Boosting your Video Engagement Score
Marie Hillion shares her insights into boosting your video engagement score, adapting your marketing strategy to the mindsets of the region you’re targeting, and why it's important to keep your recurring audience engaged.
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Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Mein Studios.
And today, we are joined by a special guest, Marie.
How are you?
>> Hello, Ian.
Thank you, great.
Thank you so much.
>> Excited to have you on the show, excited to chat,
live storm, and all of your marketing background,
and the cool stuff that the company is doing
to promote live storm to everyone around the world.
So let's get into it.
What was your first job in marketing?
>> Yes, well, I don't have a marketing background,
so that's the first thing.
I actually have a master's in French and German also,
very different.
And I started in marketing in demand
and doing SEO offsite.
It was a student job back in the days.
And I worked for Trivago,
you know, the hotel company.
And I was my task as a student
was basically to build backlinks for Trivago.
So the way I was doing it was already, you know,
it was good, but people before me were not doing it very nicely.
And three months into the job after building those backlinks,
funny story, we got a Google penalty.
It was harsh.
And then after three months, I spent basically six months
cleaning all of our backlinks portfolio,
disabling a lot of domains.
And yeah, this is how I started in marketing.
And afterwards, the SEO offsite department
merged with the blog and social media departments.
And it created the content marketing department
and then afterwards, it was responsible for partnerships.
>> So flash forward to today.
Tell me a little bit about your role at live storm.
>> Yes, so I joined live storm in September 2020.
So live storm is a video engagement platform for meetings
and for webinars.
And, you know, I joined the company
and one month and a half afterwards,
the company raised a series B.
And suddenly, we were hiring a lot of people.
So I really managed to, and I really got the chance
to build the marketing from the ground up.
And now we are currently nine people, including me.
And our marketing team focuses mainly on the top of the funnel.
So everything from, you know, PR, social media, SEO,
content marketing, religion, marketing,
and also customer marketing.
>> Tell me about like where the company is at in terms
like how many customers do you know how?
I know you can't share exactly, but like how many customers,
how big is the, how much is your reach and all that?
>> So live storm is a French company,
but we focus mainly on two main markets.
So Emile, France within it, obviously, and the US.
We have currently 5,000 customers, you know, from SMB to enterprise
and our customers are very different.
So a big chunk of our customers are SaaS companies,
but we also have many different customers
in the healthcare industry, in finance, in government,
and administration.
We have customers like, you know, US Botanical Garden
or City of West Hollywood.
So it's very different, very different types of customers
and organizations that are using Live Storm,
because we have so many different use cases.
It goes from, you know, marketing webinar,
customers training, sales calls, products, demos.
And so that's why our customers are so different.
>> Yeah, indeed.
Okay, let's get to our next segment, the Trust Tree.
This is where we go and feel honest and trusted,
and you can share those deepest, darkest,
demand-gen secrets.
Who buys your product?
Who is the buying committee for the company?
>> Yeah, so we have many different types of personas.
So, you know, originally it was mainly the marketing team.
So marketers, sea levels, marketing directors.
So it wants to use a platform like Live Storm
to organize webinars.
Do, you know, webinars for their marketing activities,
to reach out to their prospects, to generate leads.
But as the product evolves, our persona also evolves.
And now we also have customers that are in customer success teams
that are using Live Storm for customer training,
or, you know, for customer onboarding.
We also have sales team and sales leaders
that want to use Live Storm for their recurring product demo,
whether it's live or on demand,
or for the sales calls as well,
to reach out to their prospects and do meetings
in a very structured manner.
You know, to immediately have the recording,
immediately have email sequences that it can set out,
and not only for to send out reminders,
but also to send out follow-ups afterwards.
>> And obviously with this, the rise of this kind of,
you know, digital first buying motion and all that sort of stuff,
meetings, webinars are more important than ever.
And so, but there's a little bit of a different sort of like,
you know, use case there, buyer use case for, you know,
on demand webinars, automated webinars,
things like that versus virtual meetings or virtual events.
Can you kind of talk through like how you think about marketing
those two different things?
>> Yeah, so I mean, it's the beauty and maybe also the curse of Live Storm,
because there's so many use cases to, you know, to market.
That makes it very, very interesting.
But at the same time, there's so many that you,
there's so many different personas and so many different prospects
that you can try to reach.
So obviously it's going to be very different,
and you're going to address very different needs.
If you talk about Live Storm for meetings,
and if you talk about Live Storm for webinars.
