Ep. 80 – Are you using webinars to grow your business? Webinars are a great marketing strategy but can often feel complicated and stressful. Luckily, David Abrams is joining Chris this week to discuss what goes into creating and conducting a successful webinar as well as a tool you can use to simplify the process. David is the Co-Founder of Demio and has years of experience in SaaS, Marketing and Business. Have a listen to learn tips and tricks for running a winning webinar in 2021.
Winning with Webinars in 2021 feat. David Abrams of Demio
What You'll Learn
- [5:26] How David got started in marketing and what led him to create Demio
- [10:10] How to use webinars not only to engage with your audience but to actually convert
- [15:59] Tips and tricks on running a successful webinar from Chris’ personal experiences
- [17:07] Features that set Demio apart from all other webinar solutions on the market
- [18:18] What Demio will be doubling down on in 2021 to enhance the webinar experience even more
- [24:05] A feature Chris uses in Demio weekly – this function was a pleasant surprise to him
- [29:53] Exciting new features Demio will be releasing this year
- [34:30] Automations currently available within Demio and future plans for more
- [42:38] The analytics and metrics that are reported per session by Demio
- [49:38] How to become an ASP™
Today's Guest
David is the Co-Founder of Demio and has years of experience in SaaS, Marketing and Business. He is dedicated to supporting Demio in being a streamlined SaaS product and company. Demio’s mission is to make marketers’ lives easier and happier, and David spends his time at Demio designing ways to make that happen.
Resources Mentioned
- Demio
- Apply to become an Automation Service Provider™
Transcript
Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way. With your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.
Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome to the all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis, the founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge, the place online to learn about Small Business Marketing and Sales Automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals and automation service providers. And if you like to become one or find out more, please visit automation bridge comm Ford slash ASP. This episode we discuss what goes into creating and conducting a successful webinar in 2021. with David Abrams, David is the co founder of dimeo and has years of experience in SaaS SaaS software as a service. For those of you that don’t know, marketing and business he is dedicated to supporting dimeo and being a streamline SaaS product and company dimeo. His mission is to make marketers lives easier, and happier. And David spends his time at dimeo designing ways to make that happen. You’ll find in this podcast that he’s qualified to do such because he has spent time on the map the marketing battlefield, that you often hear me refer to exchanging battle wounds and scars and having that marketing dirt under your fingers. And you’ll see that experience reflected in dimeo and some of the choices in the features and how the platform operates as itself, how it operates and how it is easily configured, I should say for its customers. All right. But before we jump into it, if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you listen to this episode in its entirety. And then subscribe and leave a five star rating and review I say that because I like for you to be well informed with the type of content and value you’ll be receiving every Thursday as a new episode releases. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast yet, what are you waiting for? Come on, please do so now. We’re in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, you can subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast the All systems go podcast is there while you’re adding your five star ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated. If for whatever reason, you’re having troubles figuring out where to leave a review how to leave a review. We’ve got you covered go to automationbridge.com/review. You can post it there, we’ll do the heavy lifting for you and make sure it gets to the appropriate platform in the appropriate eyes get it. So with that being said, let’s jump right into today’s episode.
David Abrams 3:11
David, welcome to the podcast man. Glad to have you on how are you doing? I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited. It’s been a wild ride a crazy journey. Just mean you in the past five years. We’re just chatting about it. But it’s it’s exciting. Exciting. Yeah, it’s this is my opportunity to publicly on my platform. say congratulations and just express how proud I am man of you and Wyatt and the work man that it goes unseen, right?
David Abrams 3:45
Yeah, it’s the iceberg metaphor, a little bit of the tippy top but it’s like you don’t know the the hours the blood, sweat and tears. And I mean, there were times when you’re down now and there’s times where you feel like you’re on top of the world but you know you’re in it every day just chipping away man and the fortitude of you to to go from ideation. It was like five years ago, we just kind of floated the idea around with clay and then he introduced you to me and we could talk about some of the automation stuff and how we were using some of the webinars solutions at the time to have you guys build what is truly unique and, and one thing I really like about it, and I know I got to introduce you but I’m just
Chris Davis 4:28
one thing I like about it is I feel like you to have strong ears. You know, I don’t feel like it was just a meeting where we talked about some stuff and you were looking for validation of what you already wanted to do. I truly feel because you see it in the tool. I truly feel like you guys surveyed the market and truly listened because you can see how you built dimeo is told it’s a total different webinars solution than anything else on the market. So
Chris Davis 5:01
All right, I’m already fast forwarding into the podcast. That’s cool. That’s cool. We’ll start now start off, let me slow down, give, give my listeners some insight on you, as, as a co founder of demio. Your progression to, to what got you here are your path here, and then let us know what what what is demio?
