Webinars in financial services – Part 2

Lessons From The Frontline: How I Learned to Live with Never Getting a Second Chance with Live Virtual Events – Part 2

In our last episode, we dove into the world of professional development, specifically focusing on financial services and continuing education.

In our eighth episode, we are discussing:

  1. Adding Thought Leadership Strategies: They will help run your business more efficiently as it adds value for your customers to consume.
  2. Upcoming Trends: Different targeting trends in the video marketing world within the financial services sector.
  3. Webinar Planning: How webinar event planning makes things more organized and simple, especially when your employees are scattered across the map but need to attend these events.
  4. Running A Webinar Isn’t Simple: Technical issues happen all the time and you should have an expert on hand who’s capable of handling webinar obstacles.

The Complete Video Transcript

Peter Vamos:  Webinars are hot. In the world where more and more brands are concluding that they must also be content creators, finding the right voice is a crucial starting point. Whereas videos and social audiences are now central to consumer marketing strategies in the business to business space, webinars are fast becoming the most important part of the content mix.

As a content marketing professional, I’ve produced hundreds of videos for social and traditional media platforms and currently work with one of the largest podcast networks in the country. So, for me understanding how webinars work in the B2B space is both essential to my professional development and an exciting form of content creation.

According to a study commissioned by digital agency, Demand Wave, 41% of B2B marketers cite webinars as the best marketing tactic for driving revenue. Outpacing white papers, published case studies, online video, infographics and mobile apps. I’ve set out to discuss webinars with one of the foremost experts in the field, Matt Ley, President of The Streaming Network in Toronto. Together we’ve created this multipart series of videos and podcasts, The Webinar: Lessons from the Frontline or “How I Learned to Live with Never Getting a Second Chance with Live Virtual Events”

Peter Vamos:  Welcome back to The Webinar: Lessons from the Frontline. With me as usual as is Matthew Ley, President of The Streaming Network. Last time we started talking about financial services, but it’s such a broad topic with so many nuances and interesting issues, we barely touched on the actual subject of the webinar. So, let’s start there. What does a strong advisor webinar program look like?

Matthew Ley:  When I look at the strongest programs that we have out there, we’ll go back to some of the things that we just said is that they’re first off, they’re something that you can count on. They’re dependable. So, it’s not something that happens once or twice a year. Clearly, it’s a program that’s in place and it’s generally a program that has a high volume of content available on-demand.

So, if you look at just the CE, some of it is around what’s going on around right now. So huge webinars every year are like, the Trump effect. Or economic updates where they feature an economist because the advisors want to know what’s going on out there, so they can make intelligent choices for their customers.

But sometimes they need to know about specific whether it be the lifecycle that someone’s in, so new family versus someone getting ready for retirement. Maybe they need to know about certain types of products because new products are entering the market, they are hearing a lot about it. They haven’t been comfortable moving there and so they’ve got to learn about that. So, having a good library that says to the advisor, “Come to me, I’ve got pretty much something on everything that you’re looking for and you can get all of your credits for the year just by coming here,” is a good program.

Peter Vamos:  For sure.

Matthew Ley:  A better program takes that, and it adds thought leadership, practice management. Advisors in the end want to make money just like fund companies and like The Streaming Network does and so part of that is being the smartest guy in the room and knowing what you should invest it in.

The other part is how do you run your business in a more efficient way or how do you do this in a way that makes sense. So, adding in practice management and thought leadership around that really adds value. And the companies that I see doing that that have a really ease of access site, everyone’s coming to it. You can get a good amount of content, you get all of your credits for the year and maybe learn a thing or two about how to run your business better, they generally also have traditional marketing, not pitching but information on their products being put in front of people saying, “Buy this fund or work with this PM because this is going to help your people make money and it’s going to make you money.” And it’s funny that that is the last step in the program, but that is generally what I see a fully flushed out one.

The next trend that I’m seeing right now and we’re talking about it a lot is they are recognizing the fact that just like any company that has those customers or those prospects that are engaged and will show up, go through the gate and watch a webinar that they’ve got this group out here who maybe don’t know them that well, they are not quite as warm of a prospect, they might even take a call from them at this stage of the game. They are checking them out or a younger generation who doesn’t, they can get their credits quick or whatever the reason is, and they don’t want the formats that we’re giving.

