Webinars and digital experiences are essential elements of any digital marketing mix. They provide great experiences, great engagement data and, crucially, drive leads further down the marketing funnel.
That’s why Adobe APAC’s strategy to connect and convert its audiences relies on a powerful one-two punch of a smart demand generation strategy and digital experiences powered by ON24.
“We focus on the same strategy at the heart of all our webinars,” Maryel Roman-Price, Adobe’s APAC DX Commercial Demand Generation Manager, said. “We strive to deliver content that customers and prospects will benefit from and we always want them to think of Adobe when looking for solutions to their problems.”
To provide that content, Adobe’s APAC team aligned its programs to address the needs of differing audiences. For example, the team produces technical content for developers, strategy content for business leaders, and funnel nurturing best practices for marketers.
But providing a better digital event experience goes beyond individual events and programs. For example, the company holistically revamped its event experiences by unifying its branding and creating a seamless registration for attendees.
“We are lucky to have had webinars as part of our strategy long before they became necessary,” Roman-Price said. “We used the time during the pandemic to improve our webinars and implement changes and details around the audience experience that most marketers didn’t have time to think about at that moment.”
Engagement as a Metric of Success
Like all marketers, the Adobe APAC Demand Gen team looks at pipeline and revenue to gauge success. But the company did not want to pigeonhole and limit itself to just those two metrics. Event success should also be based on how effective it was.
The Adobe APAC team looked to its “Accelerator” series to measure efficacy. The series, which launched in 2018, presented a Netflix-style experience and quickly built a following.
“This series gave Adobe brand equity and a community of people who follow the content and participate in multiple episodes with surveys, polls and questions,” Roman-Price said. “These audience interactions are a goldmine for the sales team and keeps Adobe relevant because this series has been around for a while and people are still interested.”
How Adobe Brings Out Actionable Insights From Its Events
With all of this content and engagement opportunity, Adobe’s APAC team has a lot of contextual information it can use to move pipeline and analyze how its messaging resonates.
For example, Adobe APAC’s live events usually last 45 minutes. If a lead sits in on a live event for the whole duration, both sales and marketing teams can make some strong inferences.
First, they can assume the content and message is engaging enough to keep someone’s attention for nearly an hour. Second, if an attendee stayed for the whole event and clicked on a lot of the event’s engagement tools, they can assume the lead is likely interested in what they’re offering.
And they don’t have to guess. In fact, they can ask attendees directly.
“Live webinars allow attendees to ask questions, answer surveys and complete polls,” she said. “The Q&A is our most valuable tool because the audience is giving you information on the problem they are trying to solve.”
Adobe’s APAC sales team also uses the Q&A information to craft follow-up messages for attendees, start personalized conversations and create future webinar content.
How Adobe Uses Webinar Data
Audience insights and data generated from Adobe’s webinars provide the team with a treasure trove of information about customers and prospects. With ON24’s analytics, the team can see how long an attendee spent in an event, how they interacted with engagement tools and even where the lead may be in the buyer’s journey based on their attendance to multiple brand events.
With this engagement data, the APAC team can easily help the sales team build connections, craft follow-up messages and prioritize leads. Doing so cuts down on the time it takes for the sales team to identify hot leads and continue the conversation.
Results and Takeaways
The Accelerator series is so successful that Roman-Price now has a team of professionals dedicated to producing APAC-specific webinars. And that makes sense. After all, Adobe’s APAC Demand Gen team has doubled the opportunities it has driven from webinars and seen qualified leads increase 76% year-over-year.
Roman-Price also shared two hacks for readers to takeaway:
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- Last-minute invites – She and her team see the most registrations from the first email invitation to an event and the last one, which they send a few minutes before the event starts.
“You can often capture anyone who is free when the invitation lands in their inbox,” she said.
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- Easy Registration – The APAC Demand Gen team started allowing attendees to register for an event without filling out a form and registration numbers increased by 10%.