David Abrams 5:26
Yeah, it’s a great question. Um, you know, I was in the marketing field. For a while working at a company. I was doing marketing automation and marketing campaigns and building webinars. And I mean, this was a time when webinars, automated webinars didn’t even have a name. We were literally coding them in PHP and making these campaigns sequences and like the very first version of Infusionsoft sometime about 10-12 years ago, when we’re launching this thing, I ended up leaving that and building an agency doing website design and development and marketing campaigns. And that became another agency which really focused in on marketing automation. We were building funnels prior to word funnels, you know, being really out there, you know, luckily, Russell Brunson came in the market and created as a thing and made sales all of a sudden go up, because everyone understood it. Yeah, it was like a selling method we had to teach before that. But you know, we were building webinar campaigns. My other co founder had a business, it was using webinars to build his business and to grow his SEO, online sales. And we saw this pain point in the marketplace. One, my co founder was like, you know, he’s on these webinars, live webinars, wants to market and sell doesn’t have the toolkits, doesn’t have the product that he needs. He’s frustrated, they’re crashing, he’s having problems. I’m building these campaigns, I’m going in Infusionsoft and putting four or five tools together, I’m like, people are paying me 1000s of dollars to solve a pain point where like, there has to be simpler way that was like the thing that we threw around all the time, there has to be simpler way. This is also pre Webinar Jam. That was the big marketing tool that came out. But we were like, Alright, we built some software before we’ve, you know, built businesses before it, let’s build this thing can’t be that hard. Okay, wrong. It was very, very hard. It took us about two years to get a product to market. And when we did, we got to a free beta period. And that’s kind of when we started talking with during our free beta period. But during that time, we went through a lot of like you said, you know, different versions, ideations of the product. It started as as very big, robust product, we’re like, we want everything we want mobile apps, we want all of these features and functions and things. And then we’re like, oh, God, we ran into like technical issues where we couldn’t even really build it the way we wanted to. And so we just kept trying and kept trying and kept trying. And then we’re like, okay, let’s take a step back. Let’s cut out all the waste. Let’s build a very simple version of this of what we think we need. integrations are great experience for the attendee, some engagement devices, basic reporting, let’s build that. And then let’s go out and build on top of it. And so that took a big, like effort of us just slash slash, like two years worth of morning. But that is what we went to beta with. And so that’s how I really started was our own pain point. But we also saw in the marketplace, people complaining about the same problem. So it was kind of a good timing thing. It wasn’t just like it was cuz I’ve created a software before was based on my pain point. And no one else had that pain point. It was just my opinion. Yeah, right. So there wasn’t enough of external validation. In this case, we had our own pain point and external validation. And so it was pretty easy to talk to marketers and like, understand their pain points and frustrations. But as we started to grow this thing, we would do a lot of one on one demos. So that was a lot of learning where people are wanting what they’re looking for, you know, the problems that they’re facing their use cases, we also do a lot of like internalizing of feedback requests, you know, just stuff that comes into our support desk that gets analyzed every single month. And then that goes through like different charting of the impact scores and requests and how it would work. And the product process has evolved over the years. But that’s how we’ve kind of kept our ear to the ground to make sure we understood the market, we understood the needs, and we could build a product that was actually simple and easy to use and non technical, which I think has been our winning, like USP of the product. Yeah, I agree, man. One of the things, one of the themes that I hear a lot of founders when they come on the podcast, they talk about, you know, I hadn’t intended on it. And then I was just using software to you know, scratch my own itch. And I love the the amount of detail you put into it was external validation. Because sometimes you’re it’s just just your itch, like nobody else has that. And I think it could be a premature pain point, right? If you’re not in the space. I think somebody who has those premature pain points is somebody who just hasn’t spent enough time serving that market serving that industry. But man, you had agency experience Freelancer spirit like that it was official, and then it was validated right by the market. It was so I want to
Chris Davis 9:59
Man, there are so many. So here’s what I want to do. Dave, I want to let the listeners in on my plan. I want to talk about trends with winning with webinars for 2021. as familiar as I am with them, it still is a fairly new strategy for the collective small business that’s thinking, How do I use video in some capacity online, to not just engage but convert? So I know you are you the content that you publish on the blog and the emails that I get. It’s always around educating and equipping the users of dimeo. With latest trends, of course, features that are coming out, but how to leverage webinars at a high capacity. So I wanted to give you the floor and just talk about some of the trends that you’re seeing with webinars, as well as things that are working really well for for registration and show up.