So, one customer of ours is they are not from Toronto, they actually fly in and they will be in the studio and doing shooting video for three days and they are using that video to target their high net worth advisors and the idea there being is that they’re getting something special. Right? That the rest of the world did. Everyone got their audio webinar, everything got whatever it was, they are targeting that.

Another firm is using this model, where they are using the podcast to be distributed out to hopefully the younger demographic that likes the portable media. And so, it may be one message around education, one message around thought leadership, one message around product updates but it’s being delivered slightly differently for three different audiences and it is showing that the–just like traditional marketing, recycling, reusing of content is becoming very big, it’s becoming very big in financial services as well.

Peter Vamos:  So, the sector itself I mean it’s obviously a very important one and it’s a big one, but financial services itself like we’re talking, there is a much bigger thing going on here. When we look at the stats, like this is not this thing, right?

Matthew Ley:  No, 750,000 employees are not all in this advisor communication space. Actually, it’s probably pretty small group. Right?

Peter Vamos:  So how do you approach that? I mean obviously that’s a big opportunity for you and there’s also opportunities for them to take advantage of the sort of services you guys offer. What are your approaches on that?

Matthew Ley:  Well, there’s a number of different places where it gets used. So, with all of those employees there’s departments within banks that are some of the biggest companies in Canada. If we dissect them out you’ve got–they are probably in that top 500 and so they’ve got a ton of employees, they’ve got–they’re geographically dispersed. They’ve got locations all across Canada or in some cases US, South America, whatever it may be, and those department heads and those groups, they’ve got their own budgets and their own things that they need to hit. And so internal communications is big. And internal communications has also been a struggle like everything when you asked something.

Another thing that we have been seeing is that they are still going out and seeing people (which) is part of it. Whether that be direct consumer, or in a B2B space where they are looking at businesses, or the advisor market.So they are still wanting to go out and have these physical events. But like everyone else in the world, they are not getting as many people to said events, or they are not able to cover the entire country because Canada is massive. So expanding the reach of those events has always been a part of what we do, but again that sector is growing as well.

And then finally, it’s always been thought that the webinar itself was not for B2C, or that the webcast, as we used to call it before. But there’s been a lot of change in the world now. It’s becoming a way of reaching your consumer directly and so we are starting to get it in certain segments seeing a straight B2C play now where they are going directly and having conversations with the end user, you or me, who has a bank account with them or an insurance product or a mutual fund.

Peter Vamos:  Right. And that applies I mean these guys go to people’s houses all over the place, they could literally be knocking off a whole lot of visits with doing some sort of webcast. But then there’s also financial literacy, the opportunity to–and that goes with thought leadership– or the ability for these organizations to put forward, provide advice and demonstrate that they are on top of the issues that people care about and really target a large group of people.

Let’s talk about internal communications though. As a platform, the opportunity to do the things you said, because a lot of these companies have offices everywhere, like let’s sort of break that down.

Matthew Ley:  So, as big as these firms are, again, they are banks. They are housing our personal information, bank account information. We’ve all seen, maybe we haven’t, most of us have seen fight club and the doomsday scenario of someone hack in somewhere and getting rid of all of that data and so they are a lockdown environment.

They historically have not been as bandwidth rich as people might think. And so along with the bandwidth, the multiple different types of locations, branch versus office, tower downtown versus remote small office building out in the rural area, and security goes along with it as well Keeping things sort of in the organization has made a lot of these firms turn inward and not outward.

So, they will buy technology, house it internally and use that to run events, turning the IT manager or a member of the IT team, into the webcast producer or virtual event producer or whatever you want to call it. Using products and these products are amazing. We use some of them ourselves, but you know, like Skype for Business or Cisco’s new Spark product or some sort of hybrid between a videoconference and another product to make it happen.

