• 48:03
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Industrial Marketing Summit, Aya Takase, webinars, technical audiences, scientific instruments, X-ray analysis, audience engagement, presentation skills, binge-worthy webinars, marketing strategy, audience understanding, webinar tips, content repurposing, audience polling, webinar success.
SPEAKERS
Speaker 1, Damon Pistulka, Aya Takase, Curt Anderson, Speaker 2
Damon Pistulka 00:03
All right, everyone, it is Friday, and you know what that means. It is time for stop being the best kept secret. And I am excited today. I am Damon Pistulka, co host of the show. That pretty gentleman over there is Kurt Anderson. And then we have Aya takase here with us today, and we’re going to be talking about the industrial marketing summit 2026, and what Aya is going to be talking about there. Kurt, I am so excited, because I as a scientist, and it’s always fun people. So Kurt, take it away.
Curt Anderson 00:38
Man. Damon, this dude, I am so excited, man. Like I didn’t sleep a wink. Like, I don’t you get any sleep last night? I was, like, super fired up for this. I just, I’ll catch up on sleep over the weekend. But what an absolute honor, privilege. I thank you for joining us today. I know you’re super busy. We’re going to kick things off. I have a couple questions for you. I did you get a good night’s sleep last night? By the way, how’s your
Aya Takase 00:59
How was your sleep? I did not enough, but I did
Curt Anderson 01:03
never enough. Alright, so let’s, let’s, let’s rock and roll. I Are you sitting down? Are you ready to get started? Are you good? I’m ready. Here we go. Okay, my first question for you now, to my understanding, you are born and raised in Japan. Do I have that correct? Yes. Okay, when you were a little girl growing up. You were a little girl growing up, which wasn’t that long ago, it’s a long time ago. Was your hero? Who did you look up to? Who just showered you with unconditional love? Who was your hero when you were a little girl growing up in Japan?
Aya Takase 01:35
My grandfather, your grandfather,
Curt Anderson 01:38
curious minds. Would love to know more. Please do share
Aya Takase 01:41
so my grandfather was an engineer and mechanical engineer, actually, and he was pretty much the only science and tech person in my family, and nobody else shared my love for science but him, yeah, yeah. And I learned a lot from him. We would do like, a math homework together, science homework together. Awesome, yeah,
Curt Anderson 02:11
he was my hero. He was your hero. And what and grandpa’s name, please
Aya Takase 02:16
to say, takase.
Curt Anderson 02:18
Nice, awesome. All right, well, big shout out to grandpa. Absolutely love it. So now you just had that fire burning inside you. Now you’re, though, you’re a marketer today. Do I have that, right? You’re a scientist by trade. Can you please share a little bit on your education, your background? Damon, you know when I was talking about, like, I just, I love when we’re when I will speak for you, when I’m the dumbest guy in the room. Like, right now, I’m the I’m definitely the dumbest guy in the room. I share a little bit on your education, your background.
Aya Takase 02:45
Okay, so I went to school in Japan, and I went to Tokyo University of Science to study physics. I did undergraduate and graduate. I wanted to go for PhD back then. This is, this is going to date me, but more than 20 years ago, but I didn’t, and actually I couldn’t, for a reason. I hope that some people can resonate with this and get some hope from this. But this is more than 20 years ago in Japan, and I’m a woman, and when I was trying to get to the PhD program, those people around me who cared about me said that, don’t do it. You’re a woman. If you get a PhD, you will never get a job in Japan. They’re not going to hire you. That’s not a very popular position to be in if you want to get a job. And I didn’t want to stay in academic world forever, though. I wanted to study physics a bit more, so I gave up on PhD and got a job at Riga KU but I always wanted to get PhD. It’s just a title, probably, but everybody else around me had it, and I really want to get one someday, and I actually did couple years ago, I kept my full time job, but there was a course at Osaka University that accepted some full time business people to pursue PhD. So I got PhD in Engineering there. Wow.
Curt Anderson 04:28
No, I have to say, so your title Head of Global Marketing and Communications, you’re probably one of the only individuals on the planet that has a PhD as a head of marketing communications.
Aya Takase 04:40
I doubt it. So.
Curt Anderson 04:42
So if you don’t mind moving forward on the show, we’re going to call you Dr Aya. How’s that so well, you’ve earned it. Congratulations. What an accountant, and I tell you, Damon, I know that speaks close to your heart. Your mother has her PhD. And so you know, as proud girl dads, we’re both girl dads, and we love our mother. Dearly. You are an incredible inspiration as a woman fighting relentlessly to get that PhD. So how about a round of applause for IO
Damon Pistulka 05:08
Thank you. Thank you. Well, and then a PhD in engineering. I mean, yeah, it’s just that is, yeah, I
Aya Takase 05:14
want to say that, you know, whatever your gender is, it’s never too late. It’s never too late. Well, too late, yeah.
