Genesys, a company selling customer experience and call center technology, was growing and expanding fast. To accommodate this growth, the company needed to adapt its marketing strategy and digital experiences to drive more meaningful engagement with its customers.
To do this, the team at Genesys implemented an account-based marketing strategy with a strong focus on webinars. The plan was simple: use webinars to funnel leads back into its sales pipeline and generate demand to fully utilize its new ABM strategy.
Since implementing its new ABM-focused marketing strategy, Genesys realized a:
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- 127% increase in pipeline
- 101% increase in registration
- 56.4% year over year increase in engagement scores
Here’s how Genesys did it:
How Genesys Changed Its Webinar Game
Genesys’ new ABM marketing plan required its marketing team to focus on digital engagement. To encourage this engagement, the team settled on five tactics they could use to improve their overall webinar program’s engage-ability:
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- Produce digital engagement opportunities for the entire buying cycle. Genesys’ old plan of one-off, top-of-funnel webinars was not sufficient for its new ABM strategy, so the team needed to leverage cohesive digital experiences across all of its marketing and campaigns for every stage of the buyer’s journey.
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- Create and target buying personas. The company needed to create buying personas and target them at various stages of the buying journey with a consistent message aligned with the company’s marketing and sales goals.
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- Focus on engagement opportunities. Previous webinars only used audio media players, lacked any call-to-action and didn’t include engagement tools like polls, surveys or the Q&A function. Genesys’ new webinar program needed to incorporate engagement opportunities so participants could interact with the brand.
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- Develop post-webinar follow-up procedures. The company lost leads by not communicating with webinar registrants and attendees after the event. With the new approach, the team needed to create procedures for personalized communications and outreach to nurture leads from webinar registrations.
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- Extend webinar life through on-demand viewing. The company’s previous webinar program had little to no shelf-life and audiences had no way to watch content after a webinar aired. The team needed to produce relevant and interesting webinars with evergreen content that can be repurposed for multiple uses and make content available to interested parties anytime, anywhere.
How Genesys Used Webinars to Support Its ABM Strategy
With the ABM strategy in place and problems with the current webinar program identified, the team at Genesys was ready to begin implementing changes to make the new webinar strategy a reality.
Digital experiences powered by the ON24 Platform have numerous options for creativity and customization that Genesys planned to incorporate into its digital experiences program.
One of the biggest advantages is the ON24 Platform’s ability to work with other marketing and CRM platforms. Data and analytics collected during digital events seamlessly integrate with Salesforce, Genesys’ CRM platform, allowing the sales team to:
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- See attendees’ engagement scores and other insights about prospective customers.
- Help qualify and nurture leads through the buying process.
After a virtual event, Genesys uses ON24 data to follow up with attendees and registrants with fully customized and personalized communications.
Since ON24 shares information with Genesys’ marketing automation software, Marketo, its marketing team can seamlessly track registrations, attendance and client and prospect outreach.
A Fresh Approach to Great Webinar ContenT
Genesys’ previous marketing strategy didn’t incorporate on-demand viewing for digital experiences. This meant participants had to attend the event live or risk missing it completely.
The company’s new webinar strategy makes on-demand viewing its own unique channel. Doing so allows Genesys to get more life from its webinars. It also helps the company offer a more personalized experience by categorizing content and creating engagement opportunities for specific audiences and buying personas.
With its new approach, Genesys also offers more expansive webinar variety including virtual summits and simulive events which help global audiences interact with the company at convenient hours for different time zones.
The company also improved its webinar experience by incorporating the following into its webinars:
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- Live video
- Custom branding
- Polls
- Surveys
- Q&A
- Embedded calls-to-action
By making visually unique, engaging webinars Genesys can increase its overall viewing time and maximize engagement — leading to faster transitions through the buying stages.
The Genesys team also takes advantage of ON24’s certification program for Webcast Elite and webinar presenters.
Genesys encourages its team members to complete the online certifications so they know how to use the ON24 Platform, are able to integrate customizations into the webinar console and get tips, tricks and best practices for webinar presentations.
These certifications also help the team take advantage of the latest trends and platform upgrades to keep the webinar program fresh and interesting for attendees.
Results from Leveraging Digital Experiences
Genesys’ webinar program is now the anchor to the company’s ABM strategy. Digital experiences are used throughout the entire company portfolio and are integrated into every aspect of the buying journey and sales funnel.
Not only has Genesys’ digital events program focused on creating demand for its sales team, but it has also become an engagement tool that attracts prospects from other channels with interesting and relevant content.
Since implementing its new webinar strategy, Genesys has reduced costs and seen registrations grow by 101%. And, as a result, the company’s sales pipeline has increased by 127%. Of the participants who attend multiple online events, engagement scores increased by 56.4% year over year.
Though these are all fantastic results, the Genesys ABM team is most proud to say they are able to attribute revenue growth to their digital experiences program for the first time.