Context
Webinars aren’t new. Are they exciting? Depends on who you ask and what topic it is.
We all may’ve snoozed sat through one at some point. While it isn’t the most popular approach to connect with your current & potential users, it does allow us to —
- Bring those set of folks into the fold who want to have that public conversation/debate about what a product can or can’t do.
- See those who work behind the scenes in action. Makes for a great way to demonstrate how passionate people are about what they’re solving and striving to build.
- Create a resource for anyone interested in the future, wanting to go through an async style of getting-to-know.
…and much more.
In this post we’ll go through the WHYs and HOWs of our journey into the series of webinar we’ve hosted (and plan to host), share some of our learnings (along with our mistakes) & a view into what’s in store for 2023!
Why
An important distinction before we dive deep on this is that hosting webinars wasn’t driven as part of our Sales strategy but was rather crafted from the standpoint of Community engagement.
As a company, we obviously have a vested interest in getting more users onboard but given our approach to HOW we want to make that happen, we’ve been wanting to first explore & fully understand who is it that we’re solving this for, is the problem statement big enough, what would it take for us to go from a good-to-have to a must-have productivity tool etc.
Everything we did was geared towards educating viewers of what’s possible and with the hopes to better understand some of the things we wanted to learn from the get-go!
How
Format
Based on our collective experiences, it was clear that a single person going through slides and boasting about how “awesome“ something is wasn’t going to cut it. Webinars that are engaging are those that involve a conversation — which meant having at least 2 people talking & have 1 person help with moderation.
We also wanted to balance the equation by not just having folks who work at Sparklite do all the talking — sure, our first/intro webinar was all about just us but that was more of a warm-up for what was coming next — but also have the perspective of some of our early adopters or power users in general. This meant inviting folks to try us out and share their honest opinion/feedback.
Logistics
Here’s what our typical choice of platforms, action items, outreach activities looked like —
- Website: Our site’s hosted on WordPress and we used ActiveCampaign to display a pop-up and have visitors sign-up for the webinar (if they wanted to).
- Given our Google Ads campaign at the time, we received >200 registrations for our first webinar just from this channel.
- Calendar: In this day and age, (almost) everyone works out of a calendar and so we understood that until people had the event added in the calendar of their choice, the likelihood of them showing-up would’ve been slim. For this, we made use of an AddEvent link which showed-up on our email comms as well as on our “thank you” message when someone signed-up for the webinar from our website (via the pop-up).
- Social media
- LinkedIn: We created an event on LinkedIn and enabled registrations so we could notify people of when/how we’re going to proceed, even remind them of when the webinar’s about to begin.
- Full disclosure: I missed out on enabling the registration form on the 2nd so we couldn’t get to ~13 people via email (my bad!).
- Twitter: Pretty plain vanilla.
- LinkedIn: We created an event on LinkedIn and enabled registrations so we could notify people of when/how we’re going to proceed, even remind them of when the webinar’s about to begin.
- Streaming: We used Microsoft Teams for our 1st webinar but fortunately, Jon Melo — a certified Bubble coach — was kind enough to offer us his channels (Twitter, LinkedIn & YouTube) via Restream while we were planning our 2nd webinar with him.
Learnings
- Dedicated space: While we knew we had to get to this eventually, it became even more clear(er?) to us that we had to have a dedicated page on our website where we could display all the different webinars we’ve hosted, publish a schedule of upcoming ones, share the outcome with our audience (stats, learnings etc.), allow folks to sign-up & receive updates / reminders etc.
- More guests: It was a blast hosting Jon who took us through how to get things done on Bubble using Sparklite and this just amplified our approach to HOW we wanted a webinar to be. The key now would be to go out there and find more people/brands who’d want to engage us in this format.
- Find our tribe: This is less about just webinars and more towards building our community as a whole — we’ve got our work cut out for us to go our there, connect with folks, talk to them, explore all the different challenges they still face and see if there’s any way to help.
Future
Since we’re still just getting started, we don’t yet have a ton of external users to whom we can ask for what they’d want to see next but that won’t stop us as we’ve got some amazing champions internally who’ve found very many creative ways to use Sparklite across multiple different tools like Retool, Streamlit, even had one of our viewers from the 2nd webinar indicate that Webflow could be the next one to explore after Bubble.
While different tools are a great way to dig deep on specific use cases, we also want to go broad and explore what other scenarios could Sparklite be used in as well — I’ve been told NOT to use it as an email<>password database that runs a VLOOKUP but hey, would’ve been cool to brag that it can technically be used to build an entire “auth“ system.
Anyhoo, if you’ve reached so far — thank you! In case you want to (or know someone who does) join us on one of our live shows, feel free to holler.
- UPDATES
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