David Abrams 10:59
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I first like to just preface this by saying, like, webinars are not anything new. Like if you’re getting into something new, it is a one to many communication method, right? It’s like a very basic part of business. It’s building relationships, it’s talking about your business, it’s solving the pain point at solving a problem that someone has, in this instance, the medium is simply web communication, in video communication, right? That is the medium to have that message. So don’t get too, you know, caught up in that messaging I do. webinars can be so difficult. Now there are technical and tactical components that can change by the platform that you have. But it’s the basics of business, let’s build some relationships. Let’s get people interested that solve their problem and introduce them to our business. So when we talk about trends, what we’re really talking about is like what is working right now, and I think, you know, Gone are the days of these very formulaic marketing style webinars that was taught by, you know, some books out there some marketing books, I think those are still great, but they’re overused by marketers. I think the key thing now is really just trying to understand like, who is my ideal customer? When are they going to be online? How do they digest information? And how can I communicate to them in the best possible manner, that’s basic business stuff. But if you can think about it that way, it really will serve you to create a webinar that will be engaging, interactive, and that is what you’re looking for. That is the key. If you’re looking for a trend, we got to make something engaging interactive, we no longer want to have a webinar where I’m just talking at you for, you know, two hours, that is really hard to do these days. So for us, one of the things that we started doing is like, like, what beers and webinar fears is a recent asked me anything webinar we did, it was fun, it was personable, we had people sending in questions. We brought people on stage, we had interactive polls, we were launching handouts. We had really funny slides with memes on them, we understand that our audience was marketers, we only kept it at 30 minutes. We didn’t even go past 30 minutes. But we really just tried to make it interactive and fun, adding a lot of energy into it. I think one of the things we talked about a lot now is making sure you’re finding the right presenter, not always Are you the right presenter for these things as well. Like, I don’t always feel like my personality type is the best. So we found a marketer on our team who is just a great vocal person, she is amazing. She’s got like a theatre background. And like she gets on these things and just slays it and you know, sometimes it’s just about finding the right person to do it with the right energy. But if you can imagine it from that perspective of like, really just engaging and being interactive, that is how you’re going to win. Now the key part of all of this really comes down to what are you going to be talking about on the webinar, right? We call that our hook? What are we going to do to hook people on because that is the key thing for your registration page. That’s the key thing for your promotional plan. Like, you know, we could run a webinar about the most boring thing in the world with no excitement or curiosity or enticement to get people to show up. And it could be a great webinar that we do live. But if we don’t entice it, and we don’t market it, well, then no one’s going to show up, because we call it the hook. So we really have to think about what is the hook to get people to show up? Where is their pain point right now, if our presentation is around, talking about?
David Abrams 14:10
I don’t know why Polaroid cameras are the new cool thing. I don’t know why that just came to my head. So don’t judge me on that one. I’m looking at a Polaroid picture over here. That’s probably why.
David Abrams 14:19
You know, I’m not just gonna talk about the technical specs of the Polaroid camera, maybe the event itself is going to be about how to
David Abrams 14:28
connect with friends and family. like never before how Polaroid cameras are building better relationships than ever before, or like, you know, maybe the pain point is,
David Abrams 14:40
you know, something with their cameras that they’re losing footage or something like that. So never lose a picture again, why every one of your pictures will make it on your fridge with a Polaroid camera. Now you kind of understood their problem. You’re getting them excited, like Oh, that is a problem I have. So they’re going to go attend so you make that a very exciting hook. That’s how you get people to show up your registration.
David Abrams 15:00
Pages really the key parts about them or your headline, your sub headline, you know, maybe some of the key bullet points on that page. But you don’t have to have these super highly designed pages demio themselves have like really nice design registration pages that you can use. You can even embed our forms on your pages and control the whole funnel process. But you know, you can be simple if you have a really good hook. And that is really like the I like to start simple with everything. And like you can really start your process simple. And just test is this hook. Good. Am I getting registrants? If you are, are they staying on the webinar. And if they’re not, then you need to change the webinar. But there’s only you know, so many elements you want to start with if you build an entire webinar funnel to start, and then you go into to try to test where the missing pieces are, you’re going to have so many moving pieces, you got your registration page, you have your pre email sequence, you got your webinar, you’re posting mostly gay conversion, start simple.
Chris Davis 15:53
preaching to the choir. I have to say, I’m having a good I think you said hook. Right? Yep. And singular. I can’t stress that enough. Too often, are people too lofty when they want somebody to register for their event. And they think that they’re patting themselves on the back for like, Oh, I finally figured out how to do a webinar. And they don’t even think about the content, or the mode of consumption of their audience. Right? So for me, what I learned since I present to marketers as well, is that if I’m going to talk and there was an option, where you know, there’s an opportunity where you can change modalities, right like be on screen, then go to go to presentation and have a video, I didn’t want to introduce too many moving parts. So what I did was in my slides, I made sure that it was not bullet pointed all the way through, make sure that there are some graphics in there some images, just to break a pattern so that people don’t just get stuck in a low where they’re just like, okay, yeah, yeah, right. stop and ask questions throughout, right. It’s all out there. And I have to say, So, okay, let’s get into some of the dimeo features here, too. Once you have your hook, singular, it’s easy for somebody to identify if they want to show up or not. Right. And now we get to the show up part is in the registration. Again, you guys keep it simple. I think that there’s there’s something to be said about options, right? When you can go in and really move around everything. If it’s a landing page platform, you got me All right, good. But if it’s a platform like your webinar platform, it just creates another set of decisions and considerations that you have to make to go live. And I have found you guys take one a very streamlined, clean approach, which I love. Like, there is no standard template that you guys provide, because you have options within your templates as well, that I was just like, Oh, yeah, this doesn’t match my brand. I mean, you let me put my logo on there, change the colors, I can put my logo in the emails, change the colors of the buttons to really give this branded experience. But you guys did something that I it was so simple, how you how you did it before them it was really common practice in the market, is you really invited people to say, hey, look, and if you want to put this button on your existing page, here’s the simple code to do so. Right? Right, you thought that’d be complex? Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, we want to make it as simple as possible, but you can customize as much as possible. So you want to build your landing page, boom, take our forms embedded right onto your landing page, have all that customization you want. We even give you pop up models that you can use, and they sync seamlessly with demio. So if you’re adding more times to your sessions, boom, it’s automatically going to show up. So you add your form one time, it’s automatically sinking, hey, you want to customize the form all the way your stuff you wanna do everything will just give you pure code, just pure HTML, build whatever you want, you can do that with your thank you page, you can put that in there, you know, redirect to a thank you page, you can redirect after the webinar to a page that you want to. And like you said, you can brand in the room. And this is just the start, we actually have a pretty big rollout coming soon, we’re going to give you more branding abilities, put in your logo icon background colors, the colors that match your brand and the room itself. And it’s going to just get better and better branding is a key thing that we’re going to double down on in 2021. So that you can have this beautiful, seamless experience in the browser, with your brand and your audience. Front and center. Yeah, yeah. And in browser was another thing.
