facebookpixel

Webinerd to Watch: NASA

CMMA Blog

It’s no surprise that NASA is on the cutting edge. From exploring the far reaches of our solar system to putting men on the moon to exploring Mars’ surface, NASA’s fingerprints and footprints are literally everywhere.

But one area you might not expect them to be leading the way is in leveraging innovative marketing and technology solutions. After all, they are still a government operation, right? And most government operations aren’t exactly, ahem, synonymous with technology and innovation.

But skeptics of the organization’s technology prowess (at least here on Earth) were recently proved wrong. That’s because NASA hosted their annual Virtual Career Summit through the ON24 platform, providing insights into their range of scholarship, fellowship, and internship opportunities, and answering prospective applicants’ questions in real-time. NASA provided details on eligibility requirements, tips for the application process, and candid advice from previous awardees.

DQ8zwYEWsAAnkBe

NASA did this by taking full advantage of ON24’s many unique interactive features in order to maximize the value of the career summit. The event had nearly 1,500 attendees who asked more than 1,000 questions, including via ON24’s live Q&A feature and through social media widgets that enabled questions to come from Facebook and Twitter.

While many webinar providers are simply white label templates, NASA leveraged ON24’s customizable features to create an engaging, NASA-branded audience console. NASA incorporated video content throughout, featuring subject matter experts who discussed the career options available at NASA. The webinar showcased alumni of their programs who spoke compellingly about the excitement and benefits of working for the most decorated space agency in the world, often over B-Roll footage. The webinar was also made available afterward for on-demand viewing.

All of us Earthlings could learn a thing or two from NASA’s approach. They leaned heavily on interactive features to make the webinar feel personal, even with thousands of participants. They took the time to customize an appealing interface. And they used webinars in an unique way — for a career summit. For all of us who are strictly using webinars to educate potential buyers, we should take a step back and ask ourselves the different ways we might be able to incorporate webinars into other campaigns. Clearly, in many ways, NASA webinars are out of this world.

Want to learn more about how you can make your webinars astronomical? Check out our Webinar Best Practices Series  for the latest tips and tricks to maximize your marketing ROI.

The post Webinerd to Watch: NASA appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Six Takeaways From the ON24’s Regulation Webinar That Will Ease Your Mind

CMMA Blog

GDPR went into effect on May 25. With significant penalties for non-compliance, and the fact that any organisation that communicates with people in the EU will have to comply, there was a lot of discussion in the run-up to the enforcement deadline. There continues to be a lot of discussions well after. Many companies are still struggling to comply with the regulations and have questions about various aspects of compliance. What are the regulations? What do we do if our company is not ready for GDPR? Does GDPR affect other departments aside from marketing? How do we build campaigns that help gain compliance?

ON24’s Insight50 Ask About: Regulation webinar addresses these questions and more. Webinar panelists Abigail Dubiniecki, senior lawyer and specialist at My Inhouse Lawyer , Richard Preece, Director at DA Resilience and Zach Thornton, External Affairs Manager at the DMA shared their knowledge and expertise to answer questions and discuss the various aspects of GDPR and what it means to companies.

Here are just six key takeaways from the webinar, moderated by Andrew Warren-Payne from Market2Marketers .

Most attendees aren’t compliant but they are getting there

If your company is not 100% compliant with GDPR, you are not alone. Of the webinar attendees, 48% reported that ‘We are not fully compliant but are taking steps towards it’ when asked ‘Where is your company in terms of readiness for GDPR?’43a66b68 727a 452c 93ca 0654d4dbf7f8

On this note, one important question came from the audience: if your contacts have not opted in by the 25th May deadline, does it mean you can no longer contact them? According to Zach Thornton, if your company is already abiding by opt-in consent rules and you have a continual engagement or relationship with your customer, this implies continual consent making renewal of consent unnecessary. He believes that companies going through this re-consenting process are wasting resources and might needlessly be keeping in touch with contacts that are consenting to receive marketing.

Procrastinators don’t panic

If you are feeling a bit behind on GDPR compliance, don’t panic. Abigail Dubiniecki, from My Inhouse Lawyer, advises not to panic and to think before you act. She has a Five-Step Procrastinator’s Checklist that can help you towards compliance.

  1. Know the law

Get on the ICO website and familiarise yourself with the following guidelines and tools:

ICO Direct Marketing Guide

ICO Guide to the GDPR

ICO PECR Guide

ICO Lawful Basis Interactive Tool

  1. Know your data

Know what kind of data you have. This is important because, as Dubiniecki says, “You can’t do things properly if you don’t know what you have.”

