Increase in sales meetings booked as a result of webinars
Increase in speed of converting 67% marketing qualified leads to meetings
Increase in webinar registrations when partnering with a third party co-host
Employees: 900
Product: ON24 Webcast Elite
Use Case: Demand Generation
Industry: Technology
Seismic is the recognized leader in sales and marketing enablement, equipping global sale teams with the knowledge, messaging and automatically personalized content proven to be the most effective for any buyer interaction. The result for global enterprises like IBM, American Express, PayPal and Quest Diagnostics is better win rates, larger deals and higher customer retention.
Seismic provides content intelligence and analytics to customers around the globe. The company helps marketers prove and improve their impact on their bottom lines, revealing which of their activities truly drive revenue and which should be adjusted.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, Seismic has been expanding into international markets in Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Last year, the company hired Iris Chan, Chief Marketing Officer, Asia Pacific & Japan, to build and lead its regional marketing strategy and function within APAC and Japan. This involved creating a new webinar strategy for Seismic that would resonate with B2B sales and marketing leaders in the region.
Deploying a targeted, regional webinar strategy.
Initially, webinars were not a priority in the marketing mix for Seismic’s APAC audience. Webinars are an emerging marketing tool in the region, which has traditionally been more focused on in-person experiences and events.
“Obviously with the pandemic, everyone had to pivot to digital. So, I looked at what we needed to do to stand up webinars quickly in our region,” Chan said.
Secondly, the webinars produced by Seismic’s corporate headquarters were run in U.S. time zones, which meant that APAC audiences wouldn’t be able to participate live. Another challenge was that the content would need to be tweaked in order to resonate with the APAC audience as sales enablement is still an early-stage concept in the region.
“I wanted to have APAC-specific webinars held in our time zones, featuring local and regional experts—not someone in the U.S. or Europe,” Chan said.
“ON24 is much more immersive compared to other webinar platforms. There are a lot of engagement tools like polls, and the audience can click through to resources that you choose to feature. There’s also an opportunity to brand the interface, so it’s a lot more visually captivating.”
Iris Chan
Chief Marketing Officer, Asia Pacific & Japan
Using digital experiences with rich analytics to drive pipeline.
Seismic was already using ON24 to connect with its North American market, and decided to begin using the software to run digital experiences in APAC and Japan. Chan had used ON24 at a previous company, which made the decision even easier.
“I was familiar with the ON24 interface and was already a big fan. So, knowing that we had a license for ON24, I thought, that’s great, because it means I’m using a best-in-class solution when I send out my region-specific webinars,” Chan said.
Now, Seismic uses ON24® Webcast Elite to create two 60-minute webinars per month for the APAC market. The topics are typically related to B2B sales or B2B marketing. While Seismic is focused on customer acquisition and pipeline acceleration, the company also uses webinars to improve thought leadership and educate the market on sales enablement.
Seismic has a dedicated landing page on its website for APAC webinars so that the audience doesn’t have to sift through other global content to get to relevant material. People can register for live webinars on the landing page, and review on-demand versions of previous events.
The company recently ran its first simulive webinar, which included a pre-recorded fireside chat. Then, Seismic switched over to live Q&A after the video finished playing. This is just one of the interactive features Chan appreciates about the ON24 platform.
“ON24 is much more immersive compared to other webinar platforms like Zoom or WebEx. There are a lot of engagement tools like polls, and the audience gets the opportunity to click through to resources that you choose to feature. There’s also an opportunity to brand the interface, so it’s a lot more visually captivating,” Chan said.
Seismic uses ON24 analytics for lead follow-up and pipeline development. After a webinar is over, Chan’s team collects the data and works with her colleagues in Inside Sales to prioritize leads.
“We have a tiering model to rank leads. If you have 70 people coming to a webinar, you need to know who to follow up with first,” Chan said.
Tier-one leads are categorized by engagement scores, poll and survey responses, questions asked during webinars, resources clicked and links clicked to book meetings. Seismic’s sales reps use that information to craft follow-up emails to each tier-one lead. In addition, the company uses its own technology to track buyer engagement on the content that sales reps send via email.
This system has led to a 20% increase in Seismic’s success rate for booking sales meetings as a result of webinars. The company has also seen a 67% increase in the speed of converting marketing qualified leads to sales meetings.
“We were able to combine the analytics from ON24 and Seismic to drive shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates,” Chan said.
“I was familiar with the ON24 interface and was already a big fan of ON24. So, knowing that we had a license for ON24, I thought, that’s great, because it means I’m using a best-inclass solution when I send out my region-specific webinars.”
Iris Chan
Chief Marketing Officer, Asia Pacific & Japan
