Goldcast

What has Stacy Combest, the Manager of Webinar Marketing at Hootsuite, learned after seven years in the role? “It’s all about the experience,” she said. When she began searching for a new webinar platform, Goldcast won her over thanks to its powerful event engagement tools and branding. Four years later, the platform’s ability to boost attendance, improve webinar SEO, grow on-demand viewership, and repurpose content has turned her into a raving Goldcast fan.

Four years ago, Stacy was feeling let down by her legacy webinar provider. “It got to the point that it just didn't feel updated. It didn't feel like there were any improvements being made,” she said. Her team also felt like their needs were not being met, even after being a customer for more than 3 years. “​​We went from feeling like we were valued and appreciated to just checking a block with them. And so that's really what stemmed the idea to look for something new.”

The final straw was when “they doubled our contract without any real improvements with it.” This frustrating experience led the team to look into webinar platform alternatives, including Goldcast. The team first became aware of Goldcast after attending an event on the platform.

What stood out about the Goldcast platform to the Hootsuite team was the branding and engagement tools. At the time, Zoom was becoming a common webinar choice, but it wasn’t fitting Stacy’s vision for Hootsuite webinars.

“The first thing that stood out to me was that Goldcast was really fresh and modern, and it didn't feel like Zoom. I was very picky in that aspect. So I wanted something that felt fresh and modern and not like Zoom, and that's what I felt when I came to Goldcast.”

Hootsuite became a Goldcast customer in 2021 and has exponentially grown its webinar program since.

Goldcast’s ability to create modern, high-quality event experiences has helped Hootsuite build a powerful webinar program with a large audience. Some of their webinars have thousands of attendees! Stacy believes the environment Goldcast creates for Hootsuite’s webinars plays a role in their rapid audience growth.

Over the years, Stacy has come to love quite a few Goldcast features, especially the ones within the event experience. She believes they have played a significant role in growing Hootsuite’s webinar attendance rate. “As a whole, our attendance has gone up 62%. We were sitting at 25% attendance before we came to Goldcast. Now we're averaging 40%, and a lot of that has to do with the experience.”

Here are just a few Goldcast features have been game-changers for her and the Hootsuite audience:

Engaging Webinar Features

Building an engaging webinar that makes attendees feel involved is key to Stacy’s webinar strategy. To achieve this, she loves to:

• Use the Q&A feature
• Push chat messages to stage
• Bring people onto stage
• Offer a survey to get her feedback

“Our audience really, really likes this tool,” shared Stacy. “Goldcast as a virtual event platform offers all the bells and whistles, which you can use with webinars to really enrich those webinar experiences.” Here’s a bit more on how Stacy uses the platform to offer audience an engaging and interactive experience:

Embedded Surveys Stacy loves that Goldcast can host a survey within the platform. “Before Goldcast, it was really hard to get survey responses because we had to use SurveyMonkey, and that meant they had to click out of it. And I would get maybe a 10% if that. Now I'm seeing upwards to 50% of our attendees will respond.”

Related: 17 Virtual Event Survey Questions to Get the Best Feedback

Content Lab Content Lab is Goldcast’s AI video repurposing solution that turns webinars, events, and podcasts into snackable, multi-modal content. Stacy loves how quickly Content Lab can take a webinar and automatically craft a blog post, transcript, video snippets, and much more. It’s played a role in Hootsuite’s massive SEO growth, which we’ll cover in more detail below. 

Did someone say Smart Events? Get the scoop on this powerful new feature that simplifies the entire webinar process, ensuring they deliver lasting impact, with minimal effort.

Building great experiences and content that drives eyeballs is core to Hootsuite’s webinar strategy. With Goldcast as their webinar streaming and repurposing platform, they’re able to achieve these goals. Here’s just a glance at their overall webinar program stats:

Hootsuite’s Event Success Metrics Using Goldcast

• 62% increase in attendance rate
• 150% growth in organic traffic to webinar pages
• 38% increase in on-demand views

Let’s dive into each of these areas to learn more.

Stacy knows how powerful content can be when it comes to SEO and generating website traffic. That’s why she’s invested in the idea of embedding a blog post crafted from a webinar onto the webinar page. But as a team of one, she doesn’t have the time available to invest in a long content creation cycle. So the idea couldn’t be executed previously to using Goldcast.

But now, thanks to Content Lab, Stacy can use AI to take her blog creation workflow from multiple days to just an hour or two. She explains more here:

All Stacy has to do now is use the blog feature within Content Lab to auto-generate the content from Hootsuite’s webinar and tweak it from there. “The SEO traffic was 150% above what it was for webinars before because there just wasn't enough copy on the webinar pages to really drive that SEO. So those blogs really, really drove a ton of SEO for us,” explained Stacy.

Above is an overview of what these on-demand pages look like, check out the live example for Hootsuite's webinar 7 Unexpected Benefits of Social Listening here.

It’s the tale as old as time: A webinar goes to on-demand mode and it gets left in the digital dust. But with Stacy’s Content Lab created blog post strategy, she’s found a way to avoid this common issue.

That organic traffic they’ve generated onto their webinar pages isn’t going to waste. In fact, it’s led to a 38% increase in on-demand views! 

Stacy also attributes Goldcast’s engaging and interactive webinar features to their on-demand growth as well. “They keep coming back for the live ones, and I think that also helped our on-demand views as well because they know the experience is gonna be so rich for them.”

Stacy is just getting started when it comes to optimizing the on-demand experience. She’s excited to begin using Goldcast’s Smart Events to further improve Hootsuite’s on-demand webinar pages. Not only do they provide a better video player look and feel, but they also provide better access to data:

“The embedding feature alone, I feel like it's going to be a game changer for us because we are very strict on keeping with our own webpages. So being able to take what we have in Goldcast, move it over to our site, and still get these really rich experiences is going to be awesome,” shared Stacy. “It's going to allow me to be even more creative in what we're able to do next year.”

At the end of the day, Stacy’s mission is to create powerful experiences for the Hootsuite audience that keep them coming back. “Our average minutes watched went up 76% when we moved to Goldcast,” said Stacy.

“That has to do with the overall experience that our attendees are getting through this platform. The experience that they're getting is what's bringing them back. If they have a crappy experience, we're going to lose them. Goldcast has really allowed us to immerse our attendees into what we're saying and not just talking at them.”