  1. Know your legal justification and your purpose

Segment your database and identify what the legal justification is for having those contacts. You’ll want to know the following information about your contacts:

  • Provenance
  • Preference they have
  • Purpose you are allowed to market to them
  1. Trim the fat

This is where you want to use your metrics. Find out how much engagement you have had with your contacts. From that point, you can purge those contacts that do not engage.

  1. Go forth and market, but do it appropriately and maintain good practices

Establish workflows and make sure you have a record of processing activities. Most importantly, make sure you train those people involved in these workflows and processing activities.

Make privacy a positive

Many of the webinar participants polled (39%) are not sure whether GDPR would be good for business. However, the majority (54%) felt that GDPR would have a positive effect on business.

11c420cc 2195 42e6 b840 2a9d4c7e69a0 1

This positive outlook on GDPR’s on the state of business is refreshing and in line with the advice given by Zach Thornton. He suggests that companies make privacy a positive. Transparent, common-sense guidance allows companies to address customers’ concerns about their personal data and let customers know that they are in control of how your company uses their data. Privacy can now be a company’s unique selling point.

A good example of an organisation making privacy positive is the BBC, which uses a layered privacy approach. This method provides the most important information to the contact first at the top layer (for example, on a sign-up form); thereafter, each layer of additional information gets more detailed but still gives a clear explanation as to how that information will be used. This approach makes it easier to explain privacy information for the average person.

Email is thought to be the marketing channel most at risk but what about sales activities?2585e5d0 37e4 4922 8758 612202c6982c

Not surprisingly, email is believed to be the marketing channel that has the greatest amount of risk in reference to GDPR. Webinars were seen as the lowest risk.

But while much talk has been on marketing practices and channels that will fall under the scrutiny of GDPR, what about sales activities?

As Zach Thornton explained, because GDPR applies to the processing of personal data that can be linked back to an individual, it does apply to sales activities such as cold calling, contacting prospects via social media such as LinkedIn as well as the use of email prospecting tools. It is important to note that GDPR also applies to human resources, IT and any other department that processes personal data.

If marketing is designed properly, compliance will happen

So how can marketers design their campaigns to gain compliance? According to Abigail Dubiniecki, the answer is to design marketing campaigns that establish a reason for engagement and encourages the development of relationships. If marketing efforts, such as webinars, are created around the idea that people don’t want to miss out and the excitement of being part of something interesting, people will sign up so they can be notified of upcoming events. If you deliver value, compliance will follow

Compliance is an ongoing endeavor

The last takeaway from the webinar is one to keep in mind—compliance does not end; it is an endeavor. As Richard Preece explained, compliance is an ongoing process. It requires you to challenge the way you do things, to understand the risk and have a clear system in place. This system will allow for continuous improvements and adapts over time to the needs of your business.

Want to know more?

If you want to know more, the ON24 Insight50 Ask About: Regulation is available now on-demand.

The post Six Takeaways From the ON24’s Regulation Webinar That Will Ease Your Mind appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Wake Up Your Content with ON24 Webinars

B2B Webinars

Successful content has to engage. It has to pull your audience in, build a genuine connection and address a specific problem each audience member is facing. But far too often, content today doesn’t engage. It interrupts.

It’s time to wake up your content with a solution that works for both buyers and sellers. It’s time to wake up your webinars.

According to a recent Demand Gen report, nearly 70 percent of all buyers prefer webinars over any other form of content. What does that mean? It means 75 percent of buyers will share more information about themselves to gain access to webinar content. It means 37 percent of buyers will spend 30 to 60 engagement-driving minutes with webinars. It means 61 percent of the information a buyer takes from a webinar is shared with a colleague.

That’s because real webinars engage with their audience instead of just speaking to. Chats, polls, live Q&A sessions and more gives your brand the means of connecting with your audience. It’s no wonder nearly half of Demand Gen report’s respondents said webinars were their top choice and most valuable content format in the mid-stage of their buying journey

It’s time to wake up your content — click here to learn how.

Screen Shot 2018 06 25 at 2.34.28 PM

Heading to CMWorld 2018? Stop by booth #539 to learn more about how ON24 can wake up your content — and don’t forget to see what real webinars are capable of at “Webinars That Rock: Keys to Engagement-Driven Content Delivery,” in Grand Ballroom B at 12:20 on Sept. 5.

The post Wake Up Your Content with ON24 Webinars appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Microsoft and ON24 Team Up for Seamless Webinars

CMMA Blog

At ON24, we’re all about making personal engagement at scale as easy as possible. Which is why we’re pretty excited to be selected as the only webinar platform supported by the flourishing Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 platform . And it’s a booming platform, seeing a 65 percent growth rate during the first three quarters of fiscal 2018 — even faster than Microsoft Office 365.

