We hosted our annual conference, Webinar World, earlier this month. It was a huge success. We saw, heard and took notes on how folks use webinars to drive content, real engagement and more. We’ll share those stories in due time, but right now we wanted to give special attention to our Webinar World 2018 Award Winners.
Each winner went above and beyond in their respective category and deserve a hard-earned shout-out for their efforts. Without further ado, here are the 2018 winners:
Webinar Revolutionizer:
Ben Prinster and Patrick McGinnis, Tableau
Tableau is revolutionizing what it means to webinar! They’ve gone far beyond the standard marketing event by partnering with all organizational stakeholders and scaling their program globally.The result: more than 850 kickass webinars in 2017 webinars for both lead generation and live training!
Congratulations Tableau!
Webinerd Groundbreaker:
Cassandra Clark, NVIDIA
Our Webinerd Groundbreaker award goes to someone special. Someone who has stepped up to the challenge and re-define what webinars can do at their organization. This year, the team (of one) at NVIDIA has taken the grand prize! Armed with their intuition, NVIDIA’s webinar events have launched from 35 a year to more than 70! Those efforts have to be rewarded! NVIDIA’s webinar efforts for its GPU products in the medical imaging, AI and self-driving vehicle fields are seeing more than over 20k attendees total. Way to go!
Congrats NVIDIA!
Decision Accelerator:
Hope Villaluna, Zendesk
Every marketer dreams of being a hero to their sales team. Well, the team over at Zendesk did exactly that.They accelerated deals and increased their win rate. In fact, webinars have become their highest win rate of any channel! Naturally, they ramped up their program to 12 webinars per-quarter, generating more than $1.5 million in pipeline with a 55 percent win rate.
Congratulations Zendesk!
Cold Call Eliminator:
Lisa Hackbarth, OutSystems
It’s time to kill the cold call. Which is why, this year, we’re issuing The Cold Call Eliminator award to an organization that started a global demo series to jumpstart prospect calls and cut down on cold calling. This year’s award goes to OutSystems!
How did OutSystems win this award? They did the smart thing and partnered with their sales team on webinars. They’d invite attendees to the demo, with a sales team member ready to participate in a live Q&A at the end of the session. Always great to see teams using ON24 to build bridges between marketing and sales
Congrats OutSystems!
ABM Trailblazer:
Rory Tokunaaga, Demandbase
Account Based Marketing, or ABM, was one of the standout topics at Webinar World 2018. It’s only fitting that we bestow an award on a company that does ABM well. And that company is Demandbase!
How did they do it? Well, they lead the way by using ON24 for their ABM programs with targeted programs for specific audiences. The results have been phenomenal, with a 178 percent increase in opportunities.
Congrats Demandbase!
Customer Nurturer:
Jeremy Collins, BrightEdge
Do you use webinars to get a pulse on your customers, and then use those insights in other marketing campaigns? BrightEdge does. In fact, they do it so well they took home our Customer Nurturer award!
After focusing their webinars content strategy around three core topics, BrightEdge was able to drive amazing results. A single year saw 10,000 hours of webinar engagement and a drastic increase in renewal rates.
Congrats BrightEdge!
Community Builder:
James Gianotti, IBM Cloud
Marketers are great at building community. In fact, in many cases, that’s what we do! But one company stood out from the pack to take home our coveted Community Builder Award at Webinar World 2018. That company? IBM Cloud!
IBM cloud connected with its customers by deploying a smart use of polls, surveys and Q&A chats to deliver what its attendees want. This is especially effective for audiences, like developers, who can be hard to reach.
Congrats IBM Cloud!
Audience Captivator:
Roger Castilho, S&P Global
It’s great when your company is the center of attention, but it’s even better when your company can captivate an audience for a long time. That’s why the winner of our Audience Captivator award had to beat industry benchmarks on engagement — and do so continuously. So big hat’s off to S&P Global for taking home the Audience Captivator award!
S&P Global took engagement to the next level by bringing in a mix of different and key industry speakers from to ensure each message shared is valuable for each and every attendee.
Congrats S&P Global!
Brand Evangelizer:
Braeden Fair, Paycom
Webinars are a fantastic channel for your brand to show off its pizzaz, it’s charm, it’s flair! Which is why the winner of our Brand Evangelizer award had to be extremely crafty with their webinars! Paycom filled the bill by stylizing each webinar to match its story and all of its associated content.
Congrats Paycom!
Story Broadcaster:
May Chang, Polycom
A good storyteller should get great recognition. But great storyteller can only become so when they get out of their comfort zone and experiment. And Polycom did just that!
Polycom discovered different ways to create new human interactions in their webinars. In fact, they used their own video conferencing technology to enable remote collaboration over their events. A neat trick worthy of an award! We can’t wait to see more customers give it a try too!
Congrats Polycom!
Content Re-generator:
Jocelyn Robertson, Financial Engines
One of the great things about webinars is that you can use and re-use content over and over and over without and deliver it to a new audience almost every time. Identifying and preparing content for reuse is a skill that takes practice. So, we figured it’s best to award those efforts with a nice award.
And who gets that award? Why Financial Engines does! Financial Engines takes home the Content Re-generator award for their astute ability to break down their hour-long presentations and break them down into bite-sized webinar bits. Their five-to-seven minute vignettes help their customers by delivering informational updates, incentivizing employees on Financial Wellness topics and more. That’s a great re-use of content!
Congrats Financial Engines!
Webinar Globalizer:
Claudia Jimenez, Thomson Reuters
Creating webinars with a global audience in mind isn’t the easiest task, but the pay off is always worth it because it’s such a powerful way to share your brand and scale your global presence. Doing it well deserves recognition. Which is why we’re saying congrats to Thomson Reuters for taking home the Webinar Globalizer award!
Thomson Reuters stood out from the crowd by crafting their webinars over unifying topics that global audiences can relate to. One, in particular, helped the organizations to cut across regions with a high-profile report.
Congrats Thomson Reuters!
Webinerd Leader:
Nina Purro, Salesforce
We believe webinars are one of the best ways to engage. This can include team members. So how can you make sure your latest and greatest is out in front of your own team? Salesforce shows us the way.
Salesforce uses their internal communication tool, Salesforce Chatter, to announce and detail all new webinars. Simply by tagging the right groups, Salesforce can get their own internal teams to forward their webinars to other internal teams and get word of their webinar out across the globe. They even have an internal document that helps them to spread the word of their webinars and ensure everyone’s up-to-date on webinar events.
Congrats Salesforce!
Marketing Game-Changer:
The Hortonworks Team, Hortonworks
Finally, there’s the game-changer. The Marketing Game-Changer award, that is. For this award, a company has to put engagement at the core of their marketing program. And, boy, Hortonworks has done that.
From their internal promotion strategy to the analytics they collect, Hortonworks has made dramatic changes to their marketing campaigns by putting webinars at the center of an ongoing integrated program. And for that, they take him the Marketing Game-Changer award.
Congrats Hortonworks!