So, the fact is these products are not the best for what they are trying to do. They’re trying to talk to 400 employees at once. These products are meant for me and you to chat to one another and the people that are putting on the events are IT managers, making sure they are secure and that they work, and they do for the most part, but they are not professionals in that space. And so, mistakes happen, problems occur and there has been–I’ve been in many of these places where they said yeah, we tried that 10 years ago or we backed away or we could never get that to work and they will go to like a conference call or record it or whatever it is. So, the bigger you get if you haven’t set it up right, you’ve got a lot of struggles in doing this internal [unintelligible].

Peter Vamos:  And I’ve seen examples where people try to use professional cameras and the platform just isn’t built for it at all. It was built for a laptop and a little camera in there. That’s how everyone communicates, it’s all pixelated.

Matthew Ley:  You’ve got that– the worst thing I love hearing is like, if I can do this from my phone we should be able to do this easily. And the amount of things wrong in that sentence, I don’t think we have time to talk about today.

Peter Vamos:  That’s another podcast.

Matthew Ley:  That’s another podcast. Like let’s go through that and dissect all of the things that are different about that and what you’re trying to do when you talk to 500 employees on one network.

Peter Vamos:  Through your phone.

Matthew Ley:  Yeah, exactly.

Peter Vamos:  Okay. Let’s talk about what is working well. In terms of what are you seeing that actually is working to sort of meet these kinds of challenges?

Matthew Ley:  Well, first of all you got to figure the IT lead and the reason why they’re using a product like Skype for Business. They’re a Microsoft shop, they have vetted the product and even if it’s not the right product maybe for an event, it’s been vetted and it’s going to work on everyone’s computer. And so, if you’re a financial services firm looking to get into doing these types of events, especially if they are going to include video for large volumes of staff, you’ll want to standardize on a product.

And by standardizing on a product you can ensure that desktop knows what needs to be done so that it can work, help desk is informed, the network guys understand what’s going on, the end-users have a comfort in the experience. Clearly, I’d like you to get standardized on my product. But in general when you have five, six things going on and people don’t know if they’re dialing a phone or going through their computer, if this one works on their mobile, if they are allowed to do it this way, you’re going to have end-user issues that are not real, a poor experience and then a lack of adoption.

You want to– the best in our experience, it has always worked best when we didn’t throw out all of the good work that the IT team did. So, leveraging this existing technology and enhancing upon it is the best bet. So, if you can find a tool that can help take, maybe Skype for Business is working really well, and expand it to a larger audience or offer more services around it through an integration, and those integrations can be quite simple.

I mean we integrate with Skype for Business but it’s basically Skype connecting in as an endpoint into our system, and then we are able to launch it out to a larger group. But making sure that you don’t throw away–. Like a lot of times what we’ll see is you’ve got all of this stuff that is here, it kind of works, and the fact that one part of it doesn’t work it’s like, someone hires us and brings us in. And then we are coming in with all of these cameras and we’re coming in with all this– like a completely redundant scenario. Sometimes it’s needed, but it usually works best when the two things connect. And if you’ve done that and you A, pick a partner where they’re the one you’re going to go to, that’s a partner. A vendor is someone you call every once in a while, and you might call the vendor that sits next to them, but a partner is someone that you work with.

So, when we are partnered with someone and they’ve subscribed to the platform or they just decide that they want to just work with us, and we have those conversations with IT or their AV[sp] and we know what they have there, now we can help make sure mistakes don’t happen. Someone calls and speaks to the account rep or the engineer on the project and he’s like no, no, no that’s not going to work there. We’ve been down this road. We know why, call Jim but here is what you are going to have to do to make that specific project work. And in those cases in general is where you see the greatest success. Higher adoption and lower cost because you are not duplicating efforts. You’re not having people burn cycles learning a process all of the time, it is something that continuously evolves.

Peter Vamos:  So, pick a partner, not a vendor.

Matthew Ley:  Yeah. I mean yeah, pick a partner not a vendor. It’s cheesy and a self-serving thing for me to say but I know that we charge a lot more when we’re doing onesies and twosies than when we do it full-blown, and I know that whether you pick me or someone else it’s going to be a better experience long-term. Because even if they are insufficient and not as good as us, you’re going to work out processes with them that will make sure that it works.

