We're a team of 5 badass women who will be your sommelier's to the marketing world. We work and whiteboard together at our 9-5 everyday in B2B marketing. We're a small, scrappy team that's picked up a few secret hacks along the way. And we want to share our crazy ideas with you! Let's call it, an anything but ordinary guide to marketing and design. From Chardonnay to Rose, we've got your marketing sips and design tips. Now that's worth raising a glass to. So grab your favorite vino & join us!
Episode 7 | Webinars on a Whim: Quickly Test If Webinars are Right for Your Marketing Strategy
Think it's impossible to host a webinar in less than a week? Yeah, we did too! Our manager (hi Kyle!) told us we needed to host a webinar in 5 days. Build a webinar and get registrations by next week? We thought he was insane. Fast forward 4 years, now webinars are a critical part of our marketing strategy. Webinars allow you to identify leads, connect with prospects, and increase brand awareness. However, the idea of building a webinar can feel daunting if you don't know where to start. We'll walk you through our process and provide you with a tip or two, whether you're building your first one or if you've hosted hundreds.
Resources & Key Takeaways
#1 Test it
- Go fast! Use your current tools at your disposal
- Marketing automation platform for email promos and registration forms
- Video conferencing tools
- Don’t spend a ton of time trying to make it perfect
- Create a high-level overview/agenda to start
- Make sure you’re adding value
#2 Choose your topics
- Just like a podcast - webinars need a topic - something to focus on
- Identify the largest challenges your target audience has and focus on those
- Make it specific with actionable things that the audience can take and use tomorrow to better their lives and work
- Focus on narrow topics and go for depth with the content, not broad topics that cover surface level
#3 Repurpose and reuse!
- Don’t start from scratch if you don’t have to
- If you’ve had a successful speaking submission at a conference or wrote a blog post - use that content as an outline for your webinar (break out multiple blog posts into multiple webinars)
- You can have the speaking engagement transcribed and leverage that as your outline
- Here’s an ideal process to follow:
- Interview an expert in your field
- Record the interview on Zoom (or another platform)
- Have the audio transcribed (Rev.com, Descript.com, etc.)
- Use the transcription to build your content
Create an outline
- Start in a Word document
- Don’t jump straight into building your presentation
- You’ll spend hours of time reiterating and reworking the flow
- Break your outline into sections
- Think about an agenda and your main points to start
- Next, transition to PowerPoint
- Don’t overload your slides with text
- Keep it to bullets
- Add extra content to notes - for your speaker to refer back
- Take the content you built in Word and bring it to PowerPoint
- Keep your presentation simple
- Focus on content first, then design
#5 Find the right host
- A good host is essential to the success of a webinar
- You need someone who’s...
- Engaging and entertaining
- Humor and quirkiness is good
- No one wants to hear someone drone on forever to, no matter how smart or knowledgeable they are
- Willing to show their face on camera
- Quick on their feet
- Knows the audience and the industry/market
- Engaging and entertaining
#6 Focus on Design
- After you break your content out into slides - focus on design
- People will lose interest if there’s only text on a slide
- Add imagery, memes, gifs, charts
- Use animations and transitions (1 minute or less per slide)
- More slides = better
- Add humor
- Use themes
- Just like we have themes for events, we use them in webinars.
- Themes made it fun for attendees.
- We've had a unicorn theme, a dinosaur theme, and more. It makes it interesting to look at, holding the audience's attention.
#7 Send a survey
- Either before, after or both!
- Asking what your audiences’ biggest challenges are or what topics they’d like to hear about.
- And in a post-survey, ask for feedback on the webinar to know what you can improve on and what you did well.
- Have someone on the sidelines working the tech and chat on the backend (identify roles ahead of time). If you don't have a lot of attendees starting out, makeup attendee names & questions for a peacock effect until you grow your audience.
#8 Promote Your Webinar
- Use your emails lists, but be sure segment and personalize.
- Make sure the topic is relevant to the roles you send to
- It’s worked better to have it read like a personal email vs. spammed template email for us
- Don’t blast your promotions to everyone
- Use your channels and your partners
- Social media – LinkedIn is a big channel for our business
- If you have partners, ask them if they’ll share it out as well.
- Ask any potential speakers to share on their channels.
- Add it to any industry event calendars and communities (e.g. forums, Facebook groups, etc.)
- Share the recording, chat & slide deck after the webinar.
- Share it with attendees & non-attendees afterwards (create 2 separate emails so you can properly target & personalize).