Chris Davis 19:35
In the beginning, I remember the conversation of software or in browser because then you had to because I remember starting out it was chrome only, and then, of course improve the software. And that was a big decision. And I think that that of course now it has proven to be one of the best decisions. And I’ll say this, you mentioned, you mentioned sessions. Let me just explain.
Chris Davis 20:00
Everybody, this is something that caught me by surprise because I was looking for the old way to do things, David, I don’t say it right way to rethink,
Chris Davis 20:09
right? So when he says sessions, everybody, this is how dimeo works, you create your webinar, you go through all the settings, integrations, and everything went well. And you’re like, I want to do that, again, pre dimeo, you go, and you duplicate the event. And then you reconnect all your all of your integrations and everything else, post dimeo, which I did not was not expecting, and one of the things that I love, you go into that same webinar, and just add another session, which means for all of my marketing consultants out there, who have to go in and recreate stuff, and and you’re always duplicating, there’s no duplication of the title, the subject line, the presenter, the files that you’ve uploaded, the polls that you’ve configured the CRM integrations, you’re literally just saying, I want to do this again, you add the session, and everything is ready to go.
David Abrams 21:08
Yep, that’s that.
Chris Davis 21:11
Man, I just wish more people understood. Because sometimes, and listen, if you’re already a demio user, it’s okay to listen to this podcast and realize how spoiled you are. Right? You know, with with a different experience, right? The rich kids that go and say, Hey, wait a minute, everybody doesn’t have a bins. Everybody doesn’t have a chauffeur, you have to cook your own food. Right? Like, okay, now you realize, if you’re already with dimeo, you don’t have a reason to look elsewhere. Because there are some things that you guys just do really well. That was not, in my estimation. Of course, I’m not a software developer. But it wasn’t even on my radar. But I wanted to highlight that because you mentioned sessions. And then when we talk about the room, the webinar room, I have to say, It’s been one of the most stable experiences that I’ve had, usually, with webinars software, you will get some I can’t see, I can’t hear. I haven’t had those issues with dimeo. I didn’t realize it until now. Because I’ve used them all, you know, go to webinar webinarjam. And, oh, webinar ninja webinar, whatever, right? I’m
Chris Davis 22:23
right. In the stability there is it’s been top notch across platforms, it loads really fast on my phone, you know, on my iPad. So I absolutely love it. So we talked about, you know, keeping the kingpin getting to having a good hook, keeping a singular, making sure that you’re not I think the biggest thing you said so far, David is don’t overcomplicate this thing, do not a webinar is a conversation that you’re having, just like you would in a classroom, just like you would have in an auditorium, right? Like a lot of people.
Chris Davis 22:59
When it comes to the digital space, they start acting differently.
Chris Davis 23:05
Right? It’s like, Well, wait, you speak for a living? How is this webinar? any different? I think that’s the biggest key, please treat it as such. And just know that because it is different. There are now different engaging tools that you have. I think everybody should have a poll on the on their on their webinar or multiple modes. I’ve seen I’ve seen some people do, like every other slide was a poll, and it was so engaging, because it was like, it was like value based slide that it was a question about that slide. And it was an engaging scripture constantly involved. And there was like a prize giveaway at the end for like the best answers. And like, it was crazy engaging. It was all in demand. I was like, Wow, that’s a great use case. But like you don’t have to have, you know, the lecture hall. I’m standing at the front of the classroom talking about you anymore, right? Like, this should be a two way conversation. That’s the new marketing. Yep. Yep. I want to highlight something just from my my automation folks listening.
