Three Webinerds Share Their Scrappy Marketing Examples

Marketers are in a constant battle against time. Email campaigns, blog posts, social media, webinars — all of it takes more time than we have. What’s a busy marketer to do? If you’re short on time and resources and want to see great results it might be time to turn to some scrappy marketing examples.

What does scrappy marketing mean? Scrappy marketing means getting rid of perfectionism and being comfortable with pushing marketing campaigns that aren’t polished to the finest sheen. It’s about being creative, discovering the ways to get the most out of your marketing efforts even when you don’t have the answers.

To get a better idea of how webinerds get scrappy everyday, we ran a small contest asking our customers how they make use of scrappy marketing tactics to get things done. We got a lot of responses and, ultimately, three great winners. These winners include Allison Brown (AB), Senior Marketing Programs Manager at Dynatrace; Olivia Chapman (OC), Digital Producer at Devex; and Meghan Conan (MC), LMS and Training Content Administrator at ASTM International. 

If you want to see how these webinerds got scrappy, you can check out their stories at the links below or just scroll through to get all of the stories.

How Dynatrace Gets Scrappy
How Devex Delivers
ASTM International Gets to Training with Webinars

How Dynatrace Gets Scrappy:

Q: What webinar experiments, tests or changes have you made? Why?

AB:

This one is really simple. After seeing our overworked ops team taking time to manually set up confirmation, reminder and follow up emails in Marketo, we encouraged them to try something new! We tested using ON24 automated emails for registration confirmation, reminders and follow up.

Q: How did your experiment go? What results did you see?

AB:

What a hit! No room for errors in translating dates and times into Marketo tokens and emails — such a time saver. We also did not see any impact on user experience for our database. ON24 operational emails = happy campaigns and ops teams!

Q: Tell us about a time you got “scrappy” to make things happen with your webinar program.

AB:

Back to our ON24 email test, instead of involving our whole marketing org we decided to just go ahead and test these emails (ask for forgiveness right?). We just loaded the Dynatrace logo and went for it!

Q: Do you have any plans or ideas for future scrappy webinar experiments?

AB:

We all know it can be hard to get a webinar program and registration page live way before the webinar date, so a test that has been on my mind — [which] I heard about at Webinar World — was creating a form option to have someone register for a series or webinar and they will receive the confirmation once the program is ready. We run a Power Demo series and I think our audience would pre-register for the next session even if the full description isn’t built out yet.

How Devex Delivers 

Q: What webinar experiments, tests or changes have you made? Why? 

OC: 

Our latest innovation has come in the form of snappy conference call style events.

We have always produced very structured, hour-long, moderated panel style webinars for our audience. While great for meatier topics, these webinars are very time intensive logistics-wise. Wrangling three high-level speakers — often across different timezones — requires that I (as our singular digital events producer) usually plan our webinars more than a month in advance. As a media company, however, we often have breaking news stories that would definitely be worthy of a digital event… IF we had the time to put one together.

As a solution we came up with a “conference call” vs “webinar” distinction. The conference call is just 30 minutes long; and instead of a series of presentations via slide deck, the speakers on the “call” simply broadcast their audio conversation about a topic, informed by audience questions submitted in advance and during the live event.

Q: How did your experiment go? What results did you see? 

OC: 

The “conference call” has been successful in a number of ways. We’ve been able to dramatically increase our event output, often putting together events in just a few days in response to breaking news. In survey responses, our busy professional audience has frequently highlighted the convenience of a snappy half-hour event that they can listen to during the workday. They don’t always have the time or desire to watch a lengthy webinar presentation.

On the speaker side, it’s been an easier sell as well; busier presenters are happy to jump on a call and chat with one of our reporters versus preparing a 10-15 minute slide-based presentation for a full webinar. The conference calls are super mobile as well — so far we’ve done live calls with our reporters from press centers at the World Bank Spring Meetings in DC and the World Health Assembly in Geneva, making our readers feel as if they’re also on the ground at these events and a part of the conversation.

And finally, these events are fun and easy to market. With just a few days until the live event, we’ll put out a few tweets, link the event in our daily newsletters, and a send out a quick Marketo invite (using a smart list based on readers of the news coverage). 

Q: Tell us about a time you got “scrappy” to make things happen with your webinar program. 

OC: 

Devex has a number of paid subscription types using paywalled webinars in a variety of ways — from a Career Account offering access to CV trainings and panels with recruiters and HR reps to a Business Intelligence Account sharing insights and industry forecasts from Devex data analysts and M&E and funding experts at top international development orgs. 

Access to exclusive webinars is a big selling point for all of our membership types. In order to ensure that prospects are not only being nudged to upgrade prior to the webinar, we create a post-event article for every event which we publish on our website. The article features an embedded 3-5 minute excerpt of the webinar at the top, followed by a summary of the event with the featured panelists and key takeaways. A few paragraphs down behind the article paywall is the full recording of the webinar. We link to this article in our event thank you emails (which go out to attendees and no shows, and also to those who attempt to register but don’t upgrade their account). It’s a great way to reuse live webinar content, drive traffic to our site, and use “old” webinars to generate new subscriptions.

Q: Do you have any plans or ideas for future scrappy webinar experiments? 

OC: 

To get even more mileage out of our digital content via our webinar program, we’ve started putting together downloadable .PDF reports with summaries of our news coverage and data visualizations on certain topics. I’m excited to make these comprehensive reports available for download in the resource widget versus linking to lots of individual articles on our site.

Additionally, for our teams that put on demos or trainings (where the content remains relatively consistent over time) we’re looking into pre-recording demos and/or the simulive option to save time, give prospective members immediate access to product demos, and keep content evergreen. 

We’re also working on rolling out new digital event series — keeping a predictable pipeline (i.e. every first Friday) and tailoring our content to specific subsets of our audience. For example, our #OnMessage series (hosted by our communications director) has been well-received by comms specialists in our sector.

ASTM International Gets to Training with Webinars

Q: What webinar experiments, tests or changes have you made? Why? 

MC:

We have experimented with multi-host seminars to share updates on new course content which is the primary focus of our department. The hope was that we could host an online session in a very interactive environment and engage the learners to add more training to their program. 

Q: How did your experiment go? What results did you see? 

MC:

The experiment went well with one glitch. The second host was not as engaged as we would have liked and did not attend the practice sessions we held. This showed in the live session as he fumbled through his portion of the slides.

Q: Tell us about a time you got “scrappy” to make things happen with your webinar program. 

MC:

Since I am called the pitbull of our department I imagine a lot of what I do is considered “scrappy”. One of the biggest initiatives I have recently worked on for the program is to create an engaging and ongoing series in a hot new area for us of Additive Manufacturing. These series showcases both amazing instructors and incredible presentation on how the world is changing thanks to Additive Manufacturing.  

Q: Do you have any plans or ideas for future scrappy webinar experiments? 

MC:

Moving forward I would like to try to use the webinars as more of an engaging marketing plan to support our live training courses. I feel that a personal glimpse into a potential program is a lot more inviting than a paper based flyer (yes we still send these 🙂 ) or an email.