Curt Anderson 05:20
What an inspiration. So, all right, tell us a little bit about the company, and how do you and in a few minutes, I’m going to pull up the website so we can share with folks what you guys do, but just share with everybody. How does rugaku Right? Am I saying that right? Yes. How, how do you and your company make the world a better place? What are you guys doing?
Aya Takase 05:38
Okay, I love that question. So regaco is a global manufacturer of scientific instruments, and most of the products we make are based on the X ray analysis, either X ray diffraction, fluorescent analysis, but we do electron beam and laser based analysis instruments too. We are going to have our 75th anniversary next year. We’ve been around for a long time. The business started in Japan now, 74 years ago as a pretty small like a mom and pop, you know, machine shop making little instruments. But now on, we have, I think, over 2000 employees globally. Wow. And the way we try to contribute to the act of making the world a better place is to provide scientific analysis, I guess, capabilities to either industrial users or academic researchers so that they can measure whatever they need to measure, to get the answers they need and make the decisions they need to make, to Make things, fix things. We measure anything from, you know, food, peanut butter, pharmaceutical products, cynical nectar chips.
Damon Pistulka 07:09
Yeah, it’s so it’s so incredible that you can cover the wide range of industries because of the level of detail you’re going down to with your analysis.
Aya Takase 07:20
That’s a good way to put it. Yeah, yeah.
Damon Pistulka 07:22
Because you know, at the it’s like, before we got on, you’re talking about, we look at the molecular analysis, or at the molecular level, if I remember right, and everything, when you look at it, that is very important, whether you’re making steel or you’re making paint, or you’re making pharmacy or food or everything. It comes down to that chips, as we talked about, super cool.
Aya Takase 07:45
What you said is very true, because no matter what you observe as a behaviors of certain material, it’s coming from how those atoms and molecules are arranged inside of it.
Damon Pistulka 07:58
So, yeah, yeah. Super cool. So what, what is the, I mean, this has to be incredibly interesting, the applications that you get into. So what are some of the challenges without, you know, doing anything you can’t talk about, well, what are some of the cool challenges you’ve helped people solve with this technology and these processes?
Aya Takase 08:20
Okay, so I have to think about because there are things I can talk about. And, yeah, yeah, let’s see so many, many years ago. I don’t know if you remember or heard about it, but there was an incident on on on the subway in Japan. I think this was probably 27 could be 30 years ago. There was a group of people who
Aya Takase 08:59
used, you know, I’m trying to make it easy to understand. So there are a group of people who use some poison to hurt people, yep. And also, there was another incident where the same thing, there was one person who put a lot of arsenic based poison in a big pot of curry to kill a bunch of neighbors to get their insurance benefit. And in the second case, the police needed to identify where that arsenic came from. And I didn’t notice until I heard about this news, but you can analyze what kind of elements are in a certain material using x ray fluorescence analysis technique, and they took a tiny, tiny bit of scrape of kitchen sink from this suspects home and. And compare the impurities that were included in arsenic in the kitchen sink to the combination of impurities they found in the pot of curry, oh my goodness, prove that they came from the same source.
Damon Pistulka 10:16
Oh my goodness, yeah, that is really good.
Aya Takase 10:19
Just something like that,
Speaker 1 10:22
man, isn’t that Wow?
Aya Takase 10:26
Like, they needed such a high level of sensitivity to do it, and they couldn’t, unfortunately, use any of our products that are insulin the regular lab. They needed to go to a synchrotron beam line facility to get a lot more X rays to analyze them. But technique wise, that’s one of the coolest applications I remember. Yeah, that’s That’s wild.
Damon Pistulka 10:54
And when you think of if, if you’re going to produce, you know, I always think of chips, because they’re they operate on such a small level, or really anything. I mean, even if you think about the the paint that goes on a car or something like that, if you’re going to produce billions or millions of gallons of something or or millions of chips or something like that, the molecular level makes a huge difference in the consistency over time. And you can spot things that you will never see with the eye, and just so much stuff,
Aya Takase 11:25
and with those computer chips on, everything is getting smaller and smaller to stuff more things into smaller space, then that resolution becomes more important. Yeah, tiny defect that didn’t matter in the past now matters.