- Include additional blog resources related to the topic or promote your next webinar/event.
Episode 6 | What is an Offsite? Badass Goal Setting and Team Building for Marketers
Are you a part of a badass marketing team?! Do you need to build trust and communication among your team members? Do you need more cohesiveness and collaboration when it comes to your team goals? Then an offsite meeting might be a good solution for you. Listen as we dive into what an offsite meeting is and how to structure an offsite so your marketing team can: 1.) Strengthen and grow personally and professionally, and 2.) Set effective team goals. Badass-ness is right around the corner for you, can you feel it?
Resources & Key Takeaways
- There's three primary aspects to an offsite
- Prep work - The work you need to do prior to hosting the meeting to ensure it's set up for success.
- The Offsite - The actual meeting that takes places. This includes the specific structure and agenda for the offsite.
- Post-Work - This is the follow up work and tasks that need to take place after the offsite to ensure that you have a successful quarter and monitor progress on your goals.
- Put in the prep ahead of time to ensure you’re set up for the day and can have a good discussion
- Get out of the office! New views, new perspectives, new ideas.
- The more you do it, the better you get at goal-setting. Your first few times might be challenging and exhausting, but you get better.
- Don’t forget to celebrate! After a long, focused day that is dedicated to making the team better and each person better as individuals, make sure you do something fun as a team to unwind.
- Ideally, schedule ahead of time for the end of the quarter, that way you have a week or so to finalize your goals prior to the new quarter starting.
Episode 5 | Content Marketing: How to Effectively Build a Sustainable Content Cycle
Content continues to be king, but often that means creating A LOT of content. How do you keep up with the endless pressure to create blogs, whitepapers, videos, social media posts and more?! The Wine & Whiteboards team has stumbled upon a content marketing process that has saved us time and energy, and has produced results! Did we mention that we actually have a backlog of content now? We want to walk you through the process so you can develop your own sustainable content cycle that generates leads, positions you as a thought leader, and most of all, makes you look like a content marketing queen!
Resources & Key Takeaways
- Our secret sauce to content? Transcription. Transcription services we use include Rev.com and Descript.com
- Start somewhere! Content cycles can take a long time to build, and they will always be evolving, so don't feel behind.
- The best place to start is if you already have a blog post, video, podcast or some form of content. Write down a list of ways that you can slice and dice that content into different formats for different channels.
- Don't over create content that is specific to a single point in time. It doesn't stay evergreen and it's repurposing value decreases. However, there is a time and place for this, for example, a lot of bloggers and content creators of developed content specifically around advice for how to handle things during COVID-19. This is a situation that is large scale and long-lasting, and may be appropriate for your company to develop content around.
- Don't be afraid to outsource specific skills that you may not excel at. For example, copywriting, video creation or editing, graphic design, etc. We use sites like Upwork and Envato to find some really great freelancers! Remember, it's always beneficial to hire someone who knows and understands your industry and audience.
- Conduct interviews to capture stories, record them, then transcribe them and turn them into blog posts to create a content foundation. Once you have a well-structured blog post, the content repurposing opportunities are endless! We record via Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Episode 4 | How to Use Personality Tests to Build a Stronger Marketing Team
We believe a successful marketing team is made up of different styles and personalities. Understanding the unique traits of those personalities can lead to greater levels of empathy, communication, collaboration and ultimately success. We'll share our favorite ‘go-to” personality test, our team’s personality types (along with some entertaining stories), and how we've leveraged the test to work more efficiently together and strengthen our marketing team.
Resources & Key Takeaways
- FREE Personality Test: https://www.16personalities.com/ (based on the Meyers Briggs Personality Test)
- Take Action:
- Step 1: Go take a personality test on your own and get feedback on the results from LOVING CRITICS (the people in your life who care about you and will be honest with you) to see what aligns and what doesn't. Your results won't be a 100% representation of you and their feedback can be helpful to decipher and sift through the results in a meaningful way.
- Step 2: Share your personality type and characteristics with those you work with.
- Step 3: Ask each member of your team (including cross-functionally and freelancers/contractors) to take the personality test. Explain to them why you're asking and how you think it'll help you communicate, connect and work with them better.
- Why It's Important: Understanding the different personalities you interact with in your work life (and personal life) can help you be...
- A stronger communicator
- A better leader
- A more effective provider (and receiver) of feedback
- More in tune with your strengths and weaknesses (as well as your team's strengths and opportunities for growth)
- And so much more!
