Webinar production growth in the past three years
Webinars on track to be produced for 2018
Increase in volume YTY
Registrations generated in one quarter
Employees: 11,000+
Products: ON24 Webcast Elite; ON24 Engagement Hub
Use Case: Demand Generation
Industry: Information Services
Informa is a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events group. Its services help customers in hundreds of professional, commercial and academic communities connect, learn and create through relevant content so they can work smarter and make better decisions faster.
Today, with print circulation and ad revenue in decline, the publishing industry must find ways to diversify revenue beyond traditional means. So, the B2B publisher, Informa, decided to double down on the strategy it knows best: attract and engage an audience with compelling digital content and monetize those opportunities with sponsorship dollars.
With media brands across 75 different markets focused on topics as varied as manufacturing and wealth management, Informa had to zero in on the digital content tactics that reliably produced audience interest and generated leads for sponsors across all industries.
The company realized that the longform, interactive format of online events and webinars offered an ideal mix of editorial control and sponsor benefits, and embarked on its webinar journey.
Informa started offering sponsored webinars by hosting live virtual trade shows —creating a digital venue for sponsors to deliver content and generate leads. The virtual trade show model thrived, but Informa thought it could get better results by turning the one-day, eight-hour-long virtual event into weeklong webinar series, comprised of smaller, more digestible sessions of sponsored webinar content. Informa hypothesized they would have multiple opportunities to boost registration, views and engagement, and an audience primed to engage with on-demand content after the series ended. By bringing all these elements together, Informa decided to turn a one-time, online event into an ongoing demand generation campaign for its sponsors.
“The ON24 platform is invaluable. If it wasn’t for a tool like ON24, we wouldn’t be able to produce that volume of events at the staffing that we have dedicated to this product.”
Tim Stark
Director of Online Events
Through the ON24 platform, Informa has all the capabilities it needs to build a high-value webinar marketing campaign offering for its sponsors.
On the back-end, ON24 gives Informa a content command center to easily organize, administer and manage hundreds of sponsored webinars every month and automatically turn them into on-demand webinars. This makes it possible for Informa to build and scale webinar programs that are unique to each sponsor, with customized branding, interactivity and calls-to-action, and keep producing leads.
The built-in on-demand engagement solution from ON24 also makes it easy for Informa to create online content hubs comprised of sponsored webinars on the same topic. This approach makes it possible for Informa to maintain the same framework as a live trade show but spread content across a full week.
There, attendees can access various webinars on-demand on their own time — and come back for new content updates — all while enjoying a single registration process for the webinar campaign. Audiences have a single destination to keep binging on more sponsored content, upping the benefits to sponsors even further, and each hub can be updated dynamically as soon as new on-demand webinars are ready.
Furthering their goal of delivering a webinar campaign, ON24 gives Informa real-time insights into audience engagement before, during and after a sponsor’s webinar campaign. By measuring and analyzing attendee engagement, Informa can help their sponsors go beyond who registered. Now, Informa can share how well a sponsors’ messages resonated and help pinpoint their most engaged leads. Yet another differentiator, ON24 enables Informa to pass this information onto sales reps at sponsor companies to seamlessly continue the conversation from the webinar—information usually lost with third-party campaigns.
Since using ON24, Informa maximized production for its media brands and sponsors with 100 percent growth over the past three years. Comparatively, before working within the ON24 platform, Informa produced less than 15 webinars in an entire year. Informa expects to host between 1,000 and 1,200 webinars per year moving forward, driving more traffic and revenue for its publications and bringing on more valuable sponsorship partners — a win-win for all parties in a rapidly changing advertising environment.