Damon Pistulka 11:41
Yeah, yeah, yeah, excellent.
Curt Anderson 11:44
Well, here multiple different industries you mentioned, like peanut butter all the way to, like, little, tiny tips, we’ve got pharmaceuticals, cement, all sorts of fascinating things. If you’re just joining us here today, we’re with Doctor Aya. And so we’re diving into not only her company and how she makes world a better place, but she’s Damon out of you know this. She’s at the industrial marketing Summit, my friend and so, man, everybody is super excited. If you’re in B to B marketing, you want to be in Austin, Texas in March of 2026 and Aya is going to be one of our speakers. So Okay, let’s jump off anything, anything else that you want to share about the company or anything else there, and then we’re going to slide into the industrial marketing Summit.
Aya Takase 12:27
We do all kinds of X ray analysis and electron beam and the laser related analysis. And if you have any scientific question or research challenges you have, you think we might be able to help and please reach out to me on LinkedIn,
Curt Anderson 12:43
absolutely Hey. And as a matter of fact, ironically, hey, there you go. And so here’s our dear friend, Doctor Aya, on LinkedIn. Do yourself a favor. Connect with her, and you will, absolutely you’ll thank us later, drop her note. Let us know. Let her know that you’re out there, that you’re interested in what she has going on. And so now we’re going to slide over. We’re going to dive into, let’s go here. Let’s go here. How about this? Hey, Damon, yep. Do you recognize this dear friend here? I kind of know. So we have a topic coming up at the industrial marketing summit in 2026 from presentation to performance crafting, binge worthy webinars for technical audiences. I couldn’t love this topic more. Now go to the industrial marketing Summit. You can check out the website. I’m going to come back to the website in a minute. Dr, Aya, give us a little now we’re not going to Sorry, guys. You’re probably thinking, Well, hey, I can listen to this episode and then I don’t need to go to Austin. Well, guess what? You need to go to Austin, because you’ve got to see Dr Aya, in person, and everybody else are the wonderful speakers. So we were talking the industrial marketing summit in Austin, Texas. Dr Aya, what give us a little flavor. How did you get in being the educator that you are? I’m assuming that’s how you got into webinars. But just talk a bit about, like, Did you attend, like, a really boring, painful death by how did you how did this topic come about in your world?
Aya Takase 14:10
So you said, and I’m originally a scientist, and I had a lot of chances to give a technical presentation, mostly in person, because I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, but then a little bit before covid, and definitely once we, you know, got into the shutdown period, we switched All our presentations to webinars, not in person anymore, and I was still working in the lab as X ray imaging scientist, so I did a lot of webinars during that time. And at the beginning, I realized that this is different, different from giving a person. Presentation in person, which I have done countless times, I thought I was pretty good at it. Then, when I started doing it in online, I thought, well, all the techniques I had for in person presentations don’t quite transfer here. This means I’m gonna really have to learn how to do this from scratch. So that’s when I started watching different people’s YouTube. You know, instructions. Went to a lot of webinars. Some were great, and I learned a lot, and some were not so great, and I learned what not to do.
Curt Anderson 15:46
I hope she didn’t attend ours on that last part, right?
Aya Takase 15:50
But that’s when, where I started, you know, with all those webinars, and I was always a presenter for many, many years. Then when I switched to marketing, from my scientific position to marketing position. Then I switched to training and teaching our scientists at rig aku to do webinars better. And that was another phase in which I learned a lot of, yeah, I don’t want to call them tricks, what kind of tricks of how to do it.
Damon Pistulka 16:21
Well, they’re just techniques, though, that you can you learn and and over time, really become, I mean, they can be, become the cornerstones in good presentations that are done in webinars.
Aya Takase 16:34
Yeah. I think in annoying those rules or tricks goes a long way. Yeah. I mean, if you don’t know it, you’re going to make those mistakes you should avoid, right? But the other part is, it’s not easy. Like, I’m not gonna lie. I will share a lot of tips I learned over the years, but I would have never said that it’s easy. You need to be willing to spend a lot of time and walk hard to get a good at it.
Curt Anderson 17:05
So what if, again, without giving away the secret sauce or and, of course, they need to come to Austin, Texas to catch you live. What are some like, like, painful should never do in a webinar. What are some of those? Any tips of like, please don’t ever do this. Do you have any tips there
Aya Takase 17:24
that would be, don’t promote your webinar as an educational webinar. And once you go live, start selling.
Damon Pistulka 17:35
Don’t do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really teach you about this. And then, hey, higher product, buyer, product, yeah.