Peter Vamos:  Right, and that’s the thing about a partner, right? You’re in there, you’re actually providing advice, not just showing of the day of, plugging a bunch of things in and–?

Matthew Ley:  Well, I mean if you are there a bunch and, in this case, in internal comms quite often. There is a subsection of the company that you’re talking to all of the time. There is the doers who doers whether they run the AV and the technology side of it, or they are the facilitators for us to get into it, there’s that group. There is the event team that is always getting those, “would it be cool if we could do like a drone shot when they’re coming into the auditorium.” And so you create those relationships, you understand dynamics internally about X, Y or Z. And yeah, I mean it’s like any other relationship. You are able to do a better job for the customer if you know all of that.

Peter Vamos:  Right. And you guys have worked with just about every room in Toronto where these events happen, right? Probably worked with almost all of the facilitators?

Matthew Ley:  We still get asked to go into rooms where I don’t understand why the decision has been made when there are so many other rooms that are [unintelligible] but yeah, yeah. I mean we’ve worked in a lot of rooms in Toronto and when we get the partnerships in place when we’re working with a lot of the financial services, they have their own rooms. Some of them better than others but they have their own rooms that they like to do things from because all of the staff can just culminate there, and so we started learning that.

So, where it generally goes eventually is we start making recommendations, like to the AV guys like, you should buy these two things then we don’t have to lug this crap out every time. It’s cheaper for the customer, it’s built in. It’s more foolproof as well, less stress on us. And so as that partnership the fall so do their internal competencies and what it is that they are doing.

Peter Vamos:  You mentioned roadshows and product launches so let’s talk a little bit about that.

Matthew Ley:  It’s the simple story that I’ve been saying for 10 years since I’ve been doing this is that you know, the world is changing and there is less people that just want to get out of the office and go somewhere. Or they’re not allowed anymore. Or they value shaking hands with you less than they do what you are saying or your content and all of that.

So, I mean it doesn’t matter what industry I’m in, they can boast, and they can talk about this successful event that they had. In general in person attendance continues to shrink year-over-year. So, some of the most coveted events that someone would hold, the biggest events that they would hold, they’re not having the same for each. And so, every year this side of the business starts growing and expanding and people start saying, “hey, we need to reach a greater audience. That secondary audience, those people that aren’t that into us and not coming into the physical room.”

So, everything from the PM roadshows that might hit four major cities across the country to a CEO who wants to, really wants to, get out and see everyone who works for a bank or a major company, but he can’t do that. He can go out one day in one region and where it makes sense they will get people there, but he won’t hit everybody. So, the hybrid event, the physical with a virtual element, just expands the reach of anything that you are doing and that has just been a consistent growth sector for us since we started the business. Even though when we started the business basically all we did but year every year it continues to grow because there is a reality there.

Peter Vamos:  One of the things you mentioned was sort of the whole business, the B2C side of things and probably nowhere else the financial services sector really does– like they’ve got this entire audience consumer audience. So, let’s get a little bit more deeper into that because you did touch on a few things there.

Matthew Ley:  Yeah, so we had some early exposure with online brokerages, direct investing basically your online trading houses, who had a similar problem, I guess, in that they needed to educate these people. They need to educate those that are going to go on and spend their money on their platform. As people understand the platform, there is a bunch of things that go into it and so we started seeing webinars and things like that as a tool to educate the direct investors so that they knew what they were doing and also that they used their platform and that was a B2C sort of play. And when we started doing that, it was fun because if you remember the last podcast the average number of viewers on a webinar or a really good webinar might get over 1000 and those data points, and we were getting tens of thousands of people with these webinars mainly on demand. Because it wasn’t something that was happening at 2 o’clock on Wednesday when they were in the middle of their work and they had to say, “maybe/maybe not.” It was something that they needed.

So, at night or whatever the data feeds that were flowing through on this project was just like, at one point in time we had to go in and look at our cloud connecting provider that takes data feeds from us and puts them in third-party systems because it keeps breaking, and they’re like what is going on over there? Like 30,000 people watched this thing in the last week and it’s just because it’s this huge audience.

