ON24 supports the basics but struggles with complexity
May 26, 2021
ON24 supports the basics but struggles with complexity
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ON24
Our company does a variety of digital marketing and web consulting across a variety of clients. The digital marketing department uses ON24 primarily for one client in the government sector, although we have used it on occasion for others. The main client's marketing strategy as a whole is inbound relying upon a constant stream of educational and thought leadership campaigns. ON24 allows us to create webinars rapidly using a repeatable process with consistent results; we have created around 80 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The audience tools allow customization that can suit each individual webinar's goals.
- The data supported by the registration page are a value add for potential registrants.
- The reporting is infinitely valuable in tracking leads and engagement, particularly across the bulk of webinars we do.
- Our guest participants often have connection or usage issues. We have implemented a dry run policy to account for this, but sometimes it requires our IT team to support it.
- The PowerPoint upload process is slow, can be confusing (why can the last file never be deleted?), and sometimes alters the design of the deck.
- While we like that presenters are saved so their information and photo can be reused, there is no way to access that universal information to update it.
- A sizable portion of our contracted lead totals now correspond to webinar registrants.
- We have drastically increased the requests for consultations by implementing ON24's built-in tools.
- As a result of the increased requests, our leads also tend to complete the buyer's journey much more quickly (a period that previously took months/years can now be completed in one webinar).
- Integrate with CRM/marketing automation software
- Conduct lead scoring
- Track registration and attendance
- Enable sales follow-up
- Optimize campaign nurture programs
- Identify and track top-engaged accounts
Although we have always created campaigns for a variety of marketing channels, in our experience the interactive quality and audience connection found during in-person presentations have always been exceedingly valuable. As a result, the pandemic's elimination of such events was a potential disaster for our company and our contracts. Luckily, ON24's interactive audience features allows us to recreate much of the magic of live events. We increased our webinar production to 2-3 per week, allowing us to meet our goals and keep our clients happy.
- Microsoft Teams and Vimeo
As mentioned in a previous question, ON24 handles standard webinars well and we will continue to use it for that. However, other features (multiple sessions, breakout rooms, higher numbers of speakers, etc.) are not supported, or not supported well, so we will likely continue to turn to competitors for those events.