weeks to plan and execute a global virtual conference with ON24
registrants (on target with goal) and 5,000 attendees hosted on the ON24 platform with capacity for large scale events
live presentations over the course of two days thanks to the user friendly ON24 platform
hours of engagement time within the dynamic ON24 Engagement Hub
Products: ON24 Webcast Elite; ON24 Engagement Hub
Use Case: Event Marketing
Industry: Technology
Everbridge is a global software company providing enterprise software applications that automate and accelerate companies’ responses to critical events in order to Keep People Safe and Businesses Running™. More than 5,300 customers rely on Everbridge’s Critical Event Management Platform, which offers the ability to reach over 550 million people in more than 200 countries and territories.
Everbridge is a SaaS organization, and works with any company that has a duty of care to its employees or residents. Everbridge provides enterprise software applications to help organizations during their most critical emergencies, as well as to assist with daily operational needs.
Critical event management includes any major occurrence that could affect a company and its stakeholders, such as a cyber attack, natural disaster, severe weather or supply chain disruption. Due to the breadth of Everbridge’s audience, the organization needed a digital engagement strategy that could engage various industries around the world.
A gap in pipeline generation strategy
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the trade shows Everbridge had planned to attend were canceled. This caused an immediate gap in the organization’s global pipeline generation strategy that it had to fill.
The lack of in-person events also resulted in a content need for Everbridge’s audience. There’s a continuing education aspect to most trade shows, and the company’s customers and prospects were counting on attending these events to learn.
“Our audience was left in the lurch, too, from an informational perspective,” said Sal Giliberto, Director of Marketing Programs, Everbridge. “We needed a way to talk to people who were not yet our clients and get them interested in us, build trust and get them looking at us as a resource.”
Everbridge wanted to stay top of mind with its stakeholders and offer them the information they needed around critical event management. The organization decided that a digital engagement and event strategywould best help achieve those goals.
“With the Engagement Hub, we were able to move digital experiences from live to on-demand and categorize them quickly and easily. Afterward, we took all the content and created verticalized categories to make it easier for people to view content on-demand.”
Sal Giliberto
Director of Marketing Programs
A reliable, cost-effective solution for global scale events
Reliability and capacity were top of mind for Everbridge in choosing a Platform vendor because the company wanted to reach as large an audience as possible to generate the most pipeline for its sales team.
“We needed to ensure that every person who wanted to log in to any session at any time could do so. We wanted a vendor that we knew could handle large scale events,” Giliberto said.
Integration capability was also important. Everbridge wanted a solution that could seamlessly work with the company’s existing marketing automation system, Marketo, and its CRM platform, Salesforce, to help maximize efficiency while driving revenue. The solution also had to offer robust presentation capabilities, including an aesthetically pleasing, customizable look and feel. ON24 best met all of these criteria.
Everbridge purchased the ON24 Webcast Elite and Engagement Hub products and ON24 ensured they were onboarded and set up for success for their quick turn around.Â
“The trade show rug was pulled out from under our feet when the pandemic hit. We didn’t have six months to pull off our symposium, because it was a brand new initiative. We had maybe six weeks. So after we purchased ON24, we did an ON24 training to better understand the solution and involved our graphic design team. It was really useful, and our designers executed phenomenally afterward to brand our symposium.”
Everbridge was highly satisfied with the ability to categorize content in the ON24 Engagement Hub by vertical—for example, healthcare or IT—and move the content from live to on-demand quickly so that attendees could view it easily.Â
In addition, Everbridge used the ON24 Drift chatbot integration to enable real-time chats between event attendees and sales reps so that its audience could learn more about its product.Â
All of these features enable the company to deliver its audience the type of engaging digital experience they truly want, which in turn helps Everbridge generate leads and conversions.
“I highly recommend you incorporate the Drift integration. It’s subtle, so it’s not going to interfere with your event,” Giliberto said.
Everbridge’s global virtual symposium attracted 10,000 registrants (on target with the company’s goal) and 5,000 attendees. ON24 enabled Everbridge to run 20 live presentations over two days, and generate 10,000 hours of engagement time.
“We were trying to generate sales opportunities, but we have a long sales cycle so those opportunities don’t get quantified right away. However, in the short term, we hit our sales opportunity generation goal with the symposium, and the help of ON24,” Giliberto said.
Everbridge cut snippets of its webinars to create demand generation videos after the event, directing attendees back to the ON24 Engagement Hub to re-engage with the content there, and using the video recordings on other marketing channels such as social media.
The analytics on the ON24 platform empowered Everbridge with valuable data insights on attendees and helped them prioritize sales follow up with all registrants. Everbridge also used the ON24 analytics to determine the total number of sessions each individual attended, and passed that information along to its sales team as well so they could make informed decisions about which leads to pursue to drive pipeline.
“We hit our sales opportunity generation goal with the symposium, and the help of ON24.”
Sal Giliberto
Director of Marketing Programs