Aya Takase 17:43
I mean, even if not that level, you can be talking about some scientific things, yeah. Then you there is a difference between showing your product and say, you know, just for your information, this is the instrument we use to collect this data. And move on and say, This is our greatest in the latest model of this analysis technique, instrument, and you should buy this one. This is better than the competitors. The second of you do it, you just lose your credibility as a scientific figure. So don’t do that.
Curt Anderson 18:25
Don’t do that. Okay, all right. Phenomenal tip is there. So now I see, and you’re targeting high level other folks, engineers, PhD, like you’re, are you’re targeting some really, they’re smart people in the room, correct?
Aya Takase 18:43
I don’t know if there are any smarter, but they there are science and tech people. I know that a lot of people say, if you’re scientists, you must be smart, but not necessarily. We can make a lot of stupid mistakes, like any finances. Social skills could be lacking to
Curt Anderson 19:01
social skills to be lacking. That was polite, you know, I think she’s talking about us, Damon, but anyway, yeah, so how do you so going from presentation to performance, you know, and again, like, maybe I don’t know, entertaining, theatrical. Like, how do you, how do you entertain? Or, how do you keep smart guys in the room? How do you keep them engaged?
Aya Takase 19:25
So this is the no brainer, but not an easy thing. I recommend everybody you know try to do give the aha moment and keep doing that throughout your webinar, because especially for the technical audience, they’re geeks. They love to understand something new, especially in the science and tech, and the things they are happy to understand are often very complicated, but. If you do a really good job explaining something seemingly complicated to help people understand it easily, everybody goes, aha. Now I understand, and that feels good, and the people keep watching it, and they will leave your webinar feeling that was fun. I feel like I’m smarter now because I know something I didn’t know before, and that’s what you want to just keep doing throughout your webinar.
Curt Anderson 20:34
And I do feel, is it through? Is it in the presentation? Is it in the slides? Is it in the delivery? Is it in your tone? Body, like,
Aya Takase 20:42
everything, everything, everything, all the above, all the above. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even if your way of articulating something is, you know, on the spot, it’s really good, easy to understand. But if you write everything down on your slide with text that kills your presentation because you know too much text on the slide, yes, or if you rumble too much right, that it’s not good on if you’re let’s say illustration of the concept on The slide is off. You don’t have a lot of text, you have an image that’s good, but if the image is not quite expressing what you’re talking about, then people get confused, right? Being confused, not being able to understand what you’re saying, or not being able to follow what you’re saying, all those things make people feel bad, and you do not want to do that,
Curt Anderson 21:43
you know. So you’re making a great point, because you have the challenge of, you know, it’s, how do you find the balance? Because when you’re doing a webinar, you don’t know everybody in the room. If they have their their cameras off, you can’t read body language, and so you don’t want to speak above everybody, because, like you said, nobody wants to be the dumb guy in the room. And then you don’t want to speak below everybody, because they’re like, well, I already know all these things. Why, you know? Why am I sitting here wasting my time? You know? So it’s, it is difficult finding that balance. Is that, is that correct? Or how do you kind
Aya Takase 22:13
of is actually, that’s one of the common mistakes people make meaning that you need to know the audience before you prepare the first slide. Yeah. If you go live in a wondering who are those people, is this the right level? That’s too late. You should have known the answers to those questions before you prepare the webinar slides.
Curt Anderson 22:37
Yeah, yeah. Great. Yeah. Great point. You and do you have any tips on, like, how? Like, what? How do you guys, you know, you get the list of people ahead of time. Are you looking them up on LinkedIn? Or, like, what are some tips that you have?
Aya Takase 22:50
There are a couple different things you can do. Number one, you probably, especially if it’s for marketing, you design your webinar, episode or series with the targeted audience in mind, right? You don’t know who they are, you don’t know if they’re coming, but you have this ideal audience, no persona. Then you design your webinar, then when you start promoting it, use the right language to attract that audience and use the right conduct list to promote it to so that your concept of webinar and the ideal audience match. So that’s the ideal way to do it, I think. But you’re not going to know everything about the audience, and you might be a little bit iffy about certain things, right? You can run polls. You can run survey beforehand. You can run polling during the webinar. One of the things we do at the beginning of our webinars is to ask the audience and Do you own this technique or instrument. Are you using it, or are you new to this? And we run that poll right at the beginning of the webinar, so that the speaker can make some adjustments depending on how novice or professional.