And so there's different ways of presenting the products.
And sometimes it's a bit different, you know,
we all obviously have sometimes the same features,
but we present them in a different way,
whether it's for webinars,
on demand webinars or telemedic webinars,
or whether it's for meetings.
And recently, actually, we really did a big project,
and we worked on that a lot on how we should,
you know, present Live Storms in terms of features,
in terms of positioning to all different persona,
and based on their different use cases,
because sometimes it's not always the same,
you know, sometimes you have very differentiating features
that are very important for webinars,
but that are not relevant at all for meetings.
And, you know, you always have to balance a little bit the two,
and make sure that you know your customers very well,
and that you also know right away, right from the batch,
what they want, so this is for the sales team,
but also that you adapt a little bit your targeting.
And obviously, you know, within those different sort of use cases
with kind of the different buyers,
those decision makers, you know,
sit at different areas of the C-suite.
Does your sales and marketing change,
you know, based off of, or your go-to-marker motion,
change as you have, you know, different levels of
those buyers, like how many folks are buying this,
you know, kind of that traditional top-down approach
versus kind of the bottom-up or product-led,
or, you know, that type of approach?
Yeah, so this is something that we're actually working a lot
at the moment.
So we have a different approach to reach those prospects.
So the approach that I'm focusing mostly on
is the in-bound marketing approach, but we also do ad-bound,
and a lot of our customers are also, you know,
purchasing livestock through a self-serve motion.
So it says, you know, like, there's many different ways to do it.
And what I mainly focus on is the in-bound marketing strategy.
So our goal is to produce a lot of interesting content
that is appealing, you know, to those personas
based on, you know, talking about many different use cases.
And we share that content on our blog.
We share that content through email marketing campaigns.
We collaborate.
We launched a lot of co-marketing campaigns as well,
working with other partners, other companies
focusing on the same personas to make sure that we reach
another audience that we can tap into another database.
So this is what my team focuses a lot on.
And we got a lot of great success because, you know,
this is mainly an approach that is free.
So obviously you can do a lot of data activities,
but at the very beginning, you can collaborate with other companies
and really get a lot of results and really use their database,
use their content as well to produce something together
and something that works for both audience.
So through that, we acquire a lot of leads.
And obviously we worked as well a lot to make sure
that the leads are nurtured for marketing automation processes.
And we make sure to score them, you know,
before passing them on to the sales team so they can really work them
and reach out to the prospects that make more sense.
Okay, let's get to our next segment, the playbook.
This is where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that help
you win.
You play to win the game.
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Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play, it's just play it.
Can you share your three uncuttable budget items?
Well, it's always hard to cut things, but I would say if I have to pick three,
as I said, we rely a lot on content and we work a lot with
content agencies and translation agencies,
Livestorm, as we have a website in three different languages in English,
French, and Spanish.
And to produce that content for the blog, to produce those reports,
all of these sales content, we work with those content agencies.
And we have somebody internally that, you know, play that works as, you know,
the leader kind of of the orchestra to make sure that everything grows smoothly
and that we produce the content that really fits to our prospects.
So I think this would be the first one, because it's really at the core of our
strategy.
The second one would be the pay budget.
So obviously we push our content a lot on LinkedIn, on social, on Google Ads.
We rely a lot as well for to drive the self-serve motions that I was talking
about,
so to make sure that we get, you know, demos and signups to our products.
And finally, the third one, I would say, everything's touching to the brand.
So at Livestorm, maybe a particularity that we have is that we have a very
strong brand team
internally. A lot of companies at AllSays, I believe, work with external
agencies or work
with external freelancers. But we have this team internally and even if it's
not a budget per se,
but it's really teams that we really rely on a lot to create videos, to create
visuals,
to make our website very appealing. And I think that's something that's, you
know,
is very important to us to drive the brand as well in a category, webinar
software, video
conferencing markets that is very, very competitive.
I want to go into the content piece a little bit first. You mentioned
translating into multiple
languages. This is like a huge challenge for any team that does content to be
able to translate,
obviously, you know, having a presence in France and in US and Germany makes
sense.
So of course you would do that. But how difficult is that? How do you
prioritize that? How do you
prioritize which is in which language? And are there any differences between
from a language
perspective in terms of how cultures are consuming different types of content?
Yes, 100%. And great question. So prioritization is the key. You said it.
So, you know, even though Lifestyle is a French company and I am French, or
production language
at the very start is English. So all of the content that we produce at the very
, very beginning is
always made in English. And then we translate it, if it makes sense, in French
and in Spanish.