Dynamics 365 is a combination of applications, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and marketing automation, hosted on Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud platform. Dynamics 365 for Marketing is an ideal solution for marketers and marketing agencies seeking to simplify their business applications on the Microsoft stack.

To get a better idea of just what this partnership between Microsoft and ON24 entails — and what everyone gets out of it — we sat down with Lou Pelosi, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at ON24 to ask him a few questions about this development. Here’s what he had to say:

Q:

Can you explain the relationship between Microsoft and ON24?

Lou Pelosi:

From a high level, we’ve expanded our customer and technical relationship with Microsoft and signed a co-marketing agreement with their Microsoft Dynamics 365 team. The goals of the agreement are to drive greater value for our joint customers and to market and sell together to obtain new customers.

Q:

What was the impetus for this partnership?

Lou Pelosi:

Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 for Marketing earlier this spring to connect sales and marketing and help them to make smarter decisions to maximize marketing ROI. Our strategies and promises — especially when it comes to facilitating both human engagement and actionable insights at scale — to marketers are aligned and complementary.

Microsoft, and Dynamics 365, in particular, has been on a tear recently. Market share is up, the stock price has tripled in recent years, and investing in new SaaS architectures and applications which have significant momentum in the market.

Q:

How will ON24 work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing?

Lou Pelosi:

The Microsoft marketing application includes an out-of-the-box ON24 adapter allowing marketers to schedule and reserve ON24 webinars without leaving the marketing application. It also provides both the ON24 presenter and audience URLs to use in emails and landing pages for event promotion and execution. Ultimately, the marketer understands who registered, who attended and collects actionable data on engaged attendees.

Microsoft customers must still purchase an ON24 account, but the initial integration simplifies the webinar process. ON24 is making a special 30-day free trial available to Dynamics 365 for Marketing customers and prospect. You can learn more here .

Q:

How will this evolve over time?

Lou Pelosi:

Microsoft and ON24 continue to invest heavily in marketing technologies and solutions. There are several ways our relationship could evolve as we move forward. Options include improving the out-of-the-box integration capabilities to add more fields and more data for the marketer to gain more insights, improving workflows to simplify webinar management and execution and collaborating on our broader portfolio of martech solutions. We’ll be working diligently in the coming months to communicate our value to customers, prospects and partners. If there are any questions about how you can benefit from the partnership, you can email dynamics@on24.com.

The post Microsoft and ON24 Team Up for Seamless Webinars appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

ServiceNow’s Approach to Webinar Program Innovation (Part II)

ABM

This is part two in a two-part series on how organizations can extract more results from their webinars. For part one, click here . To learn more about Webinar World London, click here .

The push towards account-based marketing ultimately is about creating the capability to personalize go-to-market strategies and outreach. Webinars – both generic and targeted – play a vital role in ServiceNow’s focus on the Financial Services market.

There are many definitions of Account-Based Marketing going around – it’s a hot topic in Marketing these days. At ServiceNow, ABM is one of three Go-To-Market programs, in addition to Executive Programs and Campaigns.

 a58f8963 8be5 4f56 89b9 5826f6f824af pasted20image200

Figure 1: ServiceNow Go-To-Market Model

 

Market and Account Segmentations

We segment our markets along a number of axes, and decisions on marketing spend are related to our country tiering model (Tier 1: UK, Germany, France and The Netherlands), the 50 largest accounts for ServiceNow in EMEA, the Executive decision makers (CxO level) within the Top-50, the broader market segment of Large Enterprise organisations, specific industries that historically have proven lucrative for ServiceNow, like Financial Services.

In 2018, we increased our focus on Top-50 accounts. In the first phase of our Account-Based Marketing program, we target 17 Financial Services accounts (banks and insurers) within our EMEA Top-50 account list.

Guided by our London-based ABM agency McDonald Butler Associates, we’re working side by side with Sales leadership and Client Directors to understand how marketing can help accelerate the sales strategy execution within these 17 accounts.

Financial Services: 3 go-to-market modes

To understand the role of the ON24 platform as part of our ABM strategy, I will outline our thinking on a high-level. If we take the triangle from figure 1 and we put it on its side, we see figure 2, where three go-to-market modes in the Financial Services market are identified:

1.    Content Marketing for the largest segment in the database. These are the accounts that are in the Financial Services industry, but they’re not strategic enough yet for ServiceNow to focus investment.

2.    Account-based marketing for the 17 Financial Services Accounts within the EMEA Top-50 of largest accounts, critical to the future growth of the company.