But, in general, getting out to certain spaces, the webinar works for B2C. But it’s not the best tool, I don’t think. But the virtual event has been growing and really is, and the difference that I mean, there is things like YouTube Live, Facebook Life taking something that is experiential. Every time you go somewhere a financial services company is doing something where they are giving you like at a fair or whatever they hire these experiential companies, they sponsor events everywhere. And those events you get to see them while you’re there, but no one else knows that it’s happening. And so, we’ve done some fun things where we’re doing live streams out to John Q Public to show those great experiences, an it’s an awareness play.

We’ve done some stuff that is an education play because they also have the funds and the connections to reach high and wide. I mean before a budget gets passed in this country, the chief economist of RBC and TD, they get to look at it before we know about it. To make sure that they don’t whatever. So, the people within some of these institutions are highly plugged in and so they can do some really cool stuff they do really cool stuff it’s just that we don’t all get to see it.

So now we’re going to see that go out to the consumer and you know, although everything we do is on the Elite, the Platform. The fundamentals of taking a video feed from a venue, whether that venue is the studio or a corporate board room or it’s the Rogers Centre. It doesn’t matter. Getting that feed out to any medium is the same skill set, the same things have to happen right to make that work. And so, we’ve been brought in as partners to do those types of things, which is fun for the guys, because when we started the business, we–streaming was new. I used to say that it was magical.

I’d have to walk into rooms and people would say how do you know it’s going to work, and I’m like could you imagine me asking you how do I know I’m going to make money in this mutual fund or how do I know that that burger is going to taste good? Like this is the company that I run, this is what we do.

But, it was so magical to people, it was so hard to fathom that this video would go out, and people wouldn’t have tons of buffering, even though they did early on, everyone had buffering–but, anyways, that this thing would happen, and we knew it would work, and that we had a process for it, that we were constantly reassuring people that it just worked.

And so, we’ve been at it that long. And then all of a sudden, it got super easy, right?  The comment about the phone – it got super easy, everyone can do it. And then–so, they all tried, and then they realized, oh, no, there actually are things you need to do to make this work.

And so, early on, we had some fun stuff where we were broadcasting from TIFF [sp] and all that because it was magic, and no one knew how to do it, and then people learned how to do it, and then they failed at it a bit, and now it’s coming back with a lot of our big corporate customers. And so, it’s nice to see these guys back, you know, on the red carpet or at a hockey game or something like that doing something fun and different than, you know, the conventional webinar.

Peter Vamos:  Right. And you guys have done Facebook Live, you’ve done YouTube Live. The navigating all those mistakes, you guys have now done all that, right?

Matthew Ley:  Yeah, and–yeah, we’ve done platforms I didn’t even know existed because, you know, I’m not really that technical. I just play that guy on TV. But, yeah, all the things are the same.

I used to make a joke–when I was in a room, people would say to me, you know, are you afraid of YouTube, Matt?  Is that gonna kill your business? And at the time, I said I was not afraid because at that time, I had no life, so I was like I’m safe. But, in general, whether it’s a webinar or a webcast, whether it’s a YouTube Live or whether it’s holograms–that was my big thing. If we got into hologram broadcasting, and you want to do a virtual hologram of you over here doing whatever. All the steps we took back then for a simple audio stream onsite would be the same as this. There’d be more gear involved, more bandwidth, I’m assuming, but the steps that the guys take and the steps that we took to make it a success would be the same.

And even from a–you know, just because it’s a hologram doesn’t mean that people are gonna like it better. You’ve still got to follow even the best practices we talked about last time, about engaging your audience and having a dialogue, or else they’re gonna–you know, the gimmick will run out soon.

So, yeah, taking what we’ve done over all these years and applying it to these different mediums, is basically the same thing – virtual event production.

Peter Vamos:  Yep, yep. That’s great.

So, let’s–we’ve covered a lot of ground here, but we usually do a moment of Zen.

Matthew Ley:  Yeah.

Peter Vamos:  We’re gonna keep this one relatively straightforward. If you’ve got a message that you want to provide to the people in the sector, what would that message be?

