The rapid shift to digital during the COVID-19 pandemic left many companies scrambling to keep up. Industries favoring traditional face-to-face methods had a choice: pivot to digital or risk being left behind.
As audiences turned to online venues for engagement, the answer became clear to one company, VertMarkets.
As the winner of the ON24 Experience’s Industry Award, VertMarkets successfully embraced digital transformation and pushed its industry forward with the first virtual event of its kind for online media companies.
Want to see what award-winning experiences look like? Click here to explore the ON24 Experience’s award-winner gallery.
Read on to learn more about how VertMarkets’ virtual event attracted, engaged and converted attendees.
How VertMarkets Ran Its Virtual Pharma Expo
VertMarkets’ branded its Virtual Pharma Expo as the first ever virtual trade show for the pharmaceutical equipment industry. To make this event a reality, the team brought together pharmaceutical contract development manufacturing companies with an immediate capacity to develop and manufacture pharmaceuticals.
The event spanned three days with a two-hour session each day focusing on different pharmaceutical applications. This format allowed participants to choose which sessions they wanted to attend.
VertMarkets broke each daily session into 15-minute segments with different presenters, giving participants smaller, easily digestible chunks of content to engage with.
The company also selected a wide variety of presenters — ranging from South Korea, Australia, India, around Europe and across America — to speak at its event, providing attendees with a global perspective.
Why is engagement so important in modern digital experiences? Find out why — and the metrics you need to measure — in this blog post.
In addition to smaller presentation segments, VertMarkets also leveraged audience interaction tools through the webinar console. During the event, participants watched presenters through the media player with complimentary slides and could access a resource list, speaker bios, a quick share feature to social media, Q&A, table of contents and an embedded call to action to register for the next event in a few weeks.
To help get participants to continue engaging with the event, VertMarkets used several engagement strategies. These included CTAs offering additional summits to register for, reminders of event-related activities through the Q&A console, valuable links embedded in each session’s resource list, polls, surveys and more.
VertMarkets Results
With the pharmaceutical industry acting as a frontline in the fight against COVID-19, providing relevant information about contract manufacturers with production availability was paramount. Any information had to be timely, relevant and with accurate to help all participants.
The event produced positive feedback for the team at VertMarkets and attendees were pleased with ON24’s ease of use and the event’s overall quality.
From VertMarkets’ perspective, the team is highly satisfied with the event’s professional appearance and performance. VertMarkets had such success that, even as physical events return, the company gradually incorporates virtual elements into its event strategy to reach the most people possible.
Since VertMarkets’ virtual trade show was such a success, it has gone on to turn its Virtual Pharma Expo into a quarterly series.
In addition to providing clients with an outstanding virtual event, VertMarkets has also collected valuable attendee insights through post-event surveys. With this information, VertMarkets can more easily connect would-be buyers with its suppliers — and demonstrate VertMarkets’ value and expertise as a leading B2B pharmaceutical publisher.