3.    Target Account Marketing for those accounts within Top-17 FS which require even more focus and investments, for instance, because they have been included in a global focus program, or because the sales strategy requires additional marketing investment.

9ece1061 7a71 4a55 b28a 7ea0d85c5976 pasted20image200

Figure 2: Industry-to-Account-Based Engagement Model 

Content Strategies Per Mode

Now that these three modes have been established, we can start devising the content marketing strategy and resources, systems and data services we require per phase over time. To summarize six months of conversations between our sales teams, agencies, and colleagues around the globe:

Seventeen of the EMEA Top-50 accounts our sales organization is going after, are in Financial Services. If we create a content marketing strategy for our target personas in Financial Services, we can start creating an active database in Financial Services within our Tier 1 markets and track who is engaging with ServiceNow, test new ideas, and generate initial demand.

Part of the mix of assets and tactics we employ for this FS content strategy are industry-based messaging frameworks, demo environments, sales decks, blogs, position papers, storybooks, and FS industry event sponsorships – all developed in close cooperation with industry experts and Client Directors.

The ON24 Pillar

In the case of our Financial Services focus, one of the key content strategy pillars is a series of live webinars, running on ON24, reviewing the various parts of our FS value proposition with large FS customers featuring as panel speakers. The recordings of these webinars are used to populate an ON24 Target landing page, with a branded header visual, targeted introduction and the call-to-action to engage the FS discussion groups within the ServiceNow Community.

For the 17 FS accounts within the EMEA Top-50, we go the extra mile by increasing the level of localization of the content and assets. The messaging framework is reworked based on account insights shared by the account director. Co-branded design templates per account show our commitment to work with them. Our executives proactively reach out to their counterparts.

Not only is this a very scalable model, but it also feeds industry-specific content into the long-tail of accounts in the same segment, which are not yet in our Top-50 focus.

In line with the webinar performance metrics we track internally, some of which we shared in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we have seen a significant increase in target account engagement and pipeline influence. The use of ON24’s Target product for ABM has been key to creating the focused content experience, while enabling our marketing metrics to easily demonstrate the increased consumption and engagement via the real-time sync with our CRM system.

Bid Marketing Menu

Once we get to the RFP/bid stage of the engagement, a special programme of activities kicks into action, our so-called “Bid Marketing Menu”, including a targeted brochure aligned with the value themes outlined in the RFP, a branded ON24 Target landing page with messaging and video assets relevant to the offer, email and social media programs to driver further engagement in the account, and real-time engagement monitoring.

be1112be e78d 4260 bc30 261cfd2c7972 pasted20image200

Figure 3: Account-based ON24 Target page – account logo blurred out in header visual

Targeted, Personalized Webinars

ON24 Target has enabled the ServiceNow team to introduce targeting and personalization techniques into our webinar programs. We already had the ON24 platform integrated with our website, our Eloqua marketing automation platform and our CRM system, and Tableau already has the dashboards in place to visualize engagement and business value down the funnel, which basically means that these targeted investments are automatically tracked and reported on in our systems, too. So, without much extra effort in the infrastructure layer, we’re able to create actionable insight and higher value for our sales and account teams.

Baseline for 2019 growth

Today, we can show which contacts from our target accounts are engaging our webinar program, including the stage of their engagement and propensity to pipeline and bookings – which is a great baseline for continued growth in 2019 and beyond.

The post ServiceNow’s Approach to Webinar Program Innovation (Part II) appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

What’s to Love About Webinar World?

CMMA Blog

We get it. Your digital events aren’t going great. Your branded console, if you can even use one, is off-point, your registration is down and your messaging just isn’t registering with those who attend.

We’ve got the cure for what ails you, and it’s called Webinar World 2019 . Our annual conference, taking place March 11 to 13 in downtown San Francisco, gives you and your marketing team the tools, the techniques and the vision to make your digital events best-in-class.

What’s there to love? Well, we figure past Webinar World attendees would be able to say it best:

Think of Webinar World 2019 as your get-away from what digital marketing is now and a gentle push towards what it can be. It’s the perfect getaway where demand gen, marketing ops and webinar ops can re-center their collective efforts and focus on driving engagement with purpose. It’s time to drive real interaction and create a genuine human connection.

It’s time to take a break. It’s time to find a spot with like-minded marketers, content creators and data-driven decision makers and talk about what really matters in a fast-paced digital marketing world — engagement.

Ready for your getaway? Click here and get ready to Engage for Action.

The post What’s to Love About Webinar World? appeared first on ON24 .

To view our Partner blog, click here