Matthew Ley:  Well, I’ve got a few messages. I’m gonna keep them short.

Peter Vamos:  What messages–?

Matthew Ley:  –What messages, okay–.

Peter Vamos:  –Would you provide to the people in the financial services sector?

Matthew Ley:  First off, I would say–I say this often when I’m–financial services is not the only sector I would say this, is I would say, look outside your industry, like look outside. These–some of these companies spend so much time looking at what each other are doing, that they forget to look at what others are doing.

So, find a relevant–you know what your role is in your space. You know who you are, you know?  And when you know who you are, look at what the other guy who’s like you is doing, right? So, maybe in Canada, you know, RBC is looking at Microsoft’s practices or whatever it might be. But, look at someone outside and see what they’re doing, because it will be an indicator of something that’s probably gonna work for you. Look at the guys who are doing it well, but you know what I mean.

And stop looking at everyone else in your space and emulating. There’s an element of ‘me too’ we all need to have, but you’re not gonna separate yourself by doing it, you know, kind of the same thing as the other guy but not as good.

And then I would–if you’re not doing it already and you’re prepping for maybe some technology upgrades and stuff, start looking at where are your data gaps. Like, start plugging all of your data gaps now. Whether or not you have it, you have the capacity to fix it all, figure out what you would like for this system to talk to this system to talk to this system. Because in some of these deployments that we’re walking into, even in the best cases where people know–they’ve got the mind map for exactly what they want–in the last 12 months, something–while we were going through this process, other products were purchased, that were closed and could not get data out in the way that was needed.

And so, they had the map in their mind, but they didn’t think about that gap being a problem, until it was too late.

Peter Vamos:  Right.

Matthew Ley:  And then the final thing is–and this is bigger, I find, in financial services than in some others, is they look at–they produce content by a medium, and what I’m finding is we’re spending budgets on, you know, short format video production, webinar production, long format video production, podcast production with three to four vendors. Sometimes, it’s us. Sometimes, we’re doing this for a company saying kind of the same message over and over again to–in different mediums for different audiences, when there is a better way of doing that, right?

Like, when we do these, we do them as the video podcast, the audio podcast gets released, the webinar gets released, the short format video, and then blogs are written and people interact with you–like, there’s all kinds of stuff that goes on because we’re reusing that content.

So, I think that this sector should start talking to one another within the organization, start figuring out, “how do we reuse this content better,” and–because they need to be producing more, like everyone does, and that would be–they’ll get more ROI, I think, out of what they spend with us or with anybody else they’re working with.

Peter Vamos:  Right. And it’s good for the environment.

Matthew Ley:  And it’s good for the environment.

Peter Vamos:  Yeah.

Matthew Ley:  Well, it actually is.

Peter Vamos:  It actually is.

Matthew Ley:  Yeah.

Peter Vamos:  Well, that’s that. That is our podcast.

Matthew Ley:  Yep.

Peter Vamos:  Matthew, thank you, once again, for downloading all this great information. Our next podcast is gonna be on the legal–.

Matthew Ley:  –Legal, yeah–.

Peter Vamos:  –Legal sector. We’re gonna do a deep dive into that, so watch for that. And–.

Matthew Ley:  –And you know what?  In this case, you know–and the financial services people might watch this, and they’re gonna want to tune out, right, because what do they care about what’s going on in legal marketing. But, if they want to feel good about what they’re doing, they should tune in to the legal marketing one because they’ve got more struggles than you guys do, so–.

Peter Vamos:  –There you go. Perfect. So, everyone should watch that.

Matthew Ley:  There you go.

Peter Vamos:  Thank you so much.

Matthew Ley:  Thank you.

Matthew Ley

Matthew Ley

Matt Ley is the current President and co-founder of The Streaming Network. Starting his career in virtual events in 2007, Matt is an industry veteran that is passionate about helping customers stand out in their industry with compelling virtual events that people want to attend. The driving ambition for Matt is that virtual events are not a utility for information distribution but an opportunity for firms to create a competitive advantage. Matt is an accomplished speaker, moderator and a sought-after thought leader.

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