And to do that, you've mentioned indeed that there's differences between
countries and even
between countries for sure and also between languages. And for me, when I
started
a Lifestyle, it was very important to have people that know a lot to the US
markets, you know,
that are not all the time French. And my team is very diverse. You know, we
have two Americans
working. You know, we have some people that are French, a person that is native
Spanish,
native from Spain. So I think this is very important to also know the language,
yes, but also have
that perspective on how things perceive and done in a certain country. And for
us, this was the US.
And in terms of prioritization, you cannot do everything. So, you know, there's
a limited amount
of resources. So as you said, it's very important for us to prioritize. So
usually when we create
a content, we do it first in English. And if it performs, if it's a web page,
if we see that it
ranks well, then we are going to translate it in French and in Spanish. But our
first language
is always English. We tested that language, you know, because we have the most
manpower or
weapon power. And then we reproduce in other regions and in other languages.
But that being said,
sometimes you have to adapt. So some of the certain campaigns that we're
running with certain
partners, co-marketing partners in the US, we are not doing them in France
because we find better,
more local partners to run them with. Yeah, so that that's super interesting.
The kind of
making sure that you're partnering with the right folks, making sure that, you
know, all of that,
all of that content is being put in front of the right people. Are there any
other things like,
or any piece of advice that you would give if someone is looking to translate
their content?
Yes, I would say so, so as we already discussed, prioritization,
make sure also as well that the content is adapted. So obviously you can
translate what is even
better is to localize. So when you talk about studies that you've done in the
US, let's say,
try to maybe have the same numbers or the same numbers or the same study made
for the countries
or for the language that you want to focus on. So because some countries and
France is one of them,
they really like to have, you know, content that is very tailored to the
country. So if you run a
survey in the US, it's great for maybe the US audience and maybe it's going to
be as interesting
if you translate it, but then try to adapt it for your market because
translation is not everything.
It's also localization and making sure that you know the habit, you know,
more important in certain regions. For example, what I've noticed, I worked
previously at HubSpot
for the French market and even in Europe, you know, like the way to do things
and to do business
is very much different between France and Germany, for example. In Germany,
they often are very,
very careful about security, about data protection, about GDPR. And France, it
's also important,
maybe a bit less than Germany. In France, what is very important is, you know,
to, you know,
maybe have French software or they pay a lot more attention to that. And maybe
that's something
that should adapt as well in your messaging and try to not have the same
approach, not adapt only
the language, but also try to adapt to the mindsets of the region, the
countries that you're going
to enter in and that you're going to target. I love it. Obviously, you all
specialize in webinars.
Do you have any webinar tips for us? Any best advice for webinars?
Yes. So, Lifestyle is a video engagement platform. So, it's all in the name. I
would say engagement
is key. So, you really, when you want to do a webinar, no matter the platform,
make sure that,
obviously, you know, for the promotion, you have a great registration page, you
showcase,
you know, all your speakers, that it's custom design in the colors and the
phones of your
company, make sure that you send several reminders after before, sorry, before
doing the webinars.
So, what we usually recommend is one day before, one hour before the webinar
starts.
And then during the webinar, what is very, very important is to make it as
engaging as possible.
At Lifestyle, we love doing panels because usually that works very well and
that requires maybe
as a little bit less of preparation, a little bit less work on sites. We
definitely recommend
doing that, but make it as interactive as possible. Start with a, you know,
start by playing a video,
make sure that you launch several pools during the webinar, make sure that you
ask your audience
to ask questions several times. We also love doing fireside sites, either at
the beginning of the
end, you know, it's a great way to, especially if you have guest speakers to
kind of bring a nice
little touch, you know, unlock the mood, make everyone participate as well in a
fun way.
And at the end, you also should measure, you know, what was your attendance
rate, but also what was
your engagement score. We recently launched a new metric, so we call it the
video engagement score,
to measure how, engage with your audience during your webinar. So not only how
long
if they attended, so the attendance rate, but also how long this, this stage,
you know,
it is asking you questions, you do post any messages on the chat, you know, it
is a vote to any
poll that you've published, because in the end, this is really what the events
organizer wants to
have. It's great to, you know, do a webinar, have people join in, but during
the webinar, if you
don't see any questions coming in, if you don't see any interactions, it's
going to be very boring,
as well for the organizer, but as well as for the audience, I think they really
want to live an
experience and be able to participate to the discussion and not only listen to
somebody. It's really,
it should be almost like a two-way discussion, even though there's usually a
presenter, since it's
the audience at the other end. You talked about like hyper localization, things
like that, obviously,
you know, that stuff plays super well. I'm curious, people oftentimes are
trying to get like the
biggest webinar attendance, but I'm curious, you know, with personalization and
certain things,
you mentioned, you know, by country, it makes a huge difference, that if
focusing on smaller groups
of webinars and really kind of niche down into a smaller group or persona is a
winning strategy as well.
