How Webinerds Came, Conquered and Dazzled the Show

How Webinerds Came, Conquered and Dazzled at Webinar World 2018

Sudipto Ghosh

March 9, 2018

Webinerd — the Coolest Thing We Saw, Heard, and Experienced at ON24’s Webinar Marketing World 2018. Did You Miss It!

Three coruscating days amidst the beautiful landscape of downtown San Francisco saw brilliant minds come up with a wealth of practical knowledge on the latest trends in B2B marketing – webinars. ON24 Webinar World 2018, held between 5 and 7 March this week, showcased how to build optimized marketing campaigns and deliver events that “put the customer first and foster authentic engagement between the audience and the brand.”

We were a witness to the event, and here’s what we think were the key takeaways from Ground Zero at ON24 Webinar World 2018.

Customer-Obsessed Marketers Follow Three Rules: Human, Helpful and Handy!

The overall theme of the ON24 Webinar World 2018 was to think of prospects as PEOPLE and not just ‘responses/inquiries /MQLs/closed sale’. How do webinerds manage to succeed at their webinar marketing campaigns?

Read on…

When a customer presents a webinar, it outperforms any other in-house webinar that you could have ever designed. We learned that from Hortonworks!

In an interview with MarTech Series, Sudeep Misra, Director, Demand Gen and Global Campaigns, at Hortonworks, said, “Templatize EVERYTHING – webinar request capture, webinars ops, webinar promos, post-webinar touches etc.”

No wonder, Hortonworks won the Game-Changer award to show how to succeed with webinars and expounded on the new tools and techniques around demand gen especially around ABM maturity.

Laura Ramos, Vice President, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, came up with the staple tip for webi-newbies –

Be it a webinar or any other marketing campaign, be Human, Helpful and Handy!

Webinerds’ Oathkeeper: What to do when Webinars Attack?

Christine Jacobs Pribilski, Vice President, Marketing, IBM, presented her views onstage to discuss what to do when webinars attack.

In our TechBytes Series, Christine mentioned, “We have made incredible strides with our webinar program in the past year working with ON24, so I am delighted to share our learnings and success story in ‘casting’ with the attendees at Webinar World with the hope that other marketers can see what’s possible.”

She added, “I am such a champion of webinars, or “casting”, as I like to call it. Casting has come such a long way with the intersection of martech, analytics and content marketing. Casting is not only a viable format to deliver relevant stories and content across the buyers’ journey but also a way to deliver multiple touches in a single event, accelerating prospects forward in their buying journey. In addition, casting platforms can now offer incredible behavioral insights to help marketers become more impactful on next right step.”

In an interview with Annie Lei, Chief Revenue Officer, AmpLive, she said, “Webinar marketing tools are great because they allow you to reach a large number of people all at once, in a particularly human way. You get to put a face on your brand, engage with your audience, and learn from them all while teaching them something useful that (hopefully) leads them back to your product or solution.”

So happy to be a part of @on24 #webinarworld this year! Check out @martechseries interview with our CRO, Annie Lei #martech #marketing #webinar https://t.co/YqnOhAxtTH

— AmpLive (@ampliveinc) March 7, 2018

Content, Intent and the Power of AI: The Perfect ABM Synergy Revealed

When you have Karen Steele, CMO of LeanData, Content Zen Master Matt Heinz, and Fred Isbell, Senior Marketing Director at SAP as speakers at an event, we could sense mind-crunching facts bubbling onstage.

In our TechBytes Series, Matt provided critical insights on the webinar best practices for webinerds. Matt said, “Focus on engagement, personality, interactivity, and frequency (of the webinars). Perfect is the enemy of the good. Create more content, shorter content, more “imperfect’ content that’s easier to watch, listen to and share.”

Lots of focus on upper funnel but much of revenue comes from your existing customers so need to also focus on lower funnel @LeanData @demandgen @ON24 #WebinarWorld pic.twitter.com/JAfyv3HVZe

— Fred M. Isbell (@fmisbell) March 7, 2018

Fred, the uber-calm technocrat from SAP, said, “As a long-time practitioner of webinars, I know that they have a lot of “life and legs left”. I know of no other marketing tactic that’s as useful for fostering awareness, choice, and consideration and is also timely and relevant to demand and lead generation. In my roles for SAP Services Marketing, there’s no better way to communicate the benefits and customer experience from services, which is a fundamentally intangible offering when compared to more traditional products and solutions. The question is not “why webinars” but rather “why not more webinars”!”

In the age of Modern Marketing, Karen leads the way among women-tech CMOs. She shared the stage with DemandGen’s David Lewis. She was needle-focused at how ABM practitioners should grow beyond the legacy CRM and their limitations in processing data and personal intent in the buyer’s journey.

And we got to know about their weekly web show for B2B marketers and webinerds, called “Revving Up Your Revenue,” too!

"Should we do ABM? We need to stop asking that question. Instead, we should be asking how do we do ABM?" @demandgendave @demandgen #WebinarWorld @ON24 #ABM

— LeanData (@LeanData) March 7, 2018

Highest-Rated Quadrant #1 Tactic Is the Webinar

Still wondering if you should invest in webinar marketing tools? Then, this block is for you!

B2B webinars and Webcasts for Sales, Marketing and Product Leaders now rank highest in the quadrant for top orchestrated interactions. In her session on creating a marketing mix that resonates and buyer’s journey maps Cheri Keith, Senior Research Analyst at SiriusDecisions, demonstrated how orchestrated interactions based on data, insights and best practices help optimize efficiency and effectiveness of organization initiatives, go-to-market strategy, campaign planning, and program execution.

Every attendee at ON24 Webinar World 2018 would agree that the event offered much more value to the webinerds than what was promised and expected. Cheers to the attendees, speakers, the ON24 team, customers, event partners, sponsors, and B2B influencers on the ground who dazzled the show.