Goldcast

When Justin Meredith joined Birdeye more than two years ago, their webinar programming had plateaued. Registrations weren’t growing and engagement was flat. Once he realized their platform was the problem and switched to Goldcast, they saw their engagement rate grow 10X.

As the Digital Marketing Manager at Birdeye, Justin is always looking for ways to keep his audience engaged. One way he does this is by creating a robust webinar and digital events strategy. “I manage our webinar program from beginning to end, as well as our virtual events that happen once or twice a year,” said Justin. “Those usually include 20 total sessions over the course of two days.”

When he first started at Birdeye, they were using a “legacy webinar platform that's more geared towards webinars.” Justin quickly realized the lack of engagement in their webinars and events was due to this platform’s limited engagement options. There weren’t a lot of ways for the audience to interact with the content beyond asking questions. Webinars might get four or five questions, sometimes even less.

“For every webinar with our old platform, we had to create canned questions because we weren't sure if we were going to get questions from the audience. Now that I have Goldcast, I have to allocate more time to questions in the chat section and engaging with the audience because they are so much more engaged.”

It was difficult for the Birdeye team to measure their webinar success because the engagement options and tracking were so limited. They couldn’t report on the level of engagement on a per attendee basis, which stunted their ability to create robust follow-up strategies.

Setting up their webinars was also a challenge with their legacy webinar platform. Birdeye runs a wide assortment of webinars and events spanning multiple audiences and time zones. Running this many webinars and events with various moving pieces was very difficult within their old webinar platform. Justin explains:

When it came time to run their two-day, 20-session virtual event, they weren’t able to host it on their webinar platform due to feature and functionality limitations. So they had to use yet another piece of software in order to fully execute on their event strategy. This led them to look for a single event platform that could boost engagement not only for their webinars, but large-scale virtual events as well.

When Justin and the team at Birdeye found Goldcast, they knew it would be the best fit for both their webinars and large virtual events. Justin shares:

Once they decided to go with Goldcast as their event platform, onboarding was quick and easy. “The usability of the platform is great. I believe when we onboarded, I had maybe one training session with someone from Goldcast, but then after that, it was so user friendly it was easy for me to figure it out myself,” said Justin.

The first event Birdeye used Goldcast for was a virtual summit. The event included a mix of 20 live and pre-recorded sessions across two days and attracted 3,500 registrants.

Thanks to the platform’s ease of use and support from the Goldcast team, the event went off without a hitch! “The Goldcast team was able to help us set up our first ever virtual event that we've ever done at Birdeye. The Goldcast team was amazing during that time,” said Justin.

When asked about what Goldcast features he thinks have contributed to the success of Birdeye’s webinar and event strategy, he highlighted the following:

Auto calendar holds and emails “One of the big things with Goldcast is that when you sign up for a webinar, it gets added to your calendar automatically. I think that placeholder has been a massive driver for us when it comes to attendee rates and engagement.”

Robust attendee engagement analytics “The analytics are super easy to navigate and it gives you deeper insights than you would expect. We're actually able to get a little bit deeper and identify specific attendees who may be a hotter lead than others.”

Customizable event branding “The layout is modern. It's clean and it's super customizable. We're able to brand it with our own colors and logos. I think that all makes it easier for the audience to pay attention.”

Content Lab “I’ve loved being able to use Goldcast’s AI to create a blog post and event summary. I also enjoy getting the AI generated clips where it identifies interesting parts of the transcript and it clips that video out for you.”

After just a few months of using Goldcast, Justin was floored by the results. “When we switched to Goldcast, I didn't realize that we could get THAT much engagement during an event,” he shared.

In their previous platform, 15 engagements across Q&A and chat would qualify as a successful webinar. Now, the team averages more than 100!

10X audience engagement 50% attendance rate across live and on-demand 3X the questions from audience

It’s not just the chat and Q&A features keeping their attendees engaged. Justin also believes the documents tab plays a big role in their engagement rates as well. But it’s not just boosting engagement rates! It’s also playing a role in helping sales understand where each event attendee is in their customer journey:

For every webinar they produce, Birdeye adds a couple of guides, blogs, and webinar recordings all relating to the topic to the Documents tab. This helps in two ways: It increases engagement during the webinar and allows the sales team to better personalize follow-up.

“We're able to see exactly who clicked which resource, how many times that resource was clicked, how many different resources a person clicked on. We're able to identify those really engaged accounts,” shared Justin.

“And it keeps their interest longer. So now instead of just sitting in the webinar for 30 minutes, they're now on our website, and they just downloaded a guide. And that helps push that customer journey a little bit further, and definitely helps us identify the leads that are ready.”

Birdeye has also seen an impact on their internal event processes since moving to Goldcast, especially when it comes to post-event operations. From getting the on-demand recordings out quicker to being able to snip clips for social in record time using Content Lab, Birdeye has seen great time savings by investing in Goldcast:

The Birdeye team is already finding great value in using Content Lab, Goldcast’s AI video repurposing solution that turns webinars, events, and podcasts into snackable, multi-modal content.

They’re currently using it to identify video clips and craft blog posts, but they’re planning to use it for sales enablement as well:

Since the team is investing so much time and effort into their webinars, Justin sees webinar repurposing as an important piece of their content strategy going forward. “When it comes to marketing, especially with a webinar, there's a lot of work that goes into it. And generally ours are about an hour long and that's a lot of content."

"If you create, produce, and promote a webinar for just one hour of content and then you leave it there, it's kind of a waste,” he remarked. “What's great about Content Lab is that it allows us to make more content out of that webinar, like a blog and video clips.”

The Birdeye team has proven that when it comes to audience engagement, finding the right virtual event platform makes all the difference. “I would say we're getting over 50% attendance between live and on-demand. That, plus the improved engagement rates, has been night and day from our previous platform.”