Chris Davis 24:05
Here’s something that I do often with with demeo. You guys have a good Zapier integration, too. But you have native integrations, don’t get me wrong, everybody. The native integrations are good. But there’s something that I do in my platform is sometimes I use like an exit intent or some other means of scheduling somebody for a webinar. Whether it’s a link click within an email, like I said, exit intent or some other Legion elsewhere. And I integrated with Zapier because what happens is, and I don’t know if you guys did this Zapier however it it happened. I’m glad it’s happening. But if I have a let’s say, I have a webinar with the series. So it runs every Tuesday at a particular time, which actually I do every Tuesday at 10 or it could be multiple times a week through the Zapier integration, it will always register them
Chris Davis 25:00
For the most recent, like the next upcoming webinar, I don’t have to refresh this app, I don’t have to go into dimeo. and refresh the integration. That was a surprise to me that I didn’t realize because I actually forgot one time. And I’m like, Oh, my gosh, everybody’s been registered, I’m going to have to go in manually. And before, you know, I logged in, and I said, Wait a minute, it intelligently just registered them for the next available lesson. Where again, makes things so much easier when I was at lead pages. It was like an hour or two process to update every landing page, go on Infusionsoft update the follow up sequence in the tags episode, what are forms, right, they sync instantly. It’s so nice. And yeah, that’s it Zapier integration. That is that’s the way our series work there, always go to the next one, we actually just released an update. Now you didn’t have any sessions upcoming on your series, you can just have people register for your series events, because you know that there’s going to be new upcoming sessions coming in the future. So you know, even if you forgot to schedule, any boom, they’ll still go into your and you’ll be able to see when they registered, you can automatically have them go the next. You know, I think the big thought process for I’m gonna say my co founder is really at the core of a lot of these things as he is, you know, the product person here. And he really is so smart. But it was about two conversations that we had, which was how do we make events? We have this kind of model that we call event bias, meaning a lot of people think of events as a one time thing. I’m going to run an event on Thursday, after it’s done. It’s done. Yeah, we wanted to change that mindset, how do events live forever. That’s how we change from events and sessions from a singular event type. Because when you create an event, it’s part of a marketing campaign of your organization, you don’t necessarily want to do it one time, you might do it one time to test it. But doesn’t mean you only want to do a one time it’s a marketing, organic process. And we want you to feel like you should continue to do this. So we want to build up your analytics build up that process make it easy. And the same with series, right? Like if you run a series event, those are ongoing amount of session, we shouldn’t you shouldn’t have to create them every time or deal with that automation. So if we can really get through the thought process of how can we make this even simpler for you? How can we make this out, you don’t have to do a lot of the heavy lifting, you can just focus on presenting, engaging, communicating, that is the key thing. And we’ll try to do everything else around you. Yeah, and it starts to give dimeo and identity, one of the reasons why I like to have the founders on is that it helps people understand who’s behind the software. And a lot of times that gives you insight of why the software is the way that it is. And you look at you and why you’ve got this combo of product, and marketing.
Chris Davis 27:39
Right if you’ve got
David Abrams 27:41
operations too. So it’s like a lot like I used to say this a lot like we we folk we have two products at demio. We have the demo customer facing product. And then we have demio itself the company, which is we look at as a product. And I own demio as a company as a product, and he owns the product product. And so we giving those kind of delineations we’ve created a really great culture, we brought in great people, people love working at the company, because we have the same kind of mentality that we have about our customer facing product as our company, how do we make things better? who make things simpler? How do we give a better work environment? How do we give you more work life balance? How do we make this process simpler? How can we learn more from our customers and boil that information down to a better process for our product team? Like that is the mentality that’s constantly shifting behind the scenes? And I think that has been an acceleration for how do we make the product better, too? Yeah, yeah. Man, I love it treating the company as a product in the platform, you know, separately. And again, you can see it because the operation side of getting a webinar up in dimeo is extremely simplified. And the last thing that I mentioned, then I want to I want to talk about some of the upcoming stuff. And what’s in the future is replays is simple things. David is just simple things. And maybe some of you listening if you’d like why is he so excited that seem so little, you’ve got to have the scars from the marketing battlefield of having to do all of this heavy lifting. Right,
Chris Davis 29:14
man. So the replay page for me, one, I can go in and customize the replay page. And if I forget on the front end to say, hey, a replay is available. You guys give me the page and the URL to it that I can send out. Like Yeah, I know that the customization from your registration page. So most of the time, you won’t even have to go in there. They’ll just keep all your registration page information right on your replay page, all the customizations the text, everything is going to store there. You can add you can add a call to action, you can turn it off at a certain time to disable that replay. But I do want to say that is version one of replays. We are so excited because this year we’re going to be releasing a new version of replays where it is going to be a totally new interactive
David Abrams 29:59
Experience inside of the demio rooms fully brandable fully interactive, a whole new set of metrics that you’ll be able to look at, it’s going to be game changing. And I’m really excited about that. But I think that’s going to be the next major evolution of demio. I love it. I love it, and which is a good segue. I wanted to let you let the listeners know about some of the newer features that are available now in demeo. And then, what do we have to look forward to demeo? Going forward after you guys his big announcement?