Curt Anderson 24:19
Well, I love it. And again, if for anybody just join us, I want to come back to industrial marketing Summit. And one word that I love here is binge worthy. Crafting binge worthy. That is just such Moxie. I just love the now again, for like, our technical folks in you know, and we went to your website, so I’ve, I’m back over here, right? So, you know, this can, this could be like, you know, the, not the most exciting, you know, like, we’re not targeting, you know, we’re not preaching about Taylor Swift to a bunch of teenage girls type thing, right? I don’t know if that’s or you’re not talking football to myself and Damon, right? Yeah. So, well, how do you, how do you. Get these. How do you get that excitement? How do we create binge worthy webinars on, you know, say, for the manufacturers out there, like, hey, you know, my product’s really not that exciting. How do we, how do we get people fired up,
Aya Takase 25:12
and if your audience is technical, explaining things very simply, and help them understand a complex concept or theory or method or technique will make your webinar binge worthy. And I didn’t use this term just to get people’s attention. I’m glad that you like it. But years ago, when we did a series of webinars explaining X ray Computed Tomography technique, and we explained a lot of complicated concepts around it in very easy to understand ways. And I got a message on LinkedIn from somebody who found our recordings on YouTube, and he said, Hey, I just found your webinar recordings and started watching it, and spent the entire afternoon watching all episodes. So he actually watched, wow, my webinars, and that’s when I thought in it. I didn’t think it would be exciting because of the topic, yeah, but he made me realize, and, aha, this can be exciting to certain audience.
Damon Pistulka 26:26
Nice, yeah, where you really segment your audience? Well, though, if you’re creating content, that’s very interesting too, and really small group of people, and that’s, that’s, I mean, that’s more powerful in marketing first of all, or more powerful in education as well, or whatever you’re trying to do, because you can speak directly to something that they want to learn about.
Aya Takase 26:52
You know, you’re right. I was going to say that in marketing, we always said you need to focus on certain target, right? You cannot say that we are the best for everybody that never works. And I think a webinar is the same. Education is the same, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Curt Anderson 27:09
What I love it with the gentleman that on for folks that are giving webinars and like, we’re constantly trying to encourage our manufacturers, you know, do those education pieces or do a webinar. Do you have a tip or suggestion on the actual slide presentation itself? You mentioned we kid around a little bit about, like, death by PowerPoint, or having a slide with a bunch
Aya Takase 27:34
of, Oh, I love that TED talk. Yeah.
Curt Anderson 27:37
So you know, if we talk about, like, really getting laser focused, and, like, not to death by PowerPoint. Like, do you have any like, little tips for folks to put together a nice, healthy, engaging presentation? Any like, do’s and don’ts that you want to
Aya Takase 27:53
share first? I you know, would have repeated everything that was discussed in the How to avoid death by PowerPoint TED talk, if you have not watched it and follow all the rules, that’s one another one is when you give a presentation online, like through a webinar platform, change your visual at least every 30 seconds. A lot of people say that, Oh, that’s too much. But can you imagine staring at a screen that’s still and nothing is moving? And imagine you’re watching YouTube video and nothing moves on the screen, and you listen to a monolog you’re gonna leave before 30 seconds pass, yeah, yeah. And it’s the same for a webinar.
Damon Pistulka 28:47
Yeah, yeah. And I love how some of the tools have changed, too, that where you can actually be in front of the presentation now, and there’s just different ways that you can do it and move and move things around to really keep things moving like you said,
Aya Takase 29:03
keep things moving. And it doesn’t mean that you have to change your slide itself. You can create animations that play on your slide, even, you know, old, boring bullet points, don’t show them at once. Reveal them one by one, and that’s changing visual, right? Yeah.
Damon Pistulka 29:26
So, so, yeah. Do you? Do you ever look back at your your presentations from years ago and go, Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I actually did that.
Aya Takase 29:36
Now, the online ones still, there are things I want to do better now I look at them, but in person, presentations I’ve done in the last, I don’t know, 2530 years, there are a lot of ugly slides I’ve made.
Damon Pistulka 29:49
Yeah, I look at some of mine. For the past, I’ve gone, oh my goodness. You can’t even read that thing if you wanted to. You know, it’s just not something.
Curt Anderson 29:59
Yeah. Hey, Damon, we got a few comments we should grab here.
Damon Pistulka 30:02
Yeah, we do. We do. We got some someone I know said niche down until it hurts. Think we know who that is, right? Yeah, thanks for that, Ron. And we also have no show seems to be a big issue. How can you market? No shows seem to be a big issue. How can you market so that the people who sign up will actually show up.