Yes, what we believe at Life Storm, it's great to have events with a lot of
participants, but
what we've noticed is with our customers, with ourselves, that the success and
the value of
webinar is in the fact that it's recurring, you know. So it's great if you're
doing, you know, one webinar
every six months, but it's not going to help a lot your regeneration strategies
, not going to help
a lot your brand, but what's going to help is when it's going to be recurring
and your audiences,
you know, a little bit like a podcast, they know that, okay, the next episode
is coming in, you know,
they can, you know, follow along and have different perspectives and every week
different strategies.
And this is what I think should be done with the webinar, make sure that it's
not about the size
of the audience, but it's about the recurrence and also how people are engaged,
you know, are they
asking questions, are they asking follow-ups afterwards, do they want to know
more about the topics?
And if yes, it means that your audience is very engaged and that's, you know,
you already have,
maybe if they ask questions, the topic for your next webinar. So I think for me
, it's not about
necessarily the size of the audience or the quantity, but mostly about the
quality of the audience and
how engaged they are. So one of the, obviously, the brilliant thing about webin
ars is that you can
have that level of engagement versus kind of like the more on-demand content
where you take a webinar
and have it on demand or podcast series, video series, all that sort of stuff.
And I think that,
like, we're in that kind of mode now where you want to be able to offer both,
you want someone to be
able to engage easily with webinar content and create, you know, less friction
so they can gauge
easily and then you want the on-demand content for them to be able to consume
it wherever they want.
I'm curious, like, do you have any, you know, best practices in terms of
or information around usage in that way? Is that the same thing that you're
seeing? Is that,
you know, for people who want to engage, they can easily do it one way or on-
demand and the other way?
I mean, obviously that's where we're going. We've, where we've been for a while
, but it seems like
that's pretty critical for any type of content. So obviously life is always the
most engaging,
but I would say that it depends on the use cases. I think that, well, it's
anyway on
livestock, you know, all of the webinars that you can, you do life can be
turned on-demand afterwards,
so it's great because you're creating the content once and then people can, you
know,
registers and even see it afterwards. So, you know, that's a perk of it. But
sometimes on-demand
makes more sense, for example, for product demos, maybe sometimes, you know,
you don't want to do
the same product demo over and over every week, especially if you have a small
cell team. But maybe
on your website, you can AMP, you can AMP, you know, on-demand product demo,
and people can,
you know, see your product, understand what they can get out of it, understand
your services,
and that would be a great gain of time for your cell team. Another example of
that would be
customer training or employee training, you know. Sometimes on-demand is a
really great medium,
and you don't need to be live, you don't need to be there, especially now where
there's so many
people working remotely, so many people that are able to work in different time
zones.
Maybe sometimes, you know, on-demand is the best fit, especially for certain
use cases.
All right, let's get to our next segment. The dust-up, where we talk about
healthy tension,
whether that's with your board, your sales team, your competitors, or anyone
else,
have you had a memorable dust-up in your career, Marie?