David Abrams 30:32
Yeah, yeah. So was your question what is the announcement? You can say that but first was what are some of the the newest features now that that people can should be excited about? Yeah, so we have a room launch that has been going on behind the scenes for about a year, it’s literally taken us a year to rethink this. So you mentioned like stability of the platform and stuff like that, we really understand that, like, we could build a bunch of little features and functions. But at the end of the day, the core room experience, the streaming application, that experience that you have in the room is the key one. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that, and the future of mobile presentations, and mobile, you know, webinars and stuff like that. So we redesigned the room from the ground up, redid all of the streaming components, we rethought how many people went on to a stage, we have now what’s called a stage concept coming out. Like if you’re on stage, right, like a big presentation. And we have more branding abilities coming in, it’s fully dynamic, with webcams shifting and maximizing your screen share or your slides or your videos, the maximum area, we have a new feature called spotlight coming out. By the way, I’m definitely a sneak peek in all these things, we haven’t really announced this stuff yet. So you know, you’re getting the goods here. spotlight features we have mobile presentation ability is gonna be coming out after that. But it’s all mobile optimized for everyone. So again, in the browser, stuff like that. So it’s really gorgeous. That’s the first step, we’re also going to be doing things like, you know, possibly house party integrations in the future, we’re going to be doing things with our, our hosts, and possibly custom domains and the replay features and, you know, possibly channels, all of this great stuff, just a ton of stuff coming down the pipeline on the roadmap. But right now we have just wrapped up a acquisition process, or the company called bonzai, an incredible company. Thank you so much. Yeah, this was really exciting. beginning of this year, we got acquired and no bonds, I worked with larger enterprise companies in the event automation space, they help you to find register, and then get your registrants to show up to your events. And they really started in the field marketing space and how to pivot a lot when COVID hit. But now they’re really focusing on virtual events, driving registrations for virtual events. So the automation ability around just the event itself. And so we’re going to be working more on how do we sync these together? How do we build packages together? You know, how do we do other, you know, possibly great, you know, features and functions that marketing automation can serve in? Or when a type of events can we support? Is it summit says it, you know, other things like that meeting rooms, stuff like that. So those are the big questions that we’re going to be asking. But bonsai is an incredible organization, they just raised a big round of venture financing debt. And so there’s a lot of money behind this, there’s gonna be a lot of work put in to really continue to just make a great experience for everybody. Yeah. And when you hear that everybody that’s longevity, is longevity, that you’re not in it, just to create some software and make millions and then go. One of the other things, too, that that you guys do. It’s like a, I can’t I’m a mess up the name of the feature. But it’s like, you can bring someone from the audience on the stage, I forget the name of it, but you can, yeah, invite to stage. So you can definitely do that. With our new rooms, you’ll have a like you have a big button that says invite to stage and you can bring them on in our stage spots will have now up to four webcams and more webcam abilities. And it’s just going to keep growing from there. We have room sizes, that breakout and to bigger room sizes. And so just a lot of great stuff coming but at the core of all of these new changes is this new room coming that we’re so excited by the branding abilities of this new room, it’s going to be off the charts, it’s gonna It looks so good custom backgrounds, all that kind of cool stuff, man. So I guess I’d be remiss without asking for my for my automation crowd. Are you guys? Well, well, let me say this, let me not assume any intelligence. Talk to us a little bit about some of the existing automation that you have in even if it’s specific to integrate a CRM and marking attendees and not. But what kind of automation is in place right now? And is there anything planned, upcoming for improvements on automation?
David Abrams 34:49
First of all, yes, we want to redo our API from the ground up to be honest with you, we’re currently no we want to really supercharge that bad boy we know at the center of most of this stuff is qualification.
David Abrams 35:00
have, you know, leads and prospects is moving people down your pipeline, this demand Gen at the core, right? That’s what these conversations are. So the API becomes a central point of that. So we really want to do that just to make it a more powerful API. We want to redo this API API to make that even more powerful, like these things are good right now. But we’re constantly in like, our mindset is always how can we make this better? How can make this smarter? So we want to have the ability to pass it for more data into your CRM? How long do people stay? how engaged? Are they? Can we come up with like, demand Gen scores for you? Can we give you entrance exit times? Can we store if they ask questions, or what polls they responded to? and stuff like that, like, what are the key things that you want to pass over, you’ll have the ability to drop down and send that stuff over. Right now, it is pretty basic integration, it still works great. But when you set up your integration natively, you’re able to set either tags or lists to your CRM, when someone registers whether you’re using our forms, or our registration pages, or you’re just embedding them, it doesn’t matter. You can also then segment them to a tag list or, you know, a group of it’s like MailChimp, or something like that. If they attend or don’t attend, you can save their unique join link as a custom field, which is great, send out your own emails, you can match any custom fields that you add to your forms. And we also have things like our one click Join link. So you can actually take merge field links and put them into your CRM. And when you send them out, people can actually register by just clicking on a link in an email, and automatically be registered for that event. They don’t even have to go to the registration page. That’s great. If you’re inviting like maybe your audience of customers already, and you want them to just put their hand up and say, I’m ready for this event, click the email link, boom, they’re on the thank you page already registered man. And the API is is really exciting. Because there’s there’s been a lot of API talk, because a lot of platforms are going for an API based integration for Facebook. Right? Because they were thinking that same Yeah. And here’s, here’s what excites me about it. And I know you all are thinking about it, because of what you just said, there are so many platforms that think that all a person needs is show up and leave. Right. But like you said, What if I could denote if somebody asked a question or not, if they filled out a particular answer in a poll and see that or sync that, you know, there is so much data that is passed in a webinar. And it is refreshing to hear you all are on the job of saying, you know what, let’s capture that data. And let’s give this to the marketers so that they can be even more effective post webinar performance, you know, which is what we need, like marketers need as much access to the data as possible, one of the features that I can’t end without mentioning, you know, it’s for me, I have to say, My challenge, David, it’s, it’s almost like your child, like you know so much about your child. And then somebody says, like, Oh, my gosh, he’s grown so much, you’re like, Oh, yeah, I guess he did get, I’m just used to sit every day, right? Every day, every day. But you do have automated webinars in the classroom.