Curt Anderson 30:23
Yeah. Great question. Ron, thanks dude. Thank you for the questions. Dr, IA, what do you think about that question there?
Aya Takase 30:29
So that’s a good question, but, um, I’m gonna say and we actually don’t worry too much about whether or not people show up live, because when I think about myself on the audience side of things. I signed up for a lot of webinars. I tried to be there live, but in many cases, I’m just busy and there’s a schedule conflict and I can’t then I watch the recording later. So if people watch the recording later, we’re happy. If you can’t make it live, that’s okay. The importance of the live audience is that, I think the speakers perform better when they know, even though they can’t see the audience, when they know that a lot of people are on the other side, they just perform better. Yeah, so for that reason, I don’t recommend running recorded webinar. You want to do this live, yeah, but I wouldn’t worry too much about it if you know 40% showed up or 60% showed up, yep, yep, yeah.
Damon Pistulka 31:34
And that’s one thing too. I mean, you mentioned YouTube there. It’s amazing when you start to really think about and research different people, different even different personalities, talk show people. And there’s just so many different ways you can learn. And because there are these techniques that are really, and one of them I remember was, was, is really? It was, you know, you really have to bring a lot of energy when you’re on a webinar compared to being in person, right? In person, it’s a lot different. There’s a lot more body, body movement you can you can sense, but on a webinar, it’s you really have to bring a lot more energy to them.
Aya Takase 32:11
Yeah, for that point, my advice is, if you’re dealing with a subject matter experts that are scientists or engineers, not performers, that can be very challenging, and you can’t really tell those people you need to act more filling in that could go the wrong way.
Speaker 2 32:34
That’s true. You go off the rails. Yeah.
Aya Takase 32:37
So for that, one I recommend is don’t put them on stage alone.
Speaker 1 32:44
Yeah, great advice. Yeah, as a
Aya Takase 32:47
marketer, you can be the host and you can be running polling, you know, dealing with the chat and the Q and A, the mediated. We actually, whenever possible, have two people additional to the speaker, yeah, so all speaker needs to worry about is to give the good presentation and answer questions. And oftentimes I’m the host on opening the floor and dealing with a chat q&a And all of those things, and we have another kind of technical expert that can mediate the Q, amp a, and it makes some interesting comments or ask questions. And the reason why I recommend doing this is when you’re not alone and you have two colleagues you talk to and work with every day, that relaxes the speaker, and we can talk among ourselves. That’s a natural conversation. It’s not awkward performance, you know, learning three days by an engineer.
Curt Anderson 33:45
So, yeah, I, you know. So I watched that, you know. So again, if you’re planning webinars, or you’ve been talking about doing webinars for 26 as a marketing strategy, phenomenal. As a matter of fact, follow Dr eya here, and she has all sorts of information, just kind of, you know, she sets the bar high on how to do things. And I just had a conversation this week, a gentleman put together a presentation, showed it to me, and it was just all bullet points. And I was just like, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. I’m like, you can’t show that web that that slide presented like you just you can’t because you well, these are my talking points. I’m like a human mind. What I learned, dr, from that video that you’re talking about, the human mind can’t read and listen at the same time is physically impossible. They’re going to listen to you, or I’m going to read your slide, which you have to pick one words on a slide. You can’t talk the human mind can’t do both, if you want them to listen to you have an image. Have three words, five words, but yeah, I, I agree with you 110% so this is priceless, absolutely,
Damon Pistulka 34:54
yeah, and like you said before, Doctor, I It’s a lot of slides, right? If you want to go 30 seconds, 30 seconds, that’s something that Kurt has always encouraged. And when you, when you start to do it, you realize how much difference that variation really does. And you may have only a word or two on the slide, because then they can feel the experience by seeing the visual. And then you, you talk about the subject a little bit, and that’s good. We got another good question here from from Ron, what are your measures of success that help you determine whether or not your event was successful? Great.
Aya Takase 35:32
That’s a good question. Thank you. This gets determined before you actually deliver your performance. But number of registration is something we care a lot about, because whether or not they show up live, there is a good chance that they will watch the recording and it shows that they’re interested in the topic. We promoted the topic the right way, and we chose the right topic. After the event, we monitor how many people watch it afterwards. It’s rare that a webinar, one episode on one performance in a webinar, generates a lot of leads. We wish it would, but it doesn’t, yeah, but um, later we see customers mention our webinars. And I know that this is not quite measurable, but the one of the best, I said, rewards you can get from doing webinars is you go to a conference or even sales call and the customer you’re meeting for the very first time goes, Oh, we watch your webinar all the time.
