What’s behind marketing’s transformation? More engagement, better insights, greater impact.

All of us marketers know by now: data is the most important thing to have but the most difficult thing to get right.

Why so important? Because data is what’s enabling marketers to find the leads ready for a sales conversation, give sales an understanding of what that prospect wants to talk about and help marketers tie their actions to revenue.

Why so challenging? Because most data comes from superficial, automated interactions, and doesn’t help sales do anything other than have a phone number to cold call.

At ON24, we’ve built our platform to solve this problem — provide marketers with a tool to engage their prospects and customers, and then turn that engagement into insights their sales team can use. Every webinar generates more than 40 data points per attendee… multiply that over a webinar series or over a lifetime, and you’ve got a much better picture of the human behind the screen.

This past year, over 13 million people logged onto the ON24 network to watch, listen and interact with the 2,000 businesses we’re proud to call customers. That engagement adds up to a pretty jaw-dropping number — one billion minutes. When you think about the average time spent with an email (3 seconds) or on a website (3 minutes), it’s clear people value webinar experiences and are willing to spend a significant amount of time engaging with them.

What were attendees doing for a billion minutes? Well, they were constantly interacting to the tune of 17 million resources downloaded, 12 million polls answered, 1.5 million questions asked and 1.3 million surveys completed. More than 70 percent of marketers prioritizing lead quality over quantity, and these are the kinds of data points that help meet that goal.

Marketers’ insatiable need for more engaging experiences and better insights is why we believe 2017 was ON24’s best performing year yet. After all, our own marketing team is relying on a webinar-driven marketing strategy to solve the data problem. With those insights, we’ve doubled our pipeline, expanded deals and improved customer retention. This year, we’ll lean even more into our webinar strategy to keep getting the personal insights that are accelerating deals.

If you want to learn more about how to take your webinar campaigns to the next level, join us and hundreds of other marketers at Webinar World in San Francisco on March 5 – 7. Hope to see you there!