David Abrams 38:12
And on demand, yeah, automated on demand. So the nice thing about it is you can turn a live webinar into an automated webinar, you can turn a live webinar into an on demand, or you can go straight from recording yourself. And creating the on demand and evergreen experience with dimeo. And in the functionality is almost identical it so if you know how to build and I’m saying this, everybody, because if you know how to build a webinar, it’s not like you have to re learn. It’s not a whole nother platform, there’s solutions out there that have a live platform, and then they have an evergreen platform, you guys do a really good job with leveraging your own technology to allow people to move within the different modes of webinars. And simplicity. Yeah, we have like this idea that really like, first of all, you know, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in the product. And we all feel that way. I mean, it’s a great product now. But we just want to continue and grow it make it simpler and easier. And so when you have that mindset, it’s always easy to see the flaws. You know, like we see our own flaws. But, you know, historically we’ve been a bootstrap company. So we, you know, can’t we just don’t engineer that fast, because we try to go really slowly make sure everything is done really well. It’s thought through it’s there when we release it. So you know, that’s always been a hard thing for us. But
Narrator 39:38
you know, there’s just so much opportunity and so much stuff that we can do things that we want to do better. And I think that’s definitely you know, going to be one of them that we can do better to is just, you know, how to events work in general, like our automated and live events, different things are they just a function of the event coming up like if you have a live event
David Abrams 39:59
Coming up,
David Abrams 40:02
you know, tomorrow and all of a sudden you can’t make it. Is it really that hard to just switch? Could you just be able to switch it to an automated event? And if so, like, does that change the event itself? Like, those are the thoughts we’re having? You know, thinking about internally is like, how can we rethink the way people think about events? Yeah. And so, you know, if we could engineer faster, we could we could solve some big problems. But you know, we’ll see as we go here, you know, post merger. Yeah, but but you bring up a good point. A lot of times as marketers, I’m guilty of this, we’re always looking at ways we can leverage and strategies and hey, look, you don’t have to be on a webinar, you can automate it, especially us in the in the automation space. But what about those times where you get sick? How many people do you know, do we all know, collectively listeners that caught COVID, who are a business owner, and we’re down and maybe they had a webinar scheduled for that Wednesday, all of a sudden, they’re bedridden, right. So when platforms allow you to say, Okay, I switch, click, I need to upload a video and turn this into evergreen, it becomes a convenience for the business owner and assurance, but also quality control for the for the prospects, the people who are actually expecting in anticipating, yes, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve reserved time on my calendar for this. Let’s not let some sickness or some unforeseen, you know, event come up that prevents us from being on there. Man, again, we can go into dim, who Thank you dimeo, click a button. No. And we can still serve our audience. So it’s not always as a marketer, sometimes I have to think about it. I know, this may come off harsh, but I have to think about the human nature of the role. I’m actually building a relationship to we talked about ethics a lot internally. Yeah, I think that’s a big question. I mean, I think marketing in general can toe the line of ethics and where that is, so you definitely have to have those questions. I mean, there’s always, how can we make this more automated? But there’s the bigger question of how do we still make sure we’re connecting with our because, you know, it’s so easy to fall in love with the numbers in the computer, like with how many prospects I have, it was 100 prospects. But that’s 100 possible people. And I think one of the things that we’ve done really good, I think, is kind of helping to humanize that it’s like, after an event, we will go and manually add every person on social media or connect with them and reach out to them maybe manually and like that really helps ground you and realize how these are real people with real problems. And like, they’re not just a number on a screen. Anyways, that’s a whole nother tangent on the whole other topic, the love of medics and marketing. But yeah, one last point, I gotta, I gotta highlight before we end out. I know, I’ve probably said this three times now. But everybody, I’m serious. This is my last point, analytics man.
Chris Davis 42:50
I think that simplified analytics are the way because one numbers are intimidating to the majority of the population. Most people are intimidated by math, and those who can’t interpret numbers, those who aren’t intimidated by numbers struggle interpreting what they mean in a business context. So one of the things that I appreciated is that I can go into my event per session, and see my metrics, as well as the event as a whole. And I can see everything, David, I can see the question that they asked, I can see when they entered, when they left, a lot of times, some of these platforms will make you export that. And then you’ve got to look in a CSV and kind of see this information. So I wanted to highlight that you guys give really good basic analytics of retention. Okay, on average, how long are people staying on this webinar? When are they leaving? When are you know, your peak points? And it what it does is it gives you that feedback that digital marketing affords us in this new age to understand exactly how people are engaging with what we’re putting out there, man. So I could not mention that, you know, in the simplicity, I appreciate accessing simplicity across the board, I think is the key is like the key word that we’re talking about today, right? Like, how do we make these things simple. And I think we can, we can continue to improve our analytics, we can continue to improve those integrations as well. Like you can pass it analytical information over here, there’s still areas that you have to export CSV stuff from in demio. And I think we can do a better job of that. But the reality is, you know, when you start talking about analytics and numbers, there’s like, an infinite amount of numbers you can pull in and just like look at any equations, and the reality is, what you need is actionable data. What will help me present this better? What will help me on the next one, what will help me make the tweaks and necessary changes that I need for this campaign? That is what we really want, you know, we want the end goal, we don’t want to look at 10,000 numbers. So that’s how you know that’s a simplification process and how to do in product because there’s like, what things are important and what things aren’t. Yeah, we have to put those things in but
David Abrams 45:00
You know, again, simplicity being like the key value here at bonsai demio, and we really try to think about that. Yeah, well, thank you, David. And again, congratulations to fold again, just the commitment for the to the the toughness, the thickness of skin, the focus, all of those things required to build software, you know, that you believe in? Absolutely. And you know, just having the discipline to listen to those who have valuable feedback, and take those who don’t have as valuable feedback. But say, okay, your value your opinion, however, let’s keep going. And then of course, on the fundraising man, it’s just gonna allow you guys to do so much more. I’m excited for anybody who hasn’t figured it out by now.