Damon Pistulka 36:55
Yeah, that would be that’s awesome.
Aya Takase 36:57
That means you don’t need to spend a lot of time building the trust with that person. Yeah, that’s already done, even before you met them.
Curt Anderson 37:05
And Doctor, I mean, do you feel is this an accurate statement or not? I like webinar, typically, is not a super heavy lift. If you’re when you’re diving into a topic, like you said, like, you know your physicist PhD, you’re, you are the subject matter expert, when you’re talking about something that you know inside and out, you know, putting together that webinar, and the thing is, then it’s evergreen content that you put out. Do you feel that it’s a super heavy lift, or what’s your what’s
Aya Takase 37:33
your thoughts? It is a medium to heavy lift for the presenter, um, creating slides and Changing visuals every 30 seconds. Not having a lot of text on it, that means you have to practice a lot. If you have a one slider with 10 bullet points, you just have to read them out loud. That’s easy, right? But if you don’t have those, you know text that’s your speakers know it essentially out in the open. You need to have them somewhere else if you need your notes. Yeah, but I you need to know when you click what comes up next and what you’re supposed to say next. You have to practice a lot to deliver it, you know, right? So it’s a medium to heavy lift for the presenter, however, I’m going to put the marketers hat. Now, as a marketer, what we noticed is they’re willing to do it. Subject matter, experts. If we ask them to write, like a 2000 award blog articles, you know that they would never do it. They don’t have the time to do it. They don’t have to do it. Technical presentation. Many of them have done. Many of them. Yeah, they feel more confident they don’t have to do it. So they go through the hard work and do it, and once they do it, you got the recording. Let’s evergreen. We always create a written summary version so that the search engines and the AI can read what’s in it as well. And for some people on it’s easier to skim text, rather than spending 4560 minutes to actually watch the video. Yep.
Curt Anderson 39:13
And you, I mean, you can rep, you know, again during your marketing hat. You can repurpose the heck out of that, that webinar, because you could slice it up into one minute video, you know, YouTube shorts, you could break it up into like, three or four or five minute clips. You can, you know, transcribe it into content or social posts. So I just, I couldn’t love this direction more. Kudos to you for really spearheading this. And again, I’m going to come back to the industrial marketing Summit, and let me grab that again real quick here. So Damon, let’s just talk about this for a second. So if friends out there are new to this, it’s March 3 through March 5 in Austin, Texas. Strongly encourage you check. If you just Google industrial marketing Summit, you’ll get all the information. Wonderful, incredible speakers. They. Got ran Fishkin is one of the keynotes. They’ve got wonderful workshops coming up. And we’ve interviewed virtually everybody on this page. We’ve interviewed, if we haven’t already, we’re on the cusp. In the next few weeks, we’re going to be interviewing everybody. And Dr Aya, here is your presentation right here. And once again, great idea for manufacturers out there that are thinking about webinars and just not sure what to do, where to start or how to really conquer this with poise and effectiveness. This is the presentation that you want to catch. So yeah, Doctor. Aya, any other What questions did we not ask you about webinars or your strategies or tactics for getting a great, great, getting great webinars out there.
Aya Takase 40:45
Um, what are some of the worst webinars I’ve been to?
Curt Anderson 40:54
What wasn’t a guy named curtain Damon? Was it? No?
Aya Takase 40:57
No, no. Sometimes, you know, it’s hard to realize that you’re doing the same bad things until you see somebody else do it. Yeah. So I really recommend people go, you know, go to other people’s webinars, and you can just consume the subject of the webinar, but watch how they do it, the delivery, the slides. You know how they actually run webinars and take notes, because I’m not going to name names, but one of the webinars I went to, I genuinely wanted to learn the technique they were presenting, but they started off talking about how great the company is and how great a product they make. It’s fine. Then they started running polling questions. And I thought, Okay, now we’re getting into the subject and the polling questions, or like, how many years do you think women in business? It’s still about their company? Oh my. And if 15 minutes in, they still haven’t touched on the subject I wanted to
Curt Anderson 42:13
learn is drop the mic right there. So I couldn’t agree with you more you have to make it about the listener, the attendee. Make it about them. They don’t care about you. All they care about is if you can solve their problem, right? Yeah.
Aya Takase 42:33
And then meanwhile they got their emails been all piling up like a teams of messages, dinging everywhere, yeah, yeah. And you’re gonna lose your audience to those things if you don’t keep them there, right?
