According to Gartner, by 2025, almost 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. While most demand generation marketers have already adopted a digital-first mindset, the opportunities to create digital experiences and collect engagement data can seem overwhelming.
When we think about the problem of digital activity not keeping pace with digital results, it starts with audiences. For example, can you create experiences that are engaging, interesting and interactive enough to attract audiences?
If you can’t get audiences to show up, you can’t feed sales the leads they need. If you do attract an audience, are your sales teams able to follow-up with them immediately?
You need sales to know your buyer before they’ve ever met them so they can quickly convert leads to customers. With ON24, we use digital marketing to give sales the insight they need to drive these interactions.
From executive roundtables and product demos to regional and global user conferences, there are countless ways to engage audiences and generate demand. Let’s examine three ways you can drive demand and dig into how you can use engagement data to find your best leads.
Webinar ABM Program
Let’s say you’re running a webinar program for an account-based marketing campaign. These are highly targeted campaigns focused on a specific group of buyers for an individual account. While ABM has become the standard for demand generation, it can be difficult to execute effectively without engagement data to stay relevant and drive personalization
At ON24, every experience is generating first-party data. In this case, using the ON24 Account Engagement Profile (AEP) in Advanced Analytics*, this feature summarizes an account or customer’s interactions with all ON24 experiences across the life of the account. The report is designed to boost ABM efforts by collecting key information about specific prospects.
Within the Analytics Dashboard, you can click on an individual name to launch a unique webpage with account details like funnel stages, business interests, content views and viewers, recent interactions and more.
You can dig deeper into metrics like total engagement time for an account, total attendance, average engagement score, total leads and even registration source to help you identify who to target and with what content.
By integrating this data into your customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation platform (MAP), you can build on your existing segmentation and campaigns to be even more targeted with your ABM efforts based on a prospect’s actions and interests.
For example, if you know a particular lead in an account just watched an on-demand webinar in ON24 Engagement Hub, you can send them a follow-up email with ON24 Target that includes additional content that matches their business interests. This helps you to continually engage and nurture your prospect with personalized content.
Thought Leadership Webinars
Webinars are another key experience in the demand generation marketer’s toolkit that can be incredibly effective for thought leadership events. Not only can you customize your events and showcase your logo, colors, font and custom virtual backgrounds to leave a powerful brand impression, but you can also engage with your customers.
With ON24, you can collect more than 50 data points on one individual’s lifetime engagement with the ON24 platform. With each engagement, you gather information that helps you to personalize the next step in their buyer’s journey, inform targeted sales follow-up, and optimize your marketing programs for greater ROI.
In any ON24 Webcast Elite webinar, you can use more than 25 engagement and conversion tools, including polls, surveys, Q&A, chat, book a meeting, book a demo, reactions and more.
If a lead answers a poll, asks a question, and clicks on a request for a demo, all this data can be integrated and embedded within your CRM and compiled into a report called the Prospect Engagement Profile (PEP). The PEP is a unique set of data analytics that translates engagement in a digital experience — like a webinar, engagement hub or virtual conference — into valuable intelligence that is automatically delivered to your marketing and sales teams.
The PEP lists a prospect’s business interests to help you determine intent, recent webinars attended, questions asked, polls answered, resources downloaded, CTAs clicked and more. With this information in hand, your sales team can initiate a relevant conversation and your marketing team can personalize ongoing engagement.
User Conferences
Marketing in a post-pandemic world has forced everyone to get smarter about how and where they’re engaging with prospects. Instead of spending an entire budget on one user conference, demand generation marketers can spread that budget across multiple, smaller events and use a hybrid approach.
With this hybrid model, attendees can simultaneously engage with live keynotes and presentations, participate in polls and surveys, request meetings and more, all while sitting behind a computer screen or in a conference hall.
Not only are hybrid events budget savers, but they’re also ideal for collecting engagement data. You can track if an in-person audience member enters a hybrid event console in ON24 Virtual Conference with the scan of a QR code or if a virtual attendee enters an ON24 Breakout Room from a session. Once they’re in the event, you can see what CTAs they clicked on, if they participated in an attendee chat, what questions they asked, and more.
All this data can be viewed in the PEP and integrated with your CRM so that each member of your marketing and sales teams has a complete view of a prospect’s actions and interests, and it can be used to inform and coordinate sales and marketing actions.
For example, if an attendee takes a poll, clicks on a piece of content, or asks for a demo, you can integrate this data through ON24 Connect with a MAP like Marketo. You can use existing triggers in Marketo to drop the lead into an email stream for further nurturing or qualify and pass the lead to your sales team in Salesforce.
While there are so many formats and types of digital experiences that you can leverage as a demand generation marketer, you can use engagement data to narrow down the list by only focusing on the experiences that help you convert prospects and pass the best leads to your sales team.