Chris Davis 45:45
Where can people go to find out more about demio? Yeah, just go to the blog at demio.com. We have, like you said a lot of content on the blog. The website itself has a lot of great information if you want to check out the product. But if you’re interested in events, and like what’s going on, check out our blog, we do have a ton of content we’re putting out there on strategies, you know, the research process presenting process, we also have the SaaS breakthrough podcast, which breaks down a lot of like SaaS marketing strategies on there. So a lot of great information is just demio comm dm IO calm. I’m not really much on social, but you can always grab me on LinkedIn, David Abrams on LinkedIn, I’m always open for a conversation. I’m very approachable. So you know, reach out anytime if you’re listening and always happy to help lend a hand. Great, great. So I have both of those links to the demeo. website, as well as David’s LinkedIn, if you want to just start by saying, Hey, that was a great interview. Thank you so much, David. Those will be in the show notes. David, thank you, man. I appreciate it. Good to see you and reconnect, man. And I’m really proud of you and your journey. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. And I know our listeners will too. So have a good one man. Talk to you soon. All right. All right. Thank you for tuning in and listening to this episode of the All systems go podcast. Let me ask you this. Are you do you feel more confident in running webinars with some of the tips that we discussed in this podcast? And also, how do you feel about demio? If you’re a user, do you feel better about it? If you’re not are you like, wait a minute, there’s a tool out there that can do all of this. That is the goal for this podcast. And you’ll hear I try to be as objective as possible, while at the same time stating my experience with the platform if I have experienced with it. And what I want you all to be able to do is listen to how I’m using it my excitement, listen to how the the founders describe it. Listen to how if it’s not a founder for somebody on the team, listen to how they describe it, the F the level of effort they’re putting into it, what they want you to get out of it. Because these are all important data points for you to use to make an intelligent decision whether or not you want to use the software, I will never force any type of software down your throat. Okay, that is not what I’m here for. I’m not here for you to use the tools that I use, but I want to give my experience to make that known as well as just expose you to what’s available. All right. So share this share this with your marketing friend, your marketing automation consultant, your your friendly marketing automation consultant. Share this with anybody that you know that is attempting to run webinars, there’s a good chance they’re struggling over a process that may be able to be a lot more simplified. Alright, if you found value in today’s episode, now is the time if you haven’t subscribed to subscribe, and make sure Hey, everybody, make sure when you see us promote and publish this episode, whether it’s a snippet or the full episode, make sure you’re sharing put a like on it and share say hey, I like this episode, do something Listen, we rely on you, you are part of the family to get the word out. And if you’re not new listeners, here’s my invitation for you to join the family. The All systems go family of small business owner savvy marketing automation consultants and digital marketing professionals who get this type of value weekly, to be able to stand out in the marketplace and deliver a level of service and excellence that is void that is that is not natural that is not normal in the than the current conditions. Alright, so make sure you subscribe, leave a five star rating and review while you’re at it here at automation bridge. We’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals turning them into automation service providers, which means people who can navigate the strategy space of marketing as well as the technological landscape. put those two together to build automated systems for small businesses for rapid growth.
Chris Davis 50:00
Not just rapid growth one time, but on going performance. Okay, stability, longevity. That’s what we’re talking about here. Okay. So if that’s you, if you would like to be the person responsible for implementing the automated systems for optimizing the automated systems for being the go to for new technologies and things that the business should be aware of, here’s what I want you to do, go to automationbridge.com/ASP , and take the next steps to talk to someone on my team to assess if you’d be a good fit for any of our current programs, more, most specifically, our automation service provider program that walks you through a structured approach to teach you everything you need to have a stable, long, profitable career as a marketing automation consultant, who does the service of automation at a high level, which we call automation service providers. All right. We’re also accepting guests to the podcast everybody. So if you’re a SaaS founder or you work in product or marketing for SAS company, we’d love for you to come on, discuss your software and talk about your journey. If you’re a marketing automation consultant, experiencing success with your clients that you’d like to share, come on to the podcast and share with the collective audience as well. Okay, you can do so by going to automationbridge.com /podcast. Okay, automationbridge.com/guest to be a guest on the podcast. And now is the time everybody. Now is the time for those of you who are looking and saying what can I do online? How can I build a business, your technical, your process oriented, you like technology and learning new technologies, you value systems, this space this career is for you. And I know because I’m seeing it with my own eyes and have been serving it with my own hands. Alright. So again, if you listen to this podcast, you’re excited you start to see things differently. possibilities start to open up, go to automationbridge.com/ASP. All right, all the show notes and podcasts are accessible and available at automationbridge.com/podcast, you can subscribe there and listen to all the other episodes at your leisure. So until next time, I see you online automate responsibly
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Discover how to deploy automated marketing, sales, and onboarding systems to scale your business without working long hours to do so.