Curt Anderson 42:46
Yeah, great advice. Great advice. I know, and I know we’re keeping you. Do you have time for we’ve got one more question here. Damon, sure,
Damon Pistulka 42:54
yeah, yeah. And Ron, Ron asked maybe, what are some of the best webinars you’ve attended, and what made them great.
Aya Takase 43:04
I can’t think of the exact name of the webinar, but let me see if I can find it. So go to webinar. I think they go by go to now on had a webinar about how to keep your audience engaged. Oh, and the recording should be available. Okay, that was one of the really useful webinars.
Damon Pistulka 43:33
Yeah, I’ve got it down here. So the go to webinar people how to keep your audience engaged? Yeah, we’ll take
Aya Takase 43:40
was my Cindy is a Huggett. Huggett. Very cool. I can find it.
Curt Anderson 43:47
Yeah, and, and while you’re taking a look at that, Damon, we hey, we’ve, we’ve got, Usman
Damon Pistulka 43:53
is here today. Yeah, Usman, thanks for being here today. You’re right here at the beginning. Thanks for stopping by. Appreciate it always. We got into the questions, but thanks for hanging out with us today, absolutely.
Curt Anderson 44:06
So welcome that. And okay,
Aya Takase 44:10
webinar, I just talked about
Damon Pistulka 44:12
the link internally, so we can, we can put that out there. Oh yeah, ready to go drop that in.
Curt Anderson 44:19
Here we go. I’ve got it right here for you. So presentation skills, five key tips to sharpen your message. So, so you’d strongly recommend this, this video clip right here.
Aya Takase 44:30
Yeah, that was a good one. That was a good one.
Curt Anderson 44:33
Okay, excellent. All right. All right, guys, well, hey, we’re going to start winding down again. Industrial marketing Summit. Encourage everybody. Go ahead and sign up. Damon, as a matter of fact, we have a little coupon code, if anybody’s and they use the word B to B TAIL. You type in the word B to B TAIL, we’re just, we’re giving you, you know, we get nothing returned. So we’re not selling anything. We don’t make a penny on this. But we are sponsoring. Our friends are at true marketing, and Joe and the team at Grill. 76 and, of course, all sorts of wonderful speakers. We love going every year. And so if you do sign up, type in at the coupon code B to B tail, and you’ll get a little discount on your signup. So yep. Dr Aya, as we close out any parting thoughts, as matter of fact, I do I have one last question for you, ready? I do have one last question. So your high academic PhD, all the above you mentioned, your grandfather, long time business career, what’s the best business advice that you’ve ever received? What’s the best business advice? I feel like you gave a total master class. Know your audience, understand your audience death by PowerPoint, like all these great tips, is there one particular piece of business advice that you would love to pass on everybody?
Aya Takase 45:49
Um, it’s all about people. It’s all about it’s kind of cliche, but it
Curt Anderson 45:59
is, yeah, yeah. And it’s and it shows, because, like, your whole webinar strategy is all about helping the person on the other side, like you’re not making it about you, you’re making it all about them. And I just, I absolutely love how you have that approach. And it’s not a surprise that you guys are successful with your webinars. So first off, I want to give a huge, heartfelt thank you. I know how busy you are. We appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to hang out with us, to dive into this. And we cannot wait to catch your presentation in Austin, Texas, and this is going to be a blast. So thank you for joining us. Damon, do you
Aya Takase 46:34
want to thank you very much for having me, and it is a really, really good event in the industrial marketing summit in the I want to give a shout out. If you’re in, if you’re a marketer in B to B industrial business, you really should go to that meeting.
Curt Anderson 46:51
Absolutely, they’re going to be there, right? Is that how all the cool kids are going to be there, right? Oh yeah, yeah. So Damon, why don’t you close this out and we’ll, we’ll take it away for today, and any
Damon Pistulka 47:04
we’ll, and we’ll go from I’ll do that, I’ll, I’ll mention Muhammad here. We got another comment from Muhammad. Love from that the town in Pakistan. Thanks so much for stopping by today, Muhammad. Thanks everyone else for stopping by, and we appreciate you. We can see you’re out there listening. We can see the comments from those. If you got into this late, you definitely want to go back to the beginning and listen to Dr, dr Aya and and her tips about, you know, putting on good webinars that are binge worthy. And then also make sure to get that in. Get to that industrial market, Summit, marketing Summit, 2026, and if you’re signing up, go ahead and use that B to B TAIL code and get a little discount before you get there. But you get to go to Austin in March. It’s going to be a beautiful time of year to be there, and a lot of great people. So thanks everyone for being here. We’ll be back again next week. You.