- Books we recommended in the episode:
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip & Dan Heath
- Insight by Tasha Eurich
Episode 3 | Tradeshow Booths: How to Stand Out and Make a Splash in the Expo Hall
In this episode, we'll dive into the process of planning a stellar tradeshow booth that is sure to catch the eye of attendees and boost your lead generation. We'll focus on the key elements of an expo booth that boosts attendee engagement, stands out from other exhibitors and lets you walk away from an event knowing you hit your goals.
Key Takeaways & Resources
- Create a theme for your events. It will save you time, money and energy! Leverage a theme that you can tie into the value you provide. For example, a camping/adventure theme could be "Get S'More Technology!" or a space/galaxy theme could be "Products Are Out of This World!" (Obviously insert more creative terms, we're just being generic here! It will allow you to order swag for an entire year, repurpose booth props and designs, and allow you to order in bulk which can help with volume discounts.
- Include an "experience element". What is something that attendees can engage with at your booth? Is it a barista where they can order their own custom coffee? Is it an onsite screen-printer where they can choose the design they want screen printed onto a notebook? We've seen big companies have Build-A-Bear stations, but we know not everyone can afford that. Get creative and think about activities that empower attendees to put their own mark on the swag they walk away with.
- PS: If your "experience element" creates a line, that's even better! That way you and the sales team have time to engage in meaningful conversation with people while they wait.
- Optimize your space. Think about your booth three-dimensionally vs. two-dimensionally. Optimize the space you've been given, not just the space on your floor. Could you have a mini blimp up in the air? Can you you use balloons? What can you use to fill up the space you paid for? Afterall, it wasn't cheap!
- Clearly and concisely communicate your value proposition. We know this seems obvious, but when people are walking by and you have a couple of seconds to capture their attention, it's important. Make sure that as attendees meander by your booth it's easy to understand what problems/challenges you solve and how you can help them.
- Hint...that usually means LESS words, and but POWERFUL words and imagery.
Episode 2 | Event Experience: B2B Marketer Takeaways from Attending a B2C Conference
Our team had the opportunity to attend Create & Cultivate back in February. It's rare that we actually get to enjoy events from an attendee's perspective so grab a glass of wine and we'll share all of our takeaways of things 'to-do' for your event, and some things that we would do a bit differently.
Resources & Key Takeaways
- Make it bite-sized & actionable
- If you’re hosting an event, whether it’s a conference, webinar, etc. make sure you’re providing small, actionable takeaways that people can go implement tomorrow.
- Big picture, aspirational items are great, but people usually need somewhere to start.
- Swag
- Is it useful? Is it fun?
- Does it help you accomplish your goal?
- Does it travel well?
- Don't develop or create swag without purpose. It will end up in the trash and that is sad and wasteful.
- We order a lot of our swag from Woodward Movement, we would encourage you to check them out!
- Design
- Make it intentional.
- How does your environment make people feel when they walk in the door?
- Does it provide direction and instructions if they need to navigate anything (e.g. signage, floor stickers, etc.)
- Does it inspire word of mouth?
- Does it inspire excitement?
- Make it Instagrammable! Do people want to take pictures of it and share it?
- Post-Event
- How are you using your event content post-event?
- Do you create blog posts highlighting content from sessions or keynotes? Did you create blog posts highlighting speakers and their expertise?
- Are you leveraging photos or videos from the conference to create more content? Use these in social posts, Headliner videos, etc.
- Are you using photos/videos from last year to promote your upcoming or next event
Episode 1 | About W&W: Meet 5 Badass Marketing Women
This is Wine & Whiteboards. We're a small, scrappy marketing team that work and whiteboard together at our 9 to 5 jobs. We aren't afraid to get creative and experiment - and neither should you! Episode 01 will introduce you to the W&W hosts, our team philosophy, and why you should tune in every month for marketing sips and design tips! We want to be your sommeliers to the marketing world so grab your favorite vino and join us.
Resources & Key Takeaways
- Create Your Dream Team
- Don’t be an average marketing team - what makes you unique?
- What makes your team work well? Write it down.
- What do you value as a team?
- Think about who you surround yourself with? How do you push each other to be better?
- How does it drive results? How is it successful?
- Marketing doesn’t have to be boring
- Think big - be creative
- Where do you get inspiration?
- You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
- It’s ok to shamelessly steal, BUT you have to be a translator. This means tweaking what has worked for someone else and making it your own to tailor it for your audience and needs.
- Remember, marketers add value
- Solve problems
- Use data
- Slow and steady wins the race
- Work hard, play even harder