Yeah, I think there's a few. The most recent one that I think can be
interesting to share
dates back to, it was at Lifestone, dates back to November, December last year,
and I remember it because we worked with the marketing team on a webpage. So,
you know,
at Lifestone, there's so many different features that appealed to so many
different use cases,
and we wanted to feature all of those features on a website pages, you know,
and they were categorized,
they were very well presented, and it was very easy to browse through and
understand the platform
very easily. And we worked on that with the content marketing team, and after
just before,
you know, when we had the preview link and it was ready to go live, the CEO and
CPU saw it,
and they had a lot of feedback. So, oh, you know, I would have chosen this
feature instead of this
one. Why are you not choosing this feature rather than this one? And in this
case, it makes more sense
to use this, you know, very, very, you know, important features, and you know,
you will receive
a lot of opinions, and a lot of them were contradicting as well. So, I was not
really sure, you know,
what to do, and so we decided to publish the page. The project was done. We
decided to publish the
page anyway, but basically we spend a lot of time afterwards, you know, having,
I spend a lot of
time afterwards having those discussions with, especially the CPU, at least, oh
, hold on there,
because we never really had the discussion of, you know, what features should
we present, and that
goes back to what we discussed at the very beginning, what features should we
present,
whether it's a meeting or whether it's a webinar, you know, it changes as well,
depending on your use
cases, and we really made this deep work of going through all of our features,
all of our features,
making sure that there was a consistency in the naming of the features,
something that we didn't
have as well, you know, that we were describing it the same way, whether it was
, you know, in the
marketing department, in the sales department, in the product department, and
we created a big
feature database where every feature was referenced, was in there, and they all
had the same name,
the whole, each feature had a name, each feature had a description, and, you
know, they were categorized
by importance, and it really helped us to, you know, make sure that we promote
our products in a way
that match to what our customers, our prospects are looking for, depending on
their use cases,
depending on if they're looking for meetings or if they're looking for webinars
, and yeah, we
basically did the work all over again, but I think it was very helpful because
in in the end,
this work has been helpful for the brand team to know how to represent each
feature for the product
team, obviously, but also for the sales team, so yeah, it was a lot of work,
but in the end, I think
very, very useful for all of the company. All right, let's get to our final
segment, quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers, just like how quickly you can talk
to someone
at Qualified, if you go to Qualified.com, Qualified Prospects are on your
website right now,
and you can talk to them quickly with Qualified, go to Qualified.com to learn
more, quick and easy,
just like these questions, Marie, are you ready? Excellent. Number one, do you
have a hidden
talent or skill that is not on your resume? Oh, good one. Well, I'm writing a
book at the moment,
so it's not on my resume, not a lot of people know it, but you know, I'm trying
at least,
I don't know if it's a talent yet, but I'm trying. Yeah, what are you writing
about?
Well, nothing about marketing, so that's a good break from the day to day, but
I'm writing a
filler novel. Fantastic. Well, we'll be cheering you on and we'll be ready to
read once a son.
Do you have a favorite book, podcast, TV show or something like that that you'd
recommend?
TV show, I watched recently the dropout, you know, that explains this whole
story with
disabled homes. It was very interesting. It was, yeah, I definitely recommend
it, you know, it's
yeah, very interesting to see all her fraud process and what happens and yeah,
I really recommend it.
Is there a non-marketing hobby that you have that might make you a better
marketer?
Well, I do yoga, so I do yoga. I don't know how it helps me, but that's
definitely a hobby.
I think, you know, so I'm working from home. So a lot of people at Life's don't
know
working from home, we have this working remote, so it's remote policies in a
while now.
And during lunch break, I'm doing yoga. I think it helps me really to
disconnect, so it's only,
you know, 20 minutes. But I think that I don't know if it makes me a better
marketer, but
definitely I think it makes me a better manager. You know, I have some time to
disconnect, sometimes
simply like tune out or make something different during the day and then go
back in the afternoon
very refreshed. If you weren't in marketing at all, what do you think you'd be
doing?
I think so. I studied law. Maybe I'd be working in a company. I really liked a
work law. I find
that the view is very interesting because it really has an impact on people.
You know, work is, I guess,
I'd say 60% of the day or five days of a week. And I always find it very
interesting to
see different cases where people, you know, were in certain situation and, yeah
, work law was
very interesting. So maybe I'd be doing that. Maybe I'd be back in France and
doing that.
But I'm very happy at the moment in marketing.
And what would be your best advice for a first time, had a marketing trying to
figure out their
demand-gen strategy? So I don't think that's a secret sauce, but I would say
two things.
The first one is simply try, try, test things out. You know, there's no right
or wrong. It's always
great to test things out and try to find a certain way to launch a project or
to think big, essentially.
And the second one that is maybe opposed to that is it would be
try to focus because marketing always put in so many directions. Focus is very
important. So maybe
spend 20% on your time, you know, working on different and big projects and 80%
of your times of making
sure that your team is focused and working on very sharply and really has a
concrete direction.
Awesome. Marie, thanks so much for joining the show. We really appreciate it.
Any,
any final thoughts, anything to plug? Obviously our listeners go to livestream.
co
to learn more, such a cool company. And obviously webinars are, if anything,
only gaining steam
and obviously more than just webinars, engaging, meeting and webinars. Any, any
final thoughts?
No, you said it all. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm well happy to discuss, to
connect, to exchange
strategy. But yeah, thank you so much for having me on the show. Awesome.
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