever, when everyone’s ready for their coffee.

John Paul Mains  04:39

Yeah, I find the more educational and more entertaining. Usually it’s two or three people that are on the podcast talking about a particular topic and they’re a little bit more engaging and interesting. Listen to them sitting behind a webinar for an hour listening to somebody talk on pitching their company.

Ted Jones  04:57

Oh, and you know, you just mentioned it were fun webinars being so dry and rehearsed. Like if they rehearsed. I mean, we talked about a topic, you know, but we’re not sitting there saying, you know, when the next slide needs to be, you know, I say Next slide.

John Paul Mains  05:15

With the next slide, please, please flip. Next slide. Next slide. Wrong slide. Hey, love the slide. Hey, here’s all the people that do business with us. Every time it showed a bazillion logos all over the screen. Yeah. Oh, my word.

Ted Jones  05:34

Yeah, but podcast, you know, being the freedom and really just your mobile devices. I mean, you know, there are still some live engagements that happen, but it might not be necessarily the business driver that you need to build that audience.

John Paul Mains  05:51

Right, right. You know, a webinar, what am I, when I did webinars, the past, what we usually do is we take them, convert them into on demand, and then put them behind a form so that hey, if you missed it, come fill this form out, and the future person could come watch it. And now it’s like, hey, the podcast is out there. Okay. It’s great content. You can come listen to what yeah, go listen to the one that we did 60 episodes back and get listened to because it was pertinent to your particular topic, and they’re searchable. And they’re found across many, many, many, many platforms now. Yeah. So

Ted Jones  06:26

searchable, you know, you use that, you know, audio voice to text translated transcribing. Now you’ve got, you know, the content that you’ve talked about.

John Paul Mains  06:38

Absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the first things I do for for our podcast here is I taking create, generate the transcript for it, drip, create a blog post about it. And that’s kind of the beauty of the podcast now is that it is very omni channel. And I know that’s kind of an overused word these days. But you literally can take a podcast episode, create a blog post, create shorts on YouTube, create a full YouTube video posted out to social media, take snippets to create memes if you want to. There’s all sorts of things you can do with this content to get in front of an audience. It’s very versatile when it comes to a form of content.

Ted Jones  07:22

Yeah, everyone, then that content, obviously, is your driver for the Legion. Exactly. That’s kind of coming back to where we started. This is right, yeah, you still want to be able to, you know, get business opportunities out of some of this content here. But exactly.

John Paul Mains  07:41

So I do think podcasts. Yeah, I think podcasts are a little bit harder than just you know, with when it came to Webinar. Usually it was a kind of a sales focused or knowledge focused webinar, and you knew those people were probably decent quality leads, as long as you got the right audience and podcasts a little bit harder. But because it’s omni channel, you have the chance to reach a much wider audience and capture that audience. So yeah, they’re falling out your contents good. Anyway, they’re following you on YouTube. They’re following you on Spotify, or wherever they’re consuming their podcasts. And so you have the chance to have a much larger audience, using a podcast, a dedicated audience, as long as you’re dedicated, getting doing a regular podcast and creating that content, which of course takes its own level of effort, but it is absolutely totally worth it. For lead generation.

Ted Jones  08:34

Well, yeah, and I’ve even know, you know, LinkedIn, now they’re getting into that, you know, video side of things, you know, it could be posted, it can be live, it can be, you know, post live event that you can get into that.

John Paul Mains  08:50

That’s actually a really good point. I mean, what we’re doing here with this is recording it and putting it out later. But I can click of a button, and we could be broadcasting this live to many different video channels all the same time, LinkedIn, YouTube, and there’s a whole bunch of others, which we could actually go live with this. So you’ve got that opportunity to, hey, do an announcement ahead of time. Hey, I’ve got Ted Jones, we’re gonna be talking about blah, blah, blah, on next Friday, come join us. I mean, really, you can do this kind of stuff and then make it on demand however you wanted as a podcast, the modern version of via podcast used to be just an audio but now kind of people moved it to being content across many different platforms, but it’s recorded like the two of us are doing here right now.

Ted Jones  09:37

Well, and you know, even going back to the webinars side of things, yeah. Recording those there was times the dreaded the dreaded how many attendees are we going to have on this? Oh my gosh, we only have five people on here. But nowadays, those five people are your engaged people. They are your wants, you know, that are like okay, well, let’s engage with them a little bit more. You Oh, absolutely. Well, we would also record, you know, we’d use that same workflow that you might use for a webinar to record something like this, right? It’s tools aren’t that different list, you really want to get into a live audience, you know, and have them sitting there while you talk.

John Paul Mains  10:22

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, you’re right, the tools are pretty much the same. Now you’ve got, you know, better mics these days. You can do live streaming, and all this kind of stuff, we got better cameras to use. We can have as many people on these things you want. I mean, zoom, webinars gaming, you have an enormous audience on these things. But so you can still classify this as a webinar. But the reality is a podcast is a much more useful tool, as long as you’ve got a good topic to talk about. And as long as you’re dedicated, doing long run the search it kind of the scary thing is, people aren’t dedicated to it. You have to be dedicated to the average number of episodes and a podcast is six. That’s it. People give it up because like, oh, I can’t generate an audience, but they really truthfully didn’t give it a try. You have to be in it for the you have to be dedicated to it for the long haul.

Ted Jones  11:13

Sure. Well, and then good, that gets back to engaging your audience and, you know, learning topics, right, like, feeding back into useful. Yeah, what the audience is really interested in,

John Paul Mains  11:28

right? Yeah, you’ve got to be on topic. You can’t be salesy. People can turn off sales, junk, heartbeat, you got to be entertaining, you’ve got to be useful. You got to get you got to solve problems for people. And that’s the problem we’re solving today is Yep, switch webinars to podcasts, and give it a real shot. Because

Ted Jones  11:50

that content and reuse that or, you know, blog posts, newsletters, and driving those leads back to your Yes, always,

John Paul Mains  11:59

always, always drive people back. So come watch us on YouTube, subscribe to this, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to our newsletters, follow us on social media, because where this is where we post all of our content regularly. And that’s where you usually end up on telling people in order to get people to join your audience. You want an interactive audience? And if they are commenting out there on those channels, you interact with them.

Ted Jones  12:25

Omni channel, quickly interact with them quickly. Do you know whether positive or negative comments are what engages the community? Right? So

John Paul Mains  12:37

part of the algorithm on your content being discovered is that you are engaged with your audience, right? Yep. Yep, definitely. Alrighty, then. Well, I guess that’s the end of our episode. Follow us on YouTube.

Ted Jones  12:54

Follow us. You want to hear about?

John Paul Mains  12:57

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we just got to keep coming up with stuff. But if you’re following us, please, please, in the comments, posting things that you’d be interested in hearing about, we’re happy to hop on here and talk about them. Yeah, we’d love that. Actually. That’d be fantastic. Because we just like talking about all sorts of cool tech stuff. So all right, everybody, appreciate your time. Appreciate you joining us. Appreciate. Appreciate you following us